From: rc@depsych.Gwinnett.COM (Richard Carlson)
Newsgroups: misc.kids
Subject: Re: Aggression in boys (Was: Re: BARBIE
Date: 15 Oct 92 14:28:51 GMT
Article-I.D.: depsych.sqwosB2w165w

lynn@elan.Elan.COM (Lynn Gazis) writes:

> > On the contrary, your story is as typical as a story can get.  The
> 
> Interesting you see it that way.  In one of the previous "bully"
> threads in this group, someone told me that my case was atypical,
> and that the typical case involved a boy who picked on another
> boy and immediately stopped when the victim fought back (the other
> comments in this thread make me suspect that the previous respondent
> was wrong, and my case isn't that unusual).

That is the bully myth.  We often don't see the reality because
the myth structures our thoughts.

> > Did you have any extended family, especially cousins, in the
> > community?  
> 
> No, my father was a Greek immigrant, and my cousins were all
> in Greece.  My mother's relatives were in California (we were
> in New York).  I did have a very large nuclear family (seven
> kids, three of whom were cousins adopted after the death of
> an aunt - they arrived and joined our family the year after
> I skipped).

Were you the oldest?  If not the obvious question is why didn't
one of your siblings help.

> > Were you new _in_the_community?
> 
> No, we had moved there when I was ten months old.

Wasn't the kid next door already a friend by the time you started
school?  Didn't you play house and red rover with the other kids
starting just before kindergarten?  Didn't you have the
neighborhood girls in for make-believe tea parties?

> > Were you a different social class or ethnic group form the 
> > majority of the other students?
> 
> We were the only Greek-American family I knew until something
> like 8th or 9th grade.  There were some Italian-Americans
> and a fairly large Jewish contingent, so it wasn't pure WASP.
> We weren't poor, but the large number of children and the
> fact that the school was located in a relatively wealthy
> community made us appear relatively poor.  I can remember
> when I got older and we would go to school in hand-me-downs
> in an environment where the kids made a big deal of having
> the right clothes (didn't keep me from making friends in
> high school though, and didn't keep some of my sisters from
> being popular).

So you didn't go to the same church as any of the other kids.
That may have been important.

> > And why didn't you tell a teacher? or your father talk to the
> > boys' fathers?
> 
> I had picked up that I was being picked on for being a weakling,
> and telling an adult would make me more of a weakling.  In
> junior high school, an adult did eventually intervene with
> one of the worst bullies, and got him to stop.  Up until that
> point, it didn't seem as if the adults were doing anything
> effective (I know now that both my parents were worried
> about the situation, but don't know everything that they
> tried to stop it).

The bully myth itself tells us that getting help from adults is
inappropriate.  Every once in a while you even read a column from
a popular columnist drawing the moral from the bully myth --
bullies are a problem each child must solve for h/erself.

--
Richard Carlson
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