Often words are not enough to stop being bullied

Martial arts instructors recently condemned a Winnipeg mother's decision to enrol her bullied son in kick-boxing classes and give him permission to retaliate against his tormentors.The mother, who asked not to be named, gave her son the green light to "kick the snot out of " his alleged tormentor when school starts again. The mother said a bully had been tormenting her son for years. Both boys are in their early teens, and have attended the same school in Louis Riel School Division.

"It's about time he took a stand and stood up for himself," she said in a recent interview with the Free Press. "He has my full permission to kick the snot out of the other boy if he comes up to him."

According to Diego Beltran, who runs Guardian Dojo-Kyokushin Karate Canada Inc. in Winnipeg, "Violence only invokes more violence. I'm in total disagreement with the lady. Kicking and punching your way out is not necessarily the way to go.
Foundations on respect of discipline and courtesy will teach you that."

Those are fancy words which are meaningless if the bully is bent on bullying you, irrespective of what you or others have to say to him.

I have found that for the most part, the best way to ignore a bully’s words is to turn your back to him and walk away without giving him the sense that you even recognize him. After a while, many bullies will realize that they are talking to themselves and stop teasing you.

Then there are the bullies that trip you when you are walking, slap you on the back of the head when they sneak up behind you and in extreme cases, beat you up for no reason at all. In my opinion and from my own observations, no amount of talking will do the trick to stop this kind of bully. The bully has to be taught a lesson, if not by you then by someone bigger and stronger than he is.

When I joined the Canadian Navy in 1951, I was 17 years of age looking as if I was 14 and I only weighed 120 pounds and I was five-foot seven. I looked like a runt. A bigger young man my age in our division’s barracks building thought so also and began teasing me by calling me Junior. Within a week, all the men in my barracks were calling me Junior. When the bully would address me, I ignored him. Finally he began physically grabbing me and shoving me to the ground. After about three months of his bullying me, I had enough.

One day when we were on the second floor of our barracks building, I called him a snot-nosed jerk. When he jumped out of his bed to grab me, I began running towards the top landing of the stairs leading to the ground level of the building. When I reached the door, I flung it open and then turned immediately left as if I was heading down the stairs. But I wasn’t heading down the stairs. As he passed through the doorway, I swung my left hand in a wide arc towards his belly and he doubled up almost in half when I hit him in his solar plexus. As he staggered towards the first step, I stood behind him and gave him a football kick from behind him. The instep of my right foot caught him in the area of what is referred to in polite circles as the ‘family jewels’. He hollered in pain and then tumbled down the stairs. When I got to the bottom, he was face down on the floor, groaning in pain. I sat on his back and slammed his face on the floor until the other men restrained me. It was then that I yelled, “The next bastard that lays an unwelcomed hand on me or calls me Junior, will wake up one morning minus a certain appendage attached to his body.” The men let go of me and I walked back up the stairs and to my bed with a big smile on my face.

From that day forward, no one in the navy ever laid an unwelcomed hand on me or called me Junior. Mind you, once in a while, with tongue in cheek, they would call me “Crazy Batch” but that didn’t bother me. I had earned their respect and that was what counted. I was never bullied again.

I realized that if you stand up to a bully, unless he is really much bigger than you are, he will generally back off. If that doesn't work and you are about to get the beating of your life, then run like Hell. Maybe he won't catch you.

UPDATE: Dakota Hunter had turned 17 only two days before his bloody, beaten body was found by the side of a road on a northern Manitoba reserve on the 29th of August 2009. Previously he had been continuously bullied so he enrolled in martial arts so he could defend himself. According to his aunt, he chose not to use his skills in martial arts to defend himself when he was being beaten to death because he didn’t want to hurt anybody. Perhaps if he had used those skills, he would be alive today.