Yes, but it could also very well lead to the exacerbation of the bullying. And that is my concern here.
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Then anything was. Doing nothing was going to exacerbate it. From my experience with it, doing nothing encouraged it. At least this kid knew his mom was in his corner.
When I eventually broke free of my bullies, it wasn’t because someone in authority stopped them. It was because I finally found my voice and confronted them. I made it perfectly clear that if they kept it up, I was going to go so fucking crazy on them, even if they won they would be badly hurt. That’s what finally worked. I think for some of them, it made them realize how much it was hurting me, and that it wasn’t innocent fun. For others, it was because they realized that even winning a fight for them would be losing. YMMV. But letting bullying continue doesn’t work. For many kids, telling authority doesn’t work. Many times, kids have to solve this themselves. People are blaming the mom for being an adult and getting involved against the bully who themselves was a kid. They don’t realize that the bully almost always has adults behind them, by default. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be doing what they do.
Let’s also be super clear about something: modern bullying is deadly. Kids being bullied kill themselves. It’s not innocent and it’s never minor. If the school isn’t taking it seriously, then the victims need to do something to stop it, and if that means their parents help, then that’s OK. It’s better than ok, it’s mental support for your kid. Even if it doesn’t work out, it’s better than doing nothing. It’s better than ineffectually reporting it.
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I apologize if I made it sound like I was advocating doing nothing. However, I also do not believe that appeals to authority never work. It worked for me with at least two of my bullies (one of whom even became a friend after a couple if sit downs with the guidance counselor), so I think that it depends a lot on the situation and the competency level of the school authorities. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend that in this case, but I also wouldn’t recommend trying something so passive aggressive, either.
Ultimately, it comes down to YMMV.
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This. So much this. I’ve tried to stay out of this thread, not only because your experiences mirror mine from middle school, but also because it is so fucking triggering of what Kiddo went through in first through third grade. Bullies absolutely get the benefit of the doubt from the adults in charge, especially if the victim is in some way “different”. (Spoiler alert: the victims always are, because not matter what, the default is that these kids are bringing it on themselves because they are too sensitive or too socially oblivious/too weird or too intellectual/too quiet or too loud/too fill-in-the-goddamn-blank.)
Bullies are not dumb brutes. They usually socially well-developed, have excellent leadership abilities among their peers, and are adept at maintaining relationships with supportive adults. Yes, a lot of them probably earned their social IQ in at a minimum dysfunctional or outright abusive situations, which is terrible, but that doesn’t take away from the damage they inflict on their victims. The child who relentlessly bullied Kiddo was savvy enough to keep most of it out of sight of the adults, knew how to deflect blame onto other kids with less social capital in his orbit, knew how to “other” Kiddo to both classmates and adults in charge, and, very importantly, knew that his primary parent was seen as role model and valuable asset in the school community. IN THIRD GRADE.
I’m not going to rehash my attempts to get the school to address the problem; I already did that in a thread related to homeschooling a while back. Suffice it to say, the school, supported by the school system administration, didn’t.
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You’ve forgotten how bullying works
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Of course not. But they often do fail. Since all we know about this was from the school and from the Bexar County Sheriff who arrested the mom, maybe we should consider that there’s more going on from the bullied kid’s and mom’s perspective. Because my guess is that the mom is being bullied (by police) as much as the kid was, and that it’s probably because of influence from the bully’s side of things, like parent or family.
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On that part we agree. Whether or not her approach was correct (by which I mean simply “effective in contributing to the end of the bullying,” not morally - sorry if I wasn’t clearer on that), whether or not it was technically legal according to the letter of the law, it is ridiculous that they actually arrested her for it.
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Bullies and their elder enablers definitely know how work the system to their advantage because so often they are the system.
So, this part of the original post caught my attention. Granted, this is attributed to a Facebook comment and we need to take it with a grain of salt, but…
"Apparently the bully has parents that work at the school, that explains so much more. School was protecting the bully….”
If this is accurate that one or both of the bully’s parents hold a position of authority within the very school where he is bullying other students, is there any hope that his victims will ever get any degree of satisfaction by trying to work through the system and obediently submit bullying complaints to the bully’s parents?
This bully will continue to harass anyone in that school with impunity because as we see, he can rely on his parents to defend him by turning the full power of the system against any victim who dares to so much as raise a finger against him in retaliation.
What kind of options are available in this case when a bully’s victims and their parents find themselves seeing the system so blatantly working in the corner of the bully?
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We live in a world where many people demand simple binary justice. When A and B are the two sides a case, for A to win, B must lose.
The articles i have read say he drank some and spat it out then experienced symptoms and that he required “additional medical monitoring” at the hospital. Just because they didn’t keep him in over night doesn’t mean he wasn’t hospitalised.
She poisoned a child. And before people say it wasn’t poison it meets the Texas Poison Center’s definition of poison.
They caused harm in this case so you wrong and it was a crime.
Shouldn’t charging her with injury to a child be preceded by actual injury to a child?
How about a little habeus corpus here.
The drink she mixed wasn’t toxic. It was not unlike the drinks the kid had already been stealing and consuming. She didn’t injure that kid.
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Story has some serious holes in it. One sip of something that fowl tasting, it would have been immediately spat out and that kid wouldn’t have drank enough to even get a mild stomach ache. Sounds like the bully’s parents love to tell tall tales
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Related to switchel is shrub. I plan to try a version of the one Max makes in the linked video this berry season!
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They basically rephrase the old saying “the dose makes the poison”?
A ‘poison’ is anything that can harm someone if it is used in the wrong way, by the wrong person, or in the wrong amount.
Which of these 3 categories does that fall into?
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Ok, I like both of you. So I’m chiming in.
IIRC, you (DukeT) work in the field of health; you’re talking about this in terms of science and biology. As an applied scientist, I also see it that way first.
Dani studies law, and has forgotten more about how law works than I know. She’s telling us what the law says, and I very much appreciate it (much as I dislike what the law sometimes actually says).
As a similar weird example to how far the law can disappoint us: a friend of mine got charged with assault because when she and her sister were both adults, they were arguing and she physically blocked the hallway when her sister tried to get past. Neither woman is physically intimidating, and no blows were exchanged. Her sister tried to push past, bulldozer fashion, and my friend refused to move. That met the definition of assault, and her sister pressed charges the following morning. My friend explained how ridiculous it was to her lawyer, and her lawyer agreed. Then he told her to settle if she could, because she was actually in a legally grey area and a court appearance wouldn’t necessarily end well for her. It astonishes me to this day.
Point is: The conversation of how much actual risk and harm happened, and the conversation about what the law says are not the same conversations. And I wonder how much of the tension stems from this.
I agree with you there. I think it’s quite ridiculous.
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I really disagree on that. Maybe the kid overreacted with feeling they needed to go to the hospital, but how is this kind of thing acceptable? No, it was not poison, but it doesn’t matter. If the KID had done this on his own, I’d agree it’s a case of comeuppance, but the parent HAD other options for making the school deal with the bullying situation, something that would have been beneficially for the whole school, not just her son. All she’s done is open herself up for real consequences and the bully will probably feel vindicated and he’ll keep on bullying her kid and probably OTHER kids.
Besides that, what if something she gave him induced an allergic reaction and had killed him? What if she had put something with nuts in the concoction and the kid had a nut allergy? In these days we’re more aware of such things, and know that we need to take care in what we feed to other people’s children, yeah?
A better solution here would have been raising hell with the school about them letting a bully run rampant, not act like a child herself. 
This is only going to make the problem worse in the long run.
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Yeah, the legal definition of assault is really quite broad.
In general: “Additionally, assault is a criminal act in which a person intentionally causes fear of physical harm or offensive contact to another person.”
In the US: “However, the crime of assault can encompass acts in which no battery is intended, but the defendant’s act nonetheless creates reasonable fear in others that a battery will occur.”
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It was used in the wrong way. Salt and vinegar are used too season food not to make drinks undrinkable.
It was obviously used in the wrong amount too. She hardly put a tiny bit of salt and vinegar in the horrible cokctail she made as punishment.
The wrong person probably too as it was presented as a bottle of Gatorade.
