A Fix for Bullying?

After a Facebook friend of mine posted this story about a Detroit seven year old responding to his broken home and schoolyard bullying with suicide, the comment thread quickly filled up with the typical views on the subject of bullying (and not the broken home). Most of the blame centered on all the parents involved because, of course, children and teachers are blameless in everything. There was the more Christian response of turning the other cheek and not retaliating; the more moderate approach of not retaliating violently, but doing so with words and state power; and the response of teaching your kids to defend themselves both verbally and physically. All of these are portrayed as solutions to bullying.

It's not something you can fix. Kids, specifically boys, are little barbarians and have bullied one another since the dawn of the species. No amount of technology or elite cogitation are going to change that. Every advanced culture has had means of channeling that violence. The Athenians and Spartans had kids beating each other up for status in their military training. The classical Japanese were much the same: ceremonial combat between kids using false weapons that still hurt quite a bit when you failed. For most of Western civilization in the past 300 years, we've used sports and combat sparring. 


Sports have always been very violent things and they were up until the nonviolence people added soccer, crazy amounts of padding to hockey, flags to football, and took away scores. Combat sparring has disappeared faster (because weapons are, of course, inherently evil) but, where it remains, it's still pretty violent (not karate, but wrestling and fencing). It's not participated in widely, though. So that leaves a bunch of little barbarians with little to no release. It's bottled up until we get school shootings, over-the-top retaliation, insanely violent video games, and stories like this kid's. All of these apply to boys, primarily, girls have always had different means of sorting themselves out.

I don't pretend to understand it but it seems to be at first centered on gathering the approval of adults while they're young. More approval means more status. Later it evolves into gathering the approval of males their own age during their teen years and ends in adulthood as a self-approval topped off by the approval of a handful of significant people. These observations both for boys and girls don't apply totally, of course you always have outliers, but these mechanisms have been broken down. 


They've broken down unevenly. There are some areas that still have the mechanisms in place and functioning somewhat properly. Other places that don't tolerate a good fistfight tend to have more of the drastic violence. I'm fine with just going around the nonviolence people and letting kids beat each other up for status like an unofficial form of the Spartan and Athenian way. What about you?