SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the won't-someone-think-of-the-children dept.
I found this recently-published article, Children who are bullied suffer worse long-term mental health problems than those who are maltreated interesting. Here are some excerpts:
A new study published in The Lancet Psychiatry shows that children who have been bullied by peers suffer worse in the longer term than those who have been maltreated by adults.
The research is led by Professor Dieter Wolke from Warwick's Department of Psychology and Warwick Medical School. The study is due to be presented at the Pediatric Academic Societies (PAS) annual meeting in San Diego on Tuesday 28 April.
[...] Professor Wolke said: "The mental health outcomes we were looking for included anxiety, depression or suicidal tendencies. Our results showed those who were bullied were more likely to suffer from mental health problems than those who were maltreated. Being both bullied and maltreated also increased the risk of overall mental health problems, anxiety and depression in both groups."
An abstract and full article (pdf) are available.
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Monday May 04 2015, @05:56PM
...all I got was that the the bully deserved a second chance
Of course. They always get a second chance, and a third, and a fourth, because the teachers can't do much about it and their parents f***ing don't care.
I remember picking my son up from school one day after school. We were standing in front of the school with other parents and kids, while I was talking to another parent. One of the class bullies kicked my son, hard enough to knock him down. (They were maybe 9 or 10 years old.) The mother was standing right there, pretending she hadn't noticed anything. I said "your son just kicked my kid" and waited. She asked her son "did you?"? He put his hands over his ears and started babbling to make sure he couldn't hear anything else she might say. So she shrugs and walks off. That's it, no consequences for the kid, no apology, nothing.
Bringing up correlation and causation is, sorry, kind of naive. Sure, it's impossible to prove to a mathematical standard, because we can't really run randomized, double-blind studies on kids' lives. But I have lots of anecdotes like the above, as do many other people. Eventually, anecdotes do accumulate into something resembling evidence, as we watch previously happy kids withdraw into depression, despite anything we can do to help them.
That all said, it's not actually the bullies who are at fault. Kids are fundamentally uncivilized creatures [wikipedia.org]. It's primarily a failing of their parents, who can't be bothered to civilize them. Heck, in some cases the parents actively encourage the bullying: "look how tough my kid is - he's beating that other kid up". To a lesser extent, it's a failing of the schools - teachers could do more, but they often don't want to get involved, or they aren't allowed to get involved for political reasons.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.