We need to take #bullying seriously. This kid has lifelong injuries because a bully didn’t like how the victim was “staring at him.”
Back in August in Virginia, this story broke. http://www.kgw.com/news/boy-has-lifelong-injuries-after-attack-by-bully/309798569
The gist of it is a 15 year old has life long injuries. His jaw was broken because another 15 year old punched him. In my county, we had a kid die from being punched in the head. Head injuries are serious!!!! You get punched as an adult – it’s called battery. It’s criminal. For a reason!
The attorney for the victim gets this right – the administration, but not dealing with this appropriately, created 2 victims! The kid who is the victim and the other kid who is facing felony battery charges and prison time.
If bullying manifests as physical violence – it’s no longer bullying – it’s criminal behavior!!!! It also means that the kid who is physically violent has been failed by the school district for years. This sort of behavior doesn’t manifest out of thin air. It escalates from smaller incidents that weren’t dealt with properly!
It usually starts verbally and then escalates to threats. As soon as a kid reports a threat of physical violence, as this kid did – both the alleged victim and the alleged “bully” need to be monitored. You can’t just “talk” to a person making threats and tell them to stand down. Most times that may work, but as the article points out, it will often escalate the behavior as it did here.
Bullies who don’t get their way escalate. It’s what they do. It’s what all animals do when faced with pressure to stop. This has been well studied. For decades! Escalation is predicted to occur. We need to plan for it to occur and stop being shocked when it happens.
Adults – pay attention
Look – if you are in a school as an adult – you NEED to learn what actually works to get bullying behavior to stop. Also, you need to take bullying seriously because left on its own this behavior escalates. We have decades of research on behavior that explains exactly how and why this happens. Stop being caught off guard, learn the science and start dealing with this appropriately – in other words, in a way that will actually help to make it stop because – you know the science of how to get behaviors to stop.
Get my book. Take this free program. Join the website. Just learn this information, and share it with others (look at all the convenient social media links below – click on them and share this!). The more people who know how to make unwanted behaviors, like bullying, stop, the less bullying there will be and maybe, just maybe, we will stop having incidents like this happen. This was preventable. That’s the biggest tragedy of all.