When The Victim Gets the Punishment for Fighting Back

An article about a teen expelled as risk to other students: http://q13fox.com/2013/05/15/bullied-to-the-brim-olympia-teen-files-complaint-with-u-s-dept-of-ed/#idc-container

The teachers and administration always have a significant impact on the culture of their schools. If the school has a bullying problem, that kind of culture is also likely to be reflected on all levels of the school hierarchy. The bullying problem starts with having an extremely shallow understanding of interpersonal violence, how it starts, and how to manage it.

Lots of bullies are skilled in the art of escalation, most bullying starts with verbal or mental abuse. These kids often come from pretty fucked up family structures and have lots of 'knowledge' on social manipulation and how to push people to act out. Bullies in modern America aren't primarily bruisers looking to fight, they're expert manipulators instead.

They depend on the fact that most people won't resort immediately to physical violence in response to their tormenting and they also benefit from their understanding that all authorities are basically there to hand out random punishment like any drunken alcoholic father. The whole bullying game depends on the victim actually being the first to lash out. That way they get the added pleasure of seeing their victims get the hammer from whatever authority figure resides above them as well.

Bullies can do all of this because we, as a culture, simply do not want to acknowledge verbal forms of violence. This is most likely because authoritarian hierarchies are themselves built on the inherent threat of violence. If we acknowledged that hard truth on a mass scale, that authority is often nothing more than the threat of violence, all authority figures everywhere would suddenly become de-legitimized.

In an authoritarian system, it's also only the authority who has the right to perpetrate actual physical violence, so, you see, a victim of bullying who finally escalates to physical violence as a form of self defense is actually the rightful recipient of punishment, in a messed up sort of way. The bully is just fine, the bully gets that he was meant to bully, the victim never gets that he was meant to be dumped on because he's different, or small, or smart, or stupid, or disabled, or a racial minority, or whatever.
So until we decide that we're going to have a hard look at the structures that we believe are right in our society, we'll continue to have schools that are nothing but cesspools of mediocrity and barely suppressed disorder, and we'll have to deal with the occasional retaliation from our victims as well.