Not appeasement and pandering, but an uncompromising commitment to putting them in their place.

I didn’t say to appease or pander to the bully’s sensibilities. And putting them in their place might be part of the bully’s restoration.

The average bully doesn’t care about restoration and justice, that’s why they’re bullies.

This was specifically about bullying in schools, i.e. they’re children. Some of them might grow up to be bullies, but my view is that most childhood bullies have not yet developed empathy for their peers. I.e., people can change, especially children.

You said not to punish them. How do you intend to teach them empathy if all they learn is that they can get away with doing what they want?

I was a child once. I got bullied by other children. Some of them grew up, some of them didn’t. But you know what never helped? The adults who focused their ire on me anytime in stood up for myself, instead of having my back or telling the bullies to knock it off. No, they just told me I’m supposed to be better than them, so I’d get in just as much if not more trouble than they did, because “held to a higher standard” or some shit.

All they did was create a feeble, traumatized, spineless adult who lets others walk all over him because he’s too afraid to stand up for himself, not because he’s intimidated by bullies, but because he fears the authorities and feels he doesn’t deserve the ground beneath his feet. An adult who bottled up all his emotions, because there was nowhere else for them to go, until years later when he couldn’t hold in the pressure anymore and his psyche started rupturing into mental breakdowns and became entirely unable to participate in society.

Except no on ever says “it’s okay, it’s understandable, he has trauma.” No, people say “That guy’s crazy, stay away, he’s mentally unstable, ew.” They say “stop blaming your childhood, you’re not a victim, trauma isn’t real, you’re clearly choosing to have mental breakdowns because you want attention and it makes you feel powerful” which is entirely counterfactual.

So no, don’t let bullies off the hook because you think “punishment” is a naughty word. All you’re gonna do is enable them to push their victims over the edge, with no recourse but to feel backed into a corner and have to fight their way out.

I’ve never shot anybody, because that’s not something I would do. But I can definitely understand how enduring years of that kind of treatment can make someone feel like they have no other option besides seeking vengeance, making others feel the pain that those others had made them feel. And to an unbalanced psyche in that sort of state, everyone who minimized and dismissed and ignored their pain when they cried out for help might seem like valid targets. That doesn’t make it right, but from a psychological point of view, it’s easy to see the direct line of cause-and-effect, if you take a moment to remove those socialized glasses of admitting the facts only when they’re comfortable.

A large proportion of school shooters were victims of bullying. That doesn’t mean we should stigmatizing the victims and ostracize them further, although that’s probably the response most “normies” would jump to. But that would exacerbate the problem. No, the problem is to reduce the prevalence of bullying, and give victims sufficient avenues for redress and support, so that they don’t feel like they have to fend for themselves while backed into a corner with their hands tied behind their back and pushed daily beyond the reasonable limits of what a human psyche can take until they can’t take anymore and finally snap.

You said not to punish them. How do you intend to teach them empathy if all they learn is that they can get away with doing what they want?

Because punishment shouldn’t be the focus. It shouldn’t be “you did bad thing therefore bad thing happens to you”. I’m not saying it has to be a totally positive experience for the bully, bully might even have to get their teeth rearranged for them, but what I take issue with is the institutional, top-down, carceral mentality of punishment. The focus should be on making the victim whole and making sure the bully doesn’t bully again, not that the bully gets some requisite amount of pain and suffering.

The adults who focused their ire on me anytime in stood up for myself, instead of having my back or telling the bullies to knock it off. No, they just told me I’m supposed to be better than them, so I’d get in just as much if not more trouble than they did, because “held to a higher standard” or some shit.

Yeah I’m absolutely not saying that. If you beat the shit out of someone bullying you, you are generically in the right as far as I’m concerned.

So no, don’t let bullies off the hook because you think “punishment” is a naughty word.

Again, that’s absolutely not what I am advocating. Quite the opposite, actually. I am advocating that we treat bullies like people capable of change. Hold them accountable for their actions. And if that process is painful the bully, so be it, but inflicting pain and suffering on the bully should not be the primary goal. When we do this, the bully simply learns to pick better targets.

It seems like you’re assuming I have a retributive approach to justice, and I think that’s where this disagreement is coming from. I don’t though. I don’t think bullies should be punished just for the sake of punishing them. That wouldn’t be effective.

Sure, the focus should be on making the victim whole and making the bully stop being a bully. The first part of that I think is beyond the scope of this discussion. I assume we would agree that it would take some research-based approach likely involving counseling and social support. But I’m not here to hash out those details because it’s not my expertise.

As far as making the bullying stop bullying though, that requires either extrinsic interventions, which would be reactive and circumstantial at best, or giving the bully an intrinsic motivation to stop bullying. Most people are motivated by the desire to be a good person and treat others with kindness. Those people aren’t bullies in the first place. Bullies don’t have that motive.

So what could motivate a bully to stop bullying? Well, you wouldn’t bribe them with nice rewards for good behavior. That would be unfair to people who were never bullies in the first place, and to the bully’s victims.

Psychologically speaking, extrinsic motivators fall into two broad categories: rewards and punishments.

So how is that not bringing us full circle? Because the punishment here isn’t strictly retributive. The point isn’t to get back at them because “fair’s fair.” The point is to force them to stop bullying by making it more painful to them to continue bullying than they find worth the intrinsic reward they feel from bullying.

Maybe it sounds crass to say we need to cognitively/behaviorally condition bullies to stop bullying, but what else can you do besides asking them nicely to stop? What do you do when they refuse?