Fighting back worked a hell of a lot better than anything the "responsible" adults could ever suggest. School teachers, councilors, my mother, etc, all gave useless advice. My dad told me to fight back. When I finally listened to him, that's when the bullying stopped. I lost that fight, but won the war so to speak.

Telling kids not to fight back is a terrible cowardly thing to do, the adults who do that are either oblivious idealists or are just cynically covering their own ass because they don't want to get in trouble for encouraging a confrontation.

Bullying is unrelated to corporal punishment - Self-defence is ok.

Please do not conflate those two things.

If a bully has never felt what they dish out, they may not like it.

Self-defence is ok.

For the young people in my life, I always advise to not escalate, be clear it's not ok, seek an adult's help, and if all reasonable attempts have failed, it's a-ok to stand up for yourself and neutralize a threat when the people and systems around you aren't.

I don't condone violence. But I also see we live in a world where the world fights to force it's way on others.

I take massive grains of salt on such opinions someone is from a group more likely to be a bully or not.

I do believe there's a difference where the punishment comes from.

Aggressors[0] generally attack others one of or a combination of these reasons:

1) Pleasure/amusement/entertainment. Some people simply enjoy seeing others (everyone, specific subgroups or specific individuals) suffer.

2) Personal benefit/gain. Very often this is simply social status among peers. As aggressors grow, they refine these strategies (both consciously and unconsciously) to also gain social status in the eyes of people in positions of power (e.g. superiors/supervisors/managers), often with a resulting material benefit. Sometimes the material benefit is more direct - e.g. scammers.

A) If the punishment comes from people in positions of power:

With reason 1) it offsets the pleasure they get but quick corporal punishment is probably less effective than longer punishments such as exclusion from activities or having to perform laborious tasks.

However, with reason 2) any punishment, corporal or not, creates or reinforces a persecution complex (after all, they are just doing what they think everyone should be doing - climbing the social ladder) and often even helps them gain status because they are doing what their peers secretly also want to do - break the rules and stick it to the people in positions of power.

B) If the punishment comes from peers or especially the target, it defeats both reasons. Very few aggressors get pleasure from betting beat up by their target or other peers. And with reason 2 especially, they now risk losing social status if the target wins or it's a signal that this the behavior is not accepted by the group if it comes from peers.

The issue with B often is that to onlookers who don't know how it started, it looks like 2 people fighting, instead of one being the aggressor and the other being the target mounting a successful defense. But that can be solved through better education of people in positions of power.

What I find especially concerning are all these zero tolerance policies which actively encourage people to not defend others and sometimes even themselves.

[0]: I generally don't call them bullies because that conjures an image of children in a schoolyard but these people grow up to become adults and their behavior is driven by the same urges and incentives, it just manifests slightly differently. Being an aggressor is a mentality and a personality trait.

from figures in authority, yes. but in practise, bullies respond very well to a bigger bully. it's the entire basis of government - the monopoly on violence.

> This idea is naively appealing, but is not backed up by research

Anecdotally, it worked for me :shrug:

So what is your suggested solution? Myself and several other commenters know an effective solution that you’ve poop-pooed, so offer something better.