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Answerman - How Bad Is Bullying In Japan?

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This is one downside of youth being given much more control and free reign over their lives -- there is often not enough adult supervision to really stop this from happening.

I really wonder if Japanese kids are that much more unsupervised than those in the U.S. or in Europe.

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In some cases, being the victim of bullying can be enough to make other kids resent you. In one case, a student with 40 cigarette burns on his arm was expelled from school for showing students the burns in a way that caused them “anxiety.” One school asked the parents of a bullied victim if they could announce their son’s suicide as an “accident” rather than inform the students of the outcome of their harassment campaign.

Wow. That excerpt really leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

She came over the next day and was all shook up over it. "What does that mean!? Do you like me!?"
"Well... Yeah...!"
And you know, we were together. Later some of her friends found me and started yelling at me. Apparently it was huge gossip that I had gone and done that without a "kokuhaku".

Yamato Nadeshiko was a popular girl and the class genius, so for a while I got some sort of popularity as "Nadeshiko's gaijin boyfriend" and her many friends seemed to like me. Or so I thought.

But many hated me for "dating her wrong" for that kokuhaku mistake and who knows what else and started reporting to her every little mistake and faux pas I made and she just got tired of it all.

ResistNormal wrote:

I like to often remind bullies that this is how columbine style shooting develops, do you want that?

Columbine style shootings can still happen even if only one or none of the shooters is bullied. All you need is an asshole with access to his own guns (or his parents) and a desire to kill and you're all set.

Bullying is allowed to go on in the American public school systems, because for the most part, school systems and districts don't want to deal with it. They don't want to investigate or be judge and jury. So they punish the bully and the victim equally, if the victim defends themselves. They don't want to constantly monitor the situation, so they don't protect the victim from reprisals attacks from the bully or his friends/henchmen. And as some have said, sometimes bus drivers and teachers just turn a blind eye.

Bullying is allowed to go on in the American public school systems, because for the most part, school systems and districts don't want to deal with it. They don't want to investigate or be judge and jury. So they punish the bully and the victim equally, if the victim defends themselves. They don't want to constantly monitor the situation, so they don't protect the victim from reprisals attacks from the bully or his friends/henchmen. And as some have said, sometimes bus drivers and teachers just turn a blind eye.

TarsTarkas wrote:

Bullying is allowed to go on in the American public school systems, because for the most part, school systems and districts don't want to deal with it. They don't want to investigate or be judge and jury. So they punish the bully and the victim equally, if the victim defends themselves. They don't want to constantly monitor the situation, so they don't protect the victim from reprisals attacks from the bully or his friends/henchmen. And as some have said, sometimes bus drivers and teachers just turn a blind eye.

Um, no. Just no. As someone who has worked in public schools in the U.S. for more than 20 years, I can assure you that this is patently not the case on the whole.

Might this be true in some cases in the States? I suppose so. However, I guarantee that the truth far more commonly is that the teacher/administrator either genuinely isn't aware of what's going on or else doesn't know what to do about it. Even with the rigorous training teachers get on bullying (required yearly by state law in some states), they can't do anything if they don't see it happen or it isn't brought to their attention, and most bullies are at least clever enough to not blatantly do it in front of adult witnesses.

Even when teachers do see it, being able to thwart it is more difficult than you might think. I was substituting in a middle school Health class one time where a good chunk of the class was relentlessly picking on one disabled kid despite my efforts to discourage it, so I eventually had to send him out of class and call for an assistant principal's help. (And boy, you didn't want to be in one of those student desks when he started laying into those kids, as he had a disabled son himself and so was more than ordinarily hot under the collar about it. There were at least a couple of kids practically in tears by the time he got done.)