Bullying, schools and martial arts

I will admit that this is for an assignment I have to do, but I chose the topic because it’s something I’m interested in anyway

So there’s bullying going on around the place and we hear about it occurring most in schools – and this has a lot to do with age and the poor decision making skills and coping strategies of young ‘uns.

You still have a lot of people (particularly parents) who advocate the use of physical violence to nip bullying in the bud so to speak. Now I’ll admit that it may work for kids in some cases and even some cases when in adult-hood but you won’t ever catch me recommending it. I would also challenge anyone to get a parent to admit advocating it in any official and non-anonymous setting.

This is mostly because it can get you into big trouble and doesn’t teach appropriate adult responses to conflict which can easily result in things like getting fired and put in jail.

It’s commonly recommended that kids have a social and physical outlet outside of schools such as sports clubs and this can help mitigate or prevent any bullying that might occur. Martial arts in particular is commonly suggested and advertised as helping to build confidence as well as teaching useful self defence skills for kids. But of course any martial arts should only be applied responsibly.

So I’m curious what you think of this issue and physical retaliation since martial arts can give kids the skills to be physically violent. Since this forum is mostly anonymous you can admit whether you might suggest it in some cases. And if you teach martial arts, I’d like to know if/how you cover appropriate responses to bullying when you are teaching kids. And of course there’s always the issue of giving a bully more ammunition in the form of martial arts skills.

 

Personally, I am against teaching martial arts as an anti-bullying system or as a self-defense system for kids.

There is nothing about being a martial arts instructor that qualifies someone as an anti-bullying expert or as a self-defense expert. Schools have teachers, counselors, and administrators, and some even have security staff and/or dedicated police officers. These are the people who should be tackling bullying problems. If you feel your child needs hand-to-hand combat skills just to go to school every day, there is a much bigger problem going on than can be fixed with a few karate lessons.

 

i can say from personal experience that my martial arts training helped me enourmously in my ability to cope with bullying when i was in school, and i never had to physically fight off a bully.

because karate gave me confidence i was able to stand my ground against bullies, aided by the sharp toung i developed (not generally a good thing mind you) and the fact tha im a bit bigger than most people, the bully would back down when i showed i was willing/able to defend myself. basically, nobody wants to get beat up by the guy they just called a homophobic slur.

back in CT, i taught a childrens class at my local community center (ages 5-15ish) and often talked about bullying. i stressed that hitting a bully makes you no better than them unless attacked, and that it wasnt the way to solve things. the main technique i taught was to maintain eye contact, and loudly/confidently tell the person to back off/leave you alone.

a bully is basically like a thief, theyre looking for an easy target. all a kid generally has to do is show they arent a target, and that the bully hasnt got power over them. i think a good martial arts class can be a great thing for a kid having trouble with bullies, but it has nothing to do with beating people up.

 

Actually alot of bullies are tough and want you to stand up to them so they feel better about kicking your **** if you do.
Say you did stand up to this tough bully which turned into a fight and you whooped his butt... He will quite likely come back and kick your ****.

 

Personally I think a big problem is that adults tell kids to do one thing, but when it happens to adults they say do another thing.
For example kids are told to tell a teacher that someone is bullying them, but if an adult is being bullied online (which is so common on social media) we just say you should just get off twitter/facebook etc. There has been celebrities who complain about online trolls and identify them to the police etc and there has been an outpooring of scorn towards the celebrity (ie Charlotte Dawson). Kids see this and then adults expect them to want to tell on their friends. Given what they see of adults behaviour, how on earth could you expect that kids will think that telling teachers about bullying is a going to get a positive result?

Then you have the situation where a kid is being bullied and restrained from getting away (bullies may be bigger/stronger/faster than the kid) and then get in trouble for fighting back. So what is the kid supposed to do, they can't run away and they get in trouble for fighting back, so are they just expected to sit there and take it?
This happened to my nephew recently, the kid was holding onto his shirt and slapping him in the face, he fought back and then he got in trouble along with the instigator. When my sister complained the teachers agreed that he shouldn't have got in trouble, but by that point he had already been in detention for an hour or so. What sort of message does that send?

Would advocting fighting back work? I don't know but the inconsistencies between what children are told to do and what they see in real life certainly isn't helping. I think that at the very least the confidence that martial arts can give you would help childrens self esteme.

 

Good, topic.

I have two teenage kids who do TKD. I have always taught them to de-escalate as much as they can but if they should get hit to hit straight back.
I fully expect this to lead to getting dragged in front of teachers who have a zero tolerance policy. If a fight breaks out they would suspend both kids rather than judge.
I freely told them that when in front of the school I will say that I do not support violence in any way but outside that environment I will support what they did.

My son has used some self-defense learned in MA and twisted a bigger kids arm who went to grab him but other than that one time I think it gives them confidence to stand up to bullies more than anything else. I know he's a good kid who abhors violence and only used it because he was threatened.

 

Personally speaking,
I got bullied and hit back some of the time. I got whipped enough times. Seemed to work because the bullies moved onto easier targets (most of the time). My first day of secondary school people where lining up to give me a kicking. After 10 fights on day one I realised I couldn't take them all on. That's when I kjnew I had to do something else or I wouldn't last. I would like to say it was a happy ending but really I just learned to live with it.

In the UK schools have to have an anti-bullying policy but it's really there for box ticking. They don't really subscribe to it. If you are on the receiving end of a bullying campaign then chances are it will succeed and you will be excluded and/or injured.

I also don't like these Restorative Justice schemes. Might work for some but I don't trust some of the motives of the parents/kids involved.

Anyone any experiences?

 

At my kids primary school there is always three teachers in the playground at playtime. Never heard of any bullying. But if it did happen to my child i'd tell my kid to do nothing and i'd go speak to the persons father, diplomatically of course.

Baza

 

I got bullied quite a bit. When my kids are still young I'm going to teach them/take them to BJJ lessons. Most high school fights are one on one with all the other kids watching. BJJ (or more specifically the Gracie Bulletproof system) should be good enough for them to defend themselves and not get excluded.

 

It is important, in my opinion, to distinguish between anti-bullying, and self-defence. The strategies for each are quite different.


Most to do with SD involves de-escalation, avoiding trouble, not being a target. If all of that failed, then we use physical skills to defend ourselves.

Bullying's different. A child (or somebody in a workplace for that matter) will see the bully daily, the exposure is continuous, and the situation can't be avoided. Much good self defence strategy would have you labelled a "wimp" in the school or workplace, and lead to worse, not less, bullying.


So I think that MA has a part to play in anti-bullying strategies, but how it's used - and how we teach kids to use it - needs a great deal of thought. In many ways however actively training in MA, as Grasshopper in particular has said, can provide a self-confidence and physical presence that aid is facing bullies down. I don't think I'd advocate physical techniques at all in most workplaces, but in the playground they have their place, but it's NOT in most cases anything involving hitting. Deflections, controlled throws, restraints - basically doing no harm, but making it clear that the child is not going to be bullied, and will resist and hold their ground, have been shown in some research to work quite well.

That said, most research I've read, indicates that most anti-bullying strategies of most flavours, sadly just don't work. My suspicion is that this is because far too many of them are based upon the self defence principles, not upon more robust "standing up for yourself" principles.

G

 

I wrote a research paper on bullying during my master's program in counseling. And based on that, I think martial arts helped me enormously with bullying. But not for the reasons you'd expect (or I expected anyway). But looking back on it, my personal experience makes perfect sense given what I uncovered in the research.

Essentially, the research said that what "bully-proofs" a child more than anything else is social connectedness. Some people focus on standing up to bullies so that there's a physical consequence to their bullying. But the research suggests that it's social consequence that really carries weight.

In other words, certain people don't get bullied because the bully doesn't want to cross either 1) the sheer number of people to whom the victim is connected or 2) particular people to whom the victim is connected.

So martial arts helped me tremendously. In high school in the 1980s, the social cliques were things like "the preps," "the nerds," "the jocks," and "burnouts." (As if it needed to be said, I was a big nerd.) In high school, those divisions were clear and important.

At the dojang, they weren't. There was a different set of criteria for inclusion. I studied taekwondo with some burnouts, some jocks, plenty of nerds, etc. And my progression in taekwondo earned me social clout that I wouldn't have had otherwise. I had friends in each social circle in high school, which meant that any given bully had reason to leave me alone. "He's friends with one of the defensive linemen on the football team." "He's friends with the guys in the smoking court." Etc.

I think that did more to bully-proof me than anything else. And this is coming from a [then] weedy, underweight, unathletic, bookish (albeit still failing everything) kid with an accent and no sense of style. In other words, a seemingly perfect target.

 

I always tell my kids to leave the situation if possible, but sometimes you are left with no choice but to use physical force. I have also made it clear to them that if it is used in self defense or defense of another that I will always have their back. I did make my dauhter say she was sorry to the boy she punched for pushing her little brother around. I did that for the benifit of the angry mother. I did tell the mother my daughter was right to defend her brother. I also explained to my daughter that sometimes even when you are right you have to say you are sorry. She gets it.

 

You forgot the sportos, the motorheads, wastoids, and dweebies - all of which thought Ferris Bueller was a righteous dude.

You point is an excellent one. When I was in high school being on the wrestling team helped. Not really because of me being a wrestler ( at my high school no one cared about wrestling any more than the golf team ), but because I was friendly with most of the people of the team. A lot of those people played popular sports - football, baseball, etc. and being even on somewhat friendly terms with cool people like that made me seem like less of a nerd.

Looking back - it seems like the people with less connections were the ones that got picked on. Not just the physically weak or wimpy, but the outcasts - the "Bender" types - to drag in another '80's movie reference.

 

I'm not sure if it's still the same but in the UK we don't have such a clique school culture as the US.
At my school the only realy identidiable groups were the weedy sort of kids, the middle sort of kids and the "hard" kids (some of which were bullies but most not).
Middle sort of kids could "migrate" up or down but were less likely to be bullied than the weedy sort of kids.
I always seemed to avoid much stick by being able to draw. Weird really.

 

I was writing a post in reply to this, sharing my own childhood experiences but realized it was getting HUGE. I deleted it all, and have decided to say, "this right here."

 

I was the Anthony Michael Hall character in that movie reference. He and I were dead ringers at that age. Both physically and in terms of the character he played in "Breakfast Club" and "16 Candles."

We don't look so terribly different these days, either.

 

So if sociability is the most deciding factor in kids getting bullied or not; is it right to say the parents are responsible for the bully-proofness of their child?
Are parents responsible for the social behavior of their child?
Is there even anything they can do about their kid if he/she just does not want to socialize?
Or is that a fault in the earlier stages of their upbringing?

 

I'd say yes and no.
Some of it's upbringing, some of it's genetic, some of it's life experience, some of it you can control and some of it not.
A kid in one school might be fine but due to other factors and differences mighty get bullied at another.

 

This is why Sociology is an important science, not implemented or understood enough. The answer to many of those questions is yes, as the family is the first primary group that introduce socialization to their children. There really isn't much of a difference between say, socializing a dog and a human. If you raise a pup around other dogs and people, they will tend to be friendly around other dogs and people. There are major differences of course, and plenty of exceptions to the rule, but it's basically the same thing.

Sociology is often looked at as a science that doesn't explain much, a "fake science" and not much of a benefit. People fail to realize that much of the world and many ideologies of today happened because of sociology (just look up Karl Marx and make the connections). It really is THAT important to socialize people from a young age to give them an advantage in life.