Old-School Bullying and the Internet

This post started out as a comment to a Jezebel article. It started out simply as a mention of days of yore, but ended up being more a trip down memory lane that a comment on the subject of the article. Though I did circle around in the end to get back to the present.

The article in Jezebel was about a girl on Twitter being tormented by kids (and apparently one sad grown man), before being rescued by some unexpected characters. Her heroes? The infamous internet vigilante group Anonymous and the Rustle League. (Sorry, don't know who the latter are.) They didn't intervene by filing complaints or starting dialogs via "official" channels, but by going on Twitter, declaring all-out war, and leaving the bullies bloody and bruised.

You can relive the entire massacre here on the Daily Dot.


And now here's my comment-turned-post...

I graduated in 1995. (Oy!) Since bullying was still relegated mainly to the physical world (save for whispered rumors, notes and anonymous phone calls), our "anti-bullying measures" consisted of having "bad kids" in our schools - i.e. the ones who spent more time in detention than in class. Bad kids who were actually nice kids, even if they often times tried to hide that fact.

The two types of kids that bullies really liked to target were the quiet, non-reactionary types on one end of the scale, and the easily-annoyed, reactionary types on the other end. (The latter more preferred by bullies who really feel the need to punch people.) If a bully decided to start pushing one of these kids around, and the situation didn't change in a "reasonable" amount of time, then that's when you'd often see one of the "bad kids" make an entrance.

Usually things would end after a tense staredown, but sometimes the bullies - which often roamed in pairs or threesomes - would decide that a little double- or triple-team action was fair. Unfortunately, it always seemed to me that whenever an extra one would jump into the fray, it always got worse for the bullies. Just seemed to amp up the anti-hero, and make them more vicious in their beatdown of the thugs.

These confrontations made for some great noon-hour or after-school entertainment, and despite getting some sort of punishment along with the bullies, the anti-hero would usually get a wink from school authorities to show they understood the situation, and appreciated their actions to protect the innocent.

Some years after graduating from high-school, there was loud movement by some parents and "concerned citizens" to eliminate school fights by any means. Harsher punishments for those involved. Much harsher in some places. "Three-strike" rules which lead to expulsions. I'm sure a small amount of fights ended badly or tragically, but these were obviously exceptions. Exceptions that, despite how sad they may be, simply need to be dealt with individually.

The people behind that movement obviously didn't understand that those fights were just one part of the complex society that kids lived in called high-school. It wasn't long after that that we started hearing about kids - usually the bullied ones - bringing knives or guns to school. They didn't have anti-heroes around to protect them anymore.

But this "cyber-bullying" is a whole new beast. The internet is one of the most world-altering inventions in history. What Anonymous and the Rustle League did for the girl on Twitter was basically the modern equivalent of the "bad kids" intervening on the school-ground. They didn't run to get a teacher or call the principal's office. That would give the bullies an impetus to start beating on the kid before they had to flee. They just got in the bullies faces and challenged them.

And the bullies left the school-ground bloody and bruised. And best of all, humiliated.

Anyhoo...