Surfnow obviously has never been bullied.  Consider yourself lucky, dude.

Bullying isn’t likely any higher than it has always been.  The only thing that has
changed is that it is currently the focus of a society that is desperate to focus on
anything besides the fact that our own government has become the bully on the block
and corporations are its big brother.

Excuse me if I don’t hold my breath while society does only this lip service to how
horrible bullying is… again.  The playground monitors never paid much attention to
these mean little interactions when we were kids.  A few years ago when my son put
himself in the middle of a bully and a victim, he was the one that got in trouble. 
Where was the playground monitor? Not knowing or caring about what really was going
on in the playground, that’s for sure.  That particular bully had be plaguing the
kids for quite a while, so its pretty certain that the monitor wasn’t adequate to the
task on many levels.

These bullies arise out of families that don’t care about them and are dumped in a
society that don’t care about them and when they act out and are not challenged or
counseled, its confirmed to them from all corners that there is no concern for others
to be had or required.

surfer:

I object to your promoting bullying on this site.

or anywhere else, for that batter.

I cannot speak to the current schoolyard bully situationon the playgrounds of Gringolandia, but by looking at your foreign policy—which is make war on any country with a dominantly non-white population and grab its resources, what would you expect kids to model?

Gringolandia has always been the biggest and loudest bully on the planet.  Just gran a gander at Hillary the Hateful Hag threateneing Syria, Iran, your mother, etc.  She’s the top gun of your foreign policy and she is a BULLY.

Bullying is on the rise in Mexico’s schools, too—every since the gringos imposed their bogus War on Drugs as a condition of allowing Calderon 6 years in the presidential chair.  75,000 folks murdered.  That’s outsourcing bullying at a newer, faster rate.

the mother of bullying, belittling, looking dwn on people, racism, warfare, expoitation, wife
beatings, etc., is discrimination.
discrimination started by just first ever biped looking down on or belittling another human being.
the first such an act most likely went ununderstood or even unnoticed by most members of a
settlement.
thus, the misdeed went unpunished or not spoken against.
‘religion’ [organized mafia, really] which arose from discriminating against and belittlement of
some individuals, was its natural consequence.
one could see how easy it is to control a person by just discriminating against herhim.
one could see that the person being discriminated against would burst into anger; s/he may run
away, or withdraw to heal one’s wounds and thus become less fit to adapt to reality.
==
and if ‘teachers’ et al cannot see that grading children in school is DISCRIMINATION AND ROOT OF
ALL EVIL and sees it as a virtue, then we can expect more suicide, withdrawals, feeling sorry for
oneself, murder, etc.

BLAME THE PARENTS !!! AND ONLY THEM!!!

Bullying has not been around since the beginning of human existence, and it is not the result of evolution.

We simply did not evolve to live in so-called civilization, which will likely be our downfall. In “pre-conquest consciousness” (pre-civilization) societies, each individual is concerned that every other individual in the group is happy and contented. These people do not know what lying is, what time is, etc. You might say they are still living in the Garden. (An interesting equivalent is the way canines function in your family if they are part of it. They have no concept of time except NOW and don’t want any other family member to be unhappy. Which is why they have much more to teach us than vice versa.)

We live in a bullying society. People are paid lots of money to go on TV and bully each other in reality shows. Then we have the Nancy Graces of the world, who are professional bullies. Beyond this scale, our nation likes to bully people all over the world. Then we fuss about the bullying that children do in imitation of us.

The best thing parents can do is raise their children to be strong and assertive. Boys and girls tried to bully me when I was a kid, and they never tried a second time.

Anti-bullying is just more milquetoast, liberal PC.  On the local and state level, like all of the other school guidance department mumbo-jumbo : ADHD, Aspergers and all the other phony syndromes- anti-bullying is designed to create useless jobs and wind up just babying kids and wasting tax dollars.To Korporate Amerika on the federal level its just more good deflection. No ,don’t look over there at the endless wars and MIC, let’s focus on flag-burning, DADT and that schoolyard bullying.

Bullies are the product of their PARENTS. I am willing
to bet that the father’s/mother’s of these kids, do
their best to be JUST AS INTIMIDATING as they can
possibly be and the kids see this kind of action and
follow suite.

Bullying has always existed in some form throughout
human existence.  And the common response for thousands
of years was violence.  Only in the last few decades
have the first-world nations come to deplore this
response and encourage the emphasis on self-esteem that
has saturated our school systems.

I think a situation like Columbine is more in tune with
a visceral, human response than forgive and forget, as
awful as that sounds.

I don’t live in amerika (wow you don’t say) but there has been a much greater emphasis placed on bullying in schools here, by both parents and the media.
Is it on the rise?  Maybe - one doesn’t hafta look far to see the probable causes. 
Greater emphasis on the duty of ‘me’ to meet my needs & less on the virtues of living in a co-operative society where everyone matters.

If bullying is more prevalent there are other factors at work here, that make parents want to be more proactive about confronting bullying now.

The first is the disadvantage of children brought up in a society where all parents have to work, usually away from home.  I am a keen advocate of equal pay and the right for everyone to be able to work. 
The problem is that in an unregulated society, one where everything is determined by ‘demand’, it didn’t take many dual income families to increase demand on essentials from increased purchasing power, Eventually dual income families stopped being a choice & became a neccessity for survival.

Parents love their kids so if their time spent together with kids is diminished they put greater emphasis on time spent together.  Nowadays parents are more likely to ‘hear’ their childrens concerns about bullying and try to ‘do something’ about it.

Driving around 21st century suburbs I don’t have to drive slowly concentrating hard not to run over the local kids anymore. 
Once neighbourhood kids would all hang together playing sport, climbing trees, & planning outrages against ‘the oldies’ etc. 

Not now. 

Many kids get left in the charge of minders.  Minders have instructions to take kids swimming, riding, sports training etc.  All play is structured leaving no time for unstructured play with yer neighbours.

This is bad because kids, like adults, generally stick to the ‘ya can pick yer friends but you can’t pick yer neighbours’ that most adults follow.
After a few hiccups local kids left to their own devices usually work out problems and stick together.  All the kids swap social skills about things like bullying and how to deal with it.

This is rarely learned in structured play, where adults supervise and quash any issues themselves denying kids the opportunity to work it out.
Public transport like school buses has always been hard for a kid because many of the passengers only interact together in the time and space they share on the bus. 
Defenses are up, kids don’t have any shared history, and odds are they will lack the skills to defuse situations.

We may think of bullying as being worse for boys, but both genders cop it bad. One of my daughters was getting a pasting every day from some snotty little twerps practising the skills of their trophy wife mums.
You can’t be there all the time to stick up for the child, & chalkies just want an easy life; if they witness something particularly egregious they may intervene, but they are often under the thumb of bully parents.

All a parent can do is to socialise their children.  I put a year or so of intensive work into encouraging other kids from the ‘burb to spend time at our house with my daughter; in increasingly unstructured play.  Provide decent food and some ‘choice’ distractions and kids will come.  As my daughter spent more time with children who weren’t ‘picking on her’ but did have the occasional falling out all children do, her self confidence increased as well as the skills she needed to hold her own among a clutch of bitches.
By the time she started High School it was long behind - apart from an awareness of how that stuff feels & a determination to step in if she saw someone else copping it.

Luck plus my daughter’s determination to deal with her tormentors worked. But parents must make the time.  A kid who’s learnt to interact with humans will have a better life than one who had every piece of consumerist crap growing up.

Well said, giacomofrugoli.

Bullies should be arrested for assault and suffer appropriate penalties for that crime.  Maybe then the incidence of bullying will decline.

I just find it interesting that Hunger Games, a movie
about a group of teenagers killing each other, was so
widely accepted when a documentary about real life
bullying was met with criticism. LA times had an
interesting article about the two ratings:
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/movies/la-et-ratings-reform-20120317,0,2963068.story

Do bullies ‘outgrow’ it?  This is an interesting observation/question.  Who are the people that bully mercilessly when they grow up?

Do they normally become society’s victims themselves, or do they institutionalize the bullying and become the sociopaths we know and love?

It would be a wonderful thing if children could be raised in paradise, taught from the beginning to be human. Evolution though negates this out come, instinctively homo sapien is thrown into an environment of eat or be eaten, survival of the fittest. It is deplorable that children should suffer do to the lack of human intervention in their lives.

Homo sapien:

Killer ape

Human:

HE/SHE who stands ready with the bow to defend the lambs, from the bird of prey or the rabid dog.