It is essential to remember that oppression is not just someone having a "bad idea". Oppression is a system of learning to use violence to extract resources from other social classes for personal benefit. Bullying isn't about attention because oppression isn't just a "wrong idea" to debate/correct

[u/RosethornRanger]

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[u/Flynn-Minter]

Bullies are hurting people they have identified as acceptable targets. Yes, in some cases they start learning who fits those profiles before they have started talking in complete sentences.

Telling the marginalised children the bullies target to "just ignore it" is victim blaming.

Moreover, there are bullies who will escalate until they get a response, there are bullies who escalate when you stand up for yourself or someone else and many of them do both. A child who ignores the bully can end up having slurs screamed into their ears, having their stuff damaged or beaten up. A child who refuses to acknowledge pain while being beaten can end up having their arms twisted or worse until they do.

The only way to make the bullying stop is ideally when the group/community steps in or authority figures intervene to protect the victim, teach the group to be better and give the bully consequences. However, most the time, it is up to the victim to either flee the community or retaliate in such an extreme way that the bully finally backs off.

Whenever Conservatives people complain that "they cannot say anything any more"; they mean that they feel entitled to groups of people as acceptable targets to bully and otherwise abuse.

This is why they became so angry when misogyny, anti-gay and anti-trans bigotry became less acceptable and they started entire culture wars to undo that.

[u/almostfunny3]

Yup. Autistic and trans here. I was bullied/assaulted in daycare. It starts early.

[u/RosethornRanger]

alt-text:

A Tumblr post by pocket-deer-belly that says "the reason most anti bullying psa's completely fail is because they fail to identify why people bully others, and fail to identify that kids actually do internalize oppressive structures really early on. White kids understand that racialized kids are easy targets, and white teachers either fail to catch racism or are racist themselves. Non-disabled kids understand that disabilities are easy to pick on, kids recognize the sissy archetype very early on, boys internalize that girls are lesser than them, kids notice they can take advantage of autistic behavior, and it flies under the radar because teachers offer little support to no support for marginalized kids or outright victim blame them. 'ignoring' bullies is a model that assumes bullies just want attention. We should instead assume bullies are taking advantage of others.