stand up for yourself?

[Alan Forrester]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFDOxVyo9Rg

http://abc30.com/archive/9537054/

During a meeting of Porterville City Council Mayor Cameron Hamilton of
Porterville California stated that bullying victims at school should
"stick up for themselves." This is stupid.

First there is the practical issue of how you should stand up for
yourself if you're physically weaker than your assailants and there
are lots of them. It may be the case that the right thing to do is to
get somebody else to take care of the problem for you.

Second assault is against the law so if you're being assaulted you
should not have to stand up for yourself because you should be able to
go to the police. In practise children often can't go to the police
because adults often have contempt for children and children notice
this, So they might go to the police or a teacher and neither the
police nor the teacher will take action to solve the problem. They
might just tell the bully not to do it anymore. The the bully thinks
the victim has wronged him and may even more determined to make the
victim miserable. Hamilton is supporting this kind of behaviour, which
amounts to turning a blind eye to crime.

Third the child doesn't have the option of retreating since he forced
to go to school so the bullies know where and when they can find him.
Refusing to interact with bullies because they're scumbags is a
perfectly reasonable way of standing up for the value of your own
life: you refuse to waste it on dealing with them. Children don't have
that option.

Fourth children who stand up for themselves are often punished through
indifference to the truth or malice toward the child in question. The
standard way for this to happen is that the teacher sees a fight and
just punishes both of the parties involved with lines or whatever
without making any effort to find out who is in charge. It would be
surprising if they did make the effort since part of the point of
school is that a child's opinion or value counts for nothing and he
can be forced to do things he thinks are worthless. If the child's
life is worthless then all that counts in deciding what to do with him
is whether he has inconvenienced the teacher. Punishment would be a
bad idea anyway since it won't explain to the bully how he should deal
with disagreements or problems, but punishing the victim too is even
worse.

The punishment can take other forms. In the Source Fed video the
narrator tells us that she was called crazy for standing up for
herself. This amounts to (1) impugning the narrator's character and
(2) an inexplicit and deniable threat of forced drugging and/or
imprisonment without trial.

Alan