Bullies in children's and MG books

In my book, the female MC chooses a time when the hallway is filled with people and then refuses to back down to the football-playing bully. The idea, as she explains to the male MC later, is that the bully LOVES his football, and if he's caught in a physical altercation with a female student, he'd be off the team in a big way. Thereafter, the female MC is the one to deal with the bully and they make sure to stay in crowds.

This works in the near term, and through most the book. It makes the bully really angry, though, and towards the end of the book, the bully and some of his buddies catch the female MC alone after school.

Luckily, my book is a comedy, and things don't go the way the bullies - or anyone else - expects. Yay, fiction.

My point is that it's good to model workable solutions in a MG or YA novel, but I've yet to come across a 100% effective solution to childhood bullying, and it's not necessary or realistic to act as if there is. Bullies are individuals and have vastly different motivations, MO's, and reasonings; the right answer for your MC may be very different from the right answer for any given reader.

But what are you writing? A treatise on bullies or a romping good story? Not all MG/YA novels have to be moral teachings.

Yo Monkey, let me throw a monkey-wrench into your plot here. It may need some new writing. Writing for children is like making a ship in a bottle. You need to squeeze everything in. Many movies include two plots. One is the Maguffin plot, the secret plans, the high school championship game...and the other is the emotional plot where the character grows. The emotional plot comes to a lowest low at the climax. This is the MC at their very worst. They become the thing they hate, the do the thing they despise the most. Your nerd character is going to find himself in the awkward position of becoming the bully. Go rent the Karate kid. Because Nerd has experienced bullying form the other side he acquires the ability to say no, he offers mercy, he confronts his feelings of low esteem and discovers he's a greater person than a bully. A person that recoils from bad behavior achieves victory over anyone that embraces it. Good luck.

The "correct" way to deal with a bully varries. There's the afterschool special version, and then there's what really happens in the schoolyard. What's important is how YOUR CHARACTER would handle it. If he's the kind of kid who would hide the bushes with a sheet and a bag of rotten oranges, then that's how he'd do it.

Don't write the story to teach a lesson. Kids get enough of that as it is. Write the story to entertain, and if they get a little advice out of it, so much the better. But let that advice be more generic and something they can adapt to their own world view. Like, "you don't have to suffer a bully just because you're smaller. It's okay to stand up for yourself." How that reader chooses to do that is up to them.

I think your idea to talk with an expert down the road is a good one. In the meantime, I wanted to add that I've never heard of the advice to befriend the bully. How does a kid do this? That seems a lot to ask. Also is that advice appropriate for your character's age group? It sounds like it might be for a younger age?
I also like the idea of having your character react in a way that's unique to him/her. A kid can learn a lesson from that, rather than trying to follow a set method.

I'll answer as a teacher. These things go in cycles, like every fashion. The feel-goodness of the 70s translated into lots and lots of "character" programs that tried to teach everyone to get along and solve their problems through cooperation. For about 30 years, that was the message schools and counselors promoted: Bullies are kids with issues, and our job is to get into the head of the bully, try to find the common ground. Think of Nelson on the Simpsons. How much screen time is devoted to the reasons why he is a bully? And since teachers, librarians and parents buy the books, literature followed the school system. So at some point, the victim and the bully learned to understand each other's point of view and became allies instead of enemies.

And in real life, that works sometimes. Conflict resolution is a very powerful skill--between two people of equal strength.

Then along came Columbine, followed by Virginia Tech. Students who had been bullied or felt like outcasts who chose very violent ways of reacting. And the "experts" changed their thinking.

People now realize that true bullying is a situation that the victims can't solve on their own. The bully has too much power. Think domestic abuse, which is where bullying ends up. A battered wife has really only one option: get out. The same is true for a kid who is genuinely the victim of a bully. The only solution is to get help.

Adults who work with kids now get trained in how to recognize and intervene in bullying situations. We are being told that it is OUR responsibility to make it stop. Telling the victim to "work it out" is setting ourselves up for more violence, whether it be school shootings or the incredibly high teen suicide rate. Bullies need to get the message loud and clear that their behavior will not be tolerated, and the bystanders are dealt with almost as firmly if they just stand by and watch the bullying happen.

So, what does this mean to a writer? Times are changing, and your book can reflect that. You're right, those older stories make it much too easy. Bullies don't stop unless someone makes them. So give your characters a support system. Have them actively recruit friends and adult allies who will help them. That can be done dramatically or humorously, whatever your story needs.

Your characters may need to work very, very hard to get adults to take the problem seriously--that's how bullying continues. Adults say, "oh, kids will be kids," or, "have you talked to him?" when a much stronger solution is required. But I think you are right on the money to feel like an honest story wouldn't imply that a bully will stop if you're nice to him.

The "make friends with the bully" tends to assume bullies are the friendless losers they were in television from the fifties, but research shows bullies are often the popular kids, the ones ALREADY in a position of power, the ones with friends and they aren't a bit interested in friendship with the victim.

I do believe there is a school of thought that the real key to dealing with bullies is less in the actions of the victim as in the actions of the "audience." Bullying is often a kind of "performance" and if the other kids, the "audience" don't support the bullying behavior, it stops. That why you might have one nerdy kid who gets picked on and another who never gets picked on ...one isn't likely to be defended by the "audience" and the other is.

So, maybe the best answer is to get the average kids to like you so the bully's audience doesn't repond in the way he wants. Though certainly it would be nice if we could teach our popular powerful kids that bullying isn't cool, or funny, or acceptable.

I also vote that the whole "befriending the bully" thing is utter crap. I was fortunate never to be bullied or popular, I was your average kid, but I witnessed enough bullying to know that bullies aren't your friends. Period. Now, some bullies may be pitied because their home life sucks and they take out their feelings on unsuspecting nerds, but that's really no excuse.
Can your nerdy science-math kid come up with a smart science project or experiementy-thing that gets back at the bully? I know, that's really vague, but science is NOT my thing. Just saying, maybe he could use his strong points--the reason he's been bullied--to turn it around and get the bully to leave him alone.

I don't know if it's a better solution, it's certainly not a 'character changes things by his own efforts' one, but here it is: When I was in elementary school, a fat, bookish child, I was bullied off and on. There was one kid who was especially obnoxious, he was in the Third Grade, I was in Second. Well, he failed Third and we both ended up in Third together. No more Mr. Smartmouth from him. Would this work for you if the bullying is only a subplot? Your nerd is intelligent, and he sees it start to make a difference. Esp. if all the bully's friends dump him because they can't be seen hanging with a kid in a lower grade. If this is a series, maybe in the next book your nerd will have to fight the urge to bully the bully.
Just, don't make them become pals. That's right up there with 'understand the bully, learn about the bully, be kind to the bully' and all that claptrap that they push on kids. I think it's a form of 'blame-the-victim', the teachers know they can't change the bully, so they dump it on the victim.

Well, in the YA novel I am writing right now about some super-powered teens. They pretty much beat the crap out of the bully and turn him into a monster worse than when he started at the beginning of the book. And it is all of their fault for what he does throughout the rest of the novel.

I don't know if that will work for you in an MG novel, but you might want to try it. I don't go for the whole befriending the bully theme, however, I would venture to say that having a non-happy ending for the bully and MC might not be what many publishers consider ver PC at the moment. I have been noticing that more and more MG novels coming out these days are going for the touchy-feely happy endings rather than the "destroy the bad guy" endings. The bad guy in this case being your bully.

Hope that at least helps a little.


James Mascia
www.islandofdren.com

In my book the boy being bullied- faces up to the bully at the end of the story. Throughout the story- which is a fantasy, the hero learns how to deal with tough situations and this builds his character enough to take on the bully in front of his whole class.
I have had children write to me and tell me the story helped them face up to their situations.
All the best with your story.
In the Barnes and noble review of my book you will see a great review.
jack