That sounds crazy to me. Doesn't fighting back just escalate things? And do we really want the next generation to grow up thinking that fighting is OK? Will they apply that same pattern when they're adults?
The current state of "assault" law is appalling, especially in the U.S. We need to get more than a bit back to what we actually are.
It works when you're an adult as well, though if they're your boss they might fire you.
Bullies do know very well how to react to someone standing up to them. All my bullies did. It was worthless. I was always unable to do or say the right things to stop them.
This always seemed like a useless platitude to me that doesn’t work one bit outside of very specific circumstances.
Particularly when the alternative is to get pushed around until an authority figure happens to see and intercede on your behalf.
I think it's important to carry that lesson into adulthood, especially as we learn that not all fights are physical.
Fighting is not just violence. It is self confidence, standing up for oneself or for what is right.
It's common for members of certain groups, particularly those of a quixotic utopian bent, to see a bunched fist as something that's awful and terrifying in its own right. This is not true; like any weapon, its moral valence is ineluctably situational and determined by the use to which it's put. A bully uses it to inflict terror on those who can't or won't fight back. We agree that this use carries a negative moral valence, but you fail to think it through properly; the assumption that more violence is always worse than less violence blinds you to the fact that not all violence is morally equivalent -- that the violence which stops a bully is not the same as the violence which satisfies a bully -- because you find it so unpleasant to contemplate any violence.
This is a regrettably common form of moral cowardice, but it is no less base or shameful for all that. Perhaps you think I judge too harshly; in entire fairness, I'd think the same, had not the schools of my youth been administered by people who had precisely the same attitude toward violence in general; their idea was that the problem of bullying could be entirely solved by sufficient attention from authorized adults, which might possibly be workable if, say, there were a roughly 1:1 staff-to-student ratio, and constant supervision in places like bathrooms. Since there isn't and never will be, the whole idea is plainly and fundamentally flawed, but that doesn't seem enough to stop some people from trying to put it into practice nonetheless.
I've seen the policies which result from such foolishness, and experienced their consequences firsthand; indeed, they made my youth a great deal more unpleasant than it really had to be, and it's because of that experience that I have such short shrift to give these opinions when I encounter them in adulthood.
You also make the mistake of saying that bullying is a problem of childhood. Plenty of adults bully and are bullied.
It's easy to say "stand up for yourself", especially if you have wrong ideas about bullies, but just saying it is not particularly helpful for many people being bullied.
It is trite and simplistic. It is also harmful for some people being bullied.
All it does is give more power to bullies. They can be jerks out of sight as much as they want, knowing their targets will never do anything to protect themselves. When it happened to me, I was always more overcome with fear that they would kick me out of school and my life would be over than I was scared of the bully, so I never retaliated. Of course, you can't tell the teacher or your parents either. Not only does that make you look like a "wimp," but it's somehow against the code of kids to get an adult involved; you would feel ashamed if you tattled. So instead, you just put up with it, and the school basically enables the bully to torment as much as they want, as long as they aren't dumb enough to get caught. I didn't have too many problems with bullying growing up, but there were other kids that were basically doomed to years of torment because of this, and were seriously screwed up and jaded because of it. Even worse, even most of the regular kids would avoid the bullied kid and talk about them behind their back, partially for fear of retribution from the bully, and partially because kids in general are cruel and enjoy having power over others almost as much as the bullies themselves, so being the target of a bully meant "you endure cruelty and physical violence on a daily basis, you have no friends, you cannot escape, you aren't allowed to defend yourself, and the adults aren't on your side."
Jumping forward a few years to being a teenager, a guy I didn't like was being a jerk outside of school, and something inside of me was just so tired of always backing down that I ended up hitting him. We traded blows for a minute or so (we were more thrashing like idiots than doing anything "cool" and actually dangerous you'd see in a movie) before it got broken up. We were barely hurt, no busted lips or black eyes, and neither of our parents ever found out. Afterwards, I immediately had a lot more respect amongst my friends, and I somehow ended up becoming friends with the guy I fought. Guys are funny like that.
Random violence and actually hurting people is obviously not ok, but fighting back against bullies prevents them from getting overconfident and lets the bullied keep their dignity. I'm convinced that a more understanding administrative policy and less adult supervision would have allowed most of these problems to sort themselves out pretty quickly, evening out the power distribution in the classroom and making life significantly better for the worst victims of bullying. It probably wouldn't completely solve the problem, for example in the obvious scenario where a group of older kids screw with younger kids outside of school, but at least it solves the horrendous problem we have today where, as I described above, almost an entire class is pitted against a kid.
> do we really want the next generation to grow up thinking that fighting is OK? Will they apply that same pattern when they're adults?
As I understand it, the past few generations are the weird ones, and kids have pretty much always been allowed to get away with harmless fights. Ask your parents how often many fistfights they've had since graduating high school.