That was my experience in school. I frequently got worse punishment than my bullies. Then the one day I actually fought back I got worse punishment again. But the next day I was ignored by the bullies.

I can just hear someone out there saying that's what the school wanted to teach me but dude, it was not some reasoned, cool headed, defense of myself. It was a dirty emotional scrap where I used anything I had to hand. If I had possessed a weapon it would have been used. That's not resilience training, that's trauma and teaching kids they cannot trust authority. Because if you think the lesson was lost on anyone around me then you are a fool.

Like that kid who got kicked off the swim team because another student engraved the n word on him

In my town, a kid and his sister were bullied to the point of the kid shooting up the school. The principal that ignored it all is being hailed as a hero for being shot along with the bully of the sister.

Allegedly, the kid was also a piece of shit beforehand, so being bullied isn't really a defense of him.

The conversation about doing something about the rampant bullying at the school lasted a week, maybe, before turning back to meaningless platitudes. More memorials, more fundraising, more blue shit to show support, but nothing about stopping the root cause.

Same as it ever was

We don't discovered tarnish so bully

It's about school reputation? I thought it was about dominance hierarchy, the same reason boys' sports is a higher priority than any other education program world-wide.

We just like our beefy kids and wish we could toss the defects down a pit like the Spartans.

The teachers are requesting that, if someone harrasses you, you go WAY TOO FAR in defending yourself, and will dole out and withhold punishments to encourage it.

Anyone who wasn't basically ordering you to do that would behave differently.

I don't believe that's true.

Maybe it's true in American private schools where you need to chose which school to give money to, but where I live schools don't have reputation to care about. You just go to the one closest.

I've heard some stories about schools with zero tolerance. Bullying victims soon found out that you get equal punishment for defending themselves or for some serious violence. The logical response is to go full berserker mode.

It’s lawsuits, not reputation, the administration is worried about.

Teachers, however, actually care about human development, and attempt the impossible job of steering students in the right direction.

Anti-bullying policies at schools aren't meant to protect victims. But they aren't meant to protect perpetrators either.

They are instead meant to protect the school administration, notably from having to actually assign fault in bullying situations. They can simply say "zero tolerance," punish all parties equally, and wash their hands of it.

Back when I was in school, I was bullied so bad it resulted in multiple head injuries and even a broken arm.

My parents tried to complain to the school but got nowhere, so they went to the local newspaper. I was interviewed, so were other kids at my school. The story was pulled from the paper at the request of the school superintendent.

Years later after I graduated, I saw a documentary on Amazon about school bullying, and it featured the very same school!