I wonder if any of the anglo tendency to bully perceived by ollaimh is linked to school culture - or similar in German history. I spent some time in a private school where there was bullying, and a staff enforced culture that what happened at school stayed at school, and telling one's parents was sneaking and beneath contempt.

I was at the bottom. I was no good at games or ballet. I was a Day Girl, whose father was not in the local Chamber of Commerce. Day girls were lower than boarders. There were other subtleties subdividing the boarders. I was not aware of most of these distinctions, or any need to take account of them. I thought people were equal.

When I moved to the local Technical School, due to extracurricular activities by the school headmaster, I dreaded bullying because of having been somewhere posh and having a posh voice. Not a shred of it - people were equal, unless they behaved stupidly, judged on themselves not on some perceived status.

English society is riddled with this sort of rubbish. In private and public schools. In grammar schools which emulate them. In the class divisions which make it possible for the "upper" lot not to see those "below" them. Unless those inferiors do not recognise their place - when the bullying starts.

Not that it doesn't happen in other environments as well.

Years ago, I read a piece in the Guardian of all places, which I was gobsmackedly unable to respond to. The writer claimed that bullying at school was necessary so that people would learn their place in society for adult life, and people should learn to put up with it. I had a shrewd idea where the writer felt her place was. Not only I, but no-one picked up on this concept of human society requiring a pecking order to function. (My typing omitted the n in that word, and I almost left it.)

I wonder how much "putting people in their place", dealing with "uppity" folk of perceived lowly status, and demanding "respect" has to do with the problem, and whether this might be why authorities are slow to respond...afraid their own status may be threatened.

Penny