You sometimes wonder where does it all come from? The first 50 days of our elected government have been whisper quiet. Not a murmur of discontent. Goodness and sweetness is being spread all around.
Morrison is keeping ‘micro intelligence’ to himself and Abbott remains hidden in a veil of tantalising obscurity that Salome would be envious of. However, they now have a serious problem of keeping it all below the table. Indonesia is threatening to put a spoke in Abbott’s well oiled chain of command. How dare those nasi-goreng eaters get agitated when we want boat people to be returned to their small country of over 260.000.000 people..
Another item is the haze surrounding the navy and army. Sexual encounters on Face -book, sex-texting, white board markers in anuses, water bottles get lost in same. What is happening here? It is normal, it is normal, were some of the responses on the ABC Drum on the Hazing issue.
Well, let me assure you and agree. It is normal in our culture. The sexual abuse of young people is an ingrained part of initiation ceremonies at schools, jobs, navy, army, just about everywhere.
I was astonished to learn of those many years ago. They are not wildly exaggerated sweeping claims as was being claimed by a respondent. Bullying is ‘de riguer’ all around us still. The ‘hazing’ got nothing to do with welcoming a new young person in the workforce and everything to do with bullying.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-11-08/laplonge-punishing-the-men-wont-stop-hazing/5079272
No doubt I will get accused of drawing a long bow but I would like to do so in any case. What are the chances of some of our politicians behaviour being a result of how they were given the Blue Cobalt around their genitals, or as someone else remarked the common practise of shellacking testicles as part of those ceremonies that were widespread. They were certainly very common in the late fifties and sixties. I experienced those rituals on all the jobs that I worked at. Did it just disappear overnight?
The army and navy almost routinely come up with sexual bullying every few years and yet it continues. Now, relate Mr Abbott with his callous disregard for others. Even the most minimum of civility to those that attempt to question him. His total contempt for our environment and threat of ecological disaster. Mr Morrison, the same hatred for truth and empathy to others. His sneering contempt for any question about refugees. His relish when he tell reporters ‘illegals’ will be sent off to Manus as quickly as possible. Not a hint or tiny sliver of empathy.
Did they also get the initiation treatment, the cobalt blue or shellacking? I gave him a ‘good shellacking’ might well have been his tormenter sneering aside some decades ago.
What do you think?
Window Dresser's Arms, Pig & Whistle 
I’m interested in using the image in this story for personal film. How do I find the information about this image of boys bullying? Who can I contact? Any and all information would be greatly appreciated.
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This piece was written by Gerard Oosterman. If you Google Oostermantreats, I think you’ll find him.
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I know practices like applying boot polish or toothpaste or both to some unfortunate lad’s scrotum was often done under the guise of ‘initiation’ back in the late 60s and 70s when I was growing up. The sad thing is that bullying in one form or another is still happening in our society today.
It’s important to keep raising the issue, pushing for a better society. Thanks for your contribution, Gerard.
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The Defence Force says a number of sailors have been taken off HMAS Ballarat with investigators now aboard the ship after allegations crew members have been sexually assaulted.
The investigators include an Australian Defence Force Investigative Service (ADFIS) team and an officer from the Sexual and Misconduct and Response Office.
Defence will not say why or how many sailors have left the ship, or reveal their identity.
But it said on Sunday that they were now on mainland Australia after disembarking on Christmas Island.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-11-10/sailors-removed-from-hmas-ballarat-as-sexual-assault-probe-cont/5081902
Does anyone see the irony of investigators climbing aboard the HMAS Ballarat chasing missing felt pens and water bottles, while the entire boat under ADF is complicit in the sending of boat people off to Manus or Christmas Island? As images are shown, the frisking of the hapless cowering victims, the intimidation tactics of our Government is at the core of what this article is about. The sailors inserting felt pens or water bottles in anuses is but a logical result of what they are supposed to do to other people by order from the Commander and Monsieur Morrison and Co.
It is a brutal world out there.
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Yes, the Laurie Driver, sky hook jokes, small weights etc are looked upon with more tolerance, even though they are usually being practised upon to those most vulnerable. They pick them carefully.
Just have a look at Chris Lilleys latest comedy in Ja’ Mie. It doesn’t really work as a comedy the same as it did in previous episodes of Summer Height High, Angry Boys and others. While the exaggerations were funny before, now, in Ja’Mie no matter how over the top she bullies everyone around her including her own mother it doesn’t work as well, because…it… is very much the accepted norm. Single sex private schools work very much like that. The opportunity for the inherited English Public school methods of appointing Prefects and Duxes is at the very core at those Ja’Mie attempts at humour. So, what we get is luke warm comedy because it is more a documentary of life at those type of schools than a way over the top exaggeration that usually make up good comedy.
Now, of course the real idea of this piece is trying to link the antics of brutal politicians to the possibility that they continue giving back what they received when they were vulnerable. How better than to give brutality to those least able to defend themselves, the boat people. Just look at the involvement of ADF commander and war ships to solve a very tragic problem of coping with the boat people. They are termed ‘illegals’. Mr Morrison’s gloating reply to the question; ‘they’ will be transferred as soon as possible.
It is all there!
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I don’t disagree with you there gerard, The Laurie driver prank was just that a prank, I was 20 or 21 at the time. However, someone was humiliated as a consequence, mind you they weren’t bad a the humiliating others themselves and noticeably so regularly and without a worry. It bought a groan or a laugh from some. Some 10 minutes later they commented about whoever made the call for Laurie Driver it wasn’t very funny. The place was in uproar. A board meeting had to stop for a short while whilst they composed themselves.
The brutal politics of the past is coming back to bight Abbott and Morrison. The commander is doing as he is told and the others are looking stupid. Don’t expect the Indonesians to back down and nor should they.
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I guess the laurie driver is the equivalent of nursing’s ‘fallopian tubes’?
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My first near miss with hazing was … Cop this … At an Inter-schools Christian Fellowship camp in early high school. Some Christian thugs from a bush high school applied toothpaste to Ian Roberts’ nads, disproving the claim that Pepsodent gives you the ring of confidence.
Not really a laughing matter. I recall a sociopath I once spotted when I was a kid working in the Sebel chair factory near Bankstown in my school holidays. He was violent and picked on little guys. I avoided eye contact and always scouted for safe and obscure places in the huge factory to take lunch and morning tea breaks. I never went to the toilet there alone and I mastered the cloak of invisibility well before Harry Potter. Making metal chairs in the school holidays paid pretty well but it was a shit job made worse by that count (remove the vowel of your own choosing) and I was glad when it was over.
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Your article strikes a chord for me, Gez. I think straight away that we know this down pat and almost as a mantra now that bullying or abuse begets bullying and abuse. Different when we are asked to consider specific examples and comment if we think this is so.
Rounded up are we. My own experience of politics is that bullying is part of day to day logic. Community is not something anybody learns overnight in an individualistic society.
Bullying is so much part of the mindset of individualistic grab-when-you-can logic it looks normal to those engaged in it. Your thesis fits with statistical claims about bullying and abuse and its prevalence. These individuals’ outward show might have behind it specific acts of bullying that certainly affected their ability to feel empathy. Acts of bullying and out and out abuse were exacted on large numbers of uni students that I know of, but not everybody stood up against them or spoke out about them. Many pretended that was OK because they were fearful of hierarchy and supposed the behaviour to be normal. Tom Brown’s Schooldays. Rudyard Kipling wrote about bullying at school.
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Yes, Shoe. I do not for a moment assume it is not going on elsewhere, but… for sheer excellence in the art of sledging, abusing, belittling, denigrating, lowering esteem, punishing, getting ‘even’ and so many other forms of exacting revenge against other human beings, I have yet to come across the sheer skill and enthusiasm of the English culture and their spread out progenies across the world. I am with Kipling, as with S. Maugham, TS Elliot, H.G.Wells, T.Hardy, P White, Leonard Woolf, Fry, Tim Winton and countless others who have written about the same things that are still being experienced by thousands of hapless victims today. My mum fought tooth and nail against the ‘Brothers ‘ of De La Salle College in Kingsgrove not to inflict her sons with the brutality that was very common at the time. She thought she had escaped from all that.
Thank you Shoe.
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I condemn your repeated anti-English generalisations, not in any hope that you will stop, or even out of any interest in whether you stop or not, but simply because they deserve condemnation.
A timely reminder today on The Drum.
“In my view, it is important that we not be sheepish about condemning bad behaviour when we see it. Something needn’t be violent or maliciously directed in order to count as racism. Racism, as we know, begins with words. And it needn’t be about a doctrinal belief in racial superiority. More often than not, it is about the prejudice born of ethnic stereotypes.”
Tim Soutphommasane, the federal Race Discrimination Commissioner, at a speech delivered for the 75th anniversary commemoration of Kristallnacht
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English Traditions at Public schools.
http://www.faqs.org/childhood/Pa-Re/Public-Schools-Britain.html
Children’s life at public school was shaped by the schools’ preoccupation with the formation of their “character.” Although Arnold had emphasized the achievement of manliness through waging an unending war against sin, from the later Victorian period this evangelical conception had given way to an emphasis on the secular virtues of determination, self-control, and a sense of duty. For the pupils this translated into a cult of athleticism and the celebration of games as the mainspring of those qualities of fair play, unselfishness, and esprit de corps deemed the foundation of gentlemanly conduct. In the classroom, study was similarly geared toward the cultivation of moral and behavioral attributes fitting for the social elite rather than scholarship for its own sake. Much of the pressure exerted on the late Victorian public school to expand its curriculum beyond the dominant core of the classics was based on a subjects’ perceived capacity to aid the process of character formation. Stern discipline, reinforced by the generous use of corporal punishment, the devolving of disciplinary power onto prefects, and the practice of fagging, whereby younger pupils were required to perform services for older boys, were justified in these terms: that they taught boys those habits of obedience, self-command, and authority necessary for a future role in public life and the administration of empire.
For some, these conventions resulted in unhappy experiences in which floggings and bullying exacerbated the already harsh conditions of the schools. Although to criticize one’s school was considered dishonorable and “bad form,” accounts of the hardships engendered by the public school regime are not hard to find. In the early 1800s, in an Eton governed by the formidable Dr. Keate, famed for flogging eighty pupils in one session, the poet Shelley was a victim of ferocious bullying, partly occasioned by his refusal to submit to the fagging system. Twenty years later, the English novelist Anthony Trollope might reasonably have expected to escape the severity of prefect discipline at Winchester after his elder brother Tom was elected his “tutor.” Instead, as his autobiography recalls, he was daily thrashed with a stick
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One minute on google:
http://www.thelocal.se/20110919/36232
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-18008298
http://usarmygermany.blogspot.com.au/2010/02/guttenberg-promises-inquiry-amid-more.html
And remember I’m googling in English.
I’ve never been hazed in a workplace. I’ve been bullied but not ritually bullied.
My impression is that it is more common in the trades. It shouldn’t happen by the way. I disapprove. It is regrettable that it happened to you. Maybe left-handed screw-drivers, skyhooks and black and white paint type jokes are okay but sexualised violence is not on.
So what’s your argument? That the worldwide ill treatment of refugees is due to the worldwide problem of bullying. As an explanatory theory I find it a little lacking.
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So, if it is happening elsewhere as well, does that make it any less relevant to our situation? As you are at pains to often point out in being a ‘male’ I find your reaction a bit puzzling. Are you discounting what I have experienced, or are you just finding it too hard to accept?
Your reference to sky hooks and paint jokes must have been gleaned from my ‘Frank story’ biography on my own blog. You are obviously itching for another episode of a bullying fracas but I am chuffed you read my book.
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I concur, sea. Many trades aren’t heaps of fun and personal nourishment, and good natured pranks break up the hum drum days. My favourite was being sent to the stores for the long weight. Not the short wait, the LONG weight. Harmless tomfoolery. But sadly pranking is not always so.
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I don’t quite agree there, bullying is just as prevalent amongst Professionals its just more subtle I’ve witnessed plenty of it. My former boss was one. Another colleague and I would act as shields to protect and deflect the staff under us. After all going our own ways about 11 years ago after being retrenched after a company buy out. I started my on consultancy. I became amazed at how wide spread this persons reputation was within the industry and what lengths he’d gone to and the damage he’d caused.
Recently I witnessed a manager rather aggressively lay into a women a work for not doing something, blow the fact it was absolute last minute and was told it could not be done. He then took her into one of the conference rooms and tear strips off her. The then spun a story to her manager, mostly untrue to protect his own inadequacies there. This person was an Afgan vet. It ended up being resolved but not as he had expected.
Agree about the tomfoolery though, been guilty of it myself by asking a receptionist to page Laurie Driver.
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I think this bullying happens on all levels of the society. Even our PM was practically bullied out of office. The shock jocks, the brute opposition did it all the time. It did not matter what she did, how much legistlation was passed, how good the initiatives, it was no good. It did not help that she was a woman….
It was said that she should have toughened up. Why? Why should anyone become as rough as the most brutal of our politicians. I think we ought to aspire to be a more gentle and caring society, not the other way down.We are not heading there with Abbott, army generals and Morrison.
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I’ve been bullied only once, in one workplace by another woman. It was obvious to me that she was jealous of my abilities. I ignored all her ‘advice’ and carried on as usual doing my job to the best of my abilities. It annoyed the shit out her. Her immediate boss got the sack and she went with him once she lost her protector. No-one gave her a farewell. There was a big farewell (two actually) for me and a lovely present.
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A good ending in your case. Your tactic obviously worked for you and is the best way to react to overt bullying.
The best though, according to experts, is I when other people are around condemning the bullying tactics and bully as well.
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At the time I didn’t view it as a ‘tactic’ – I just had no respect for her or her attitude to getting the job done. In retrospect if that happened now I’d be more likely to tell her to eff off !!
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Soft soaping bullies using words in the hope of striking an accord or negotiation between what they do and any victim is underestimating the degree they focus on manipulating any and every situation to advantage intentional to bringing down a victim or victims. Bullies will attempt to throw a spanner into the works at every peaceful gathering they can get to so as to attempt to expose someone as the villain they (alone initially) decide someone is. Wild horses will not stop that behaviour as long as they are allowed to romp away with the corps d’esprit.
Sometimes it works that a victim employs their wit and a degree of cunning to catch …if you like the bully at their own corner so as to come face to face with them. If it works, effective for jolting a predator into their right frame of mind. I did it once many years ago and I will never do it again. I recognise how dangerous it is. By the same token, unfortunately we do not always find the inner resolve and sense of rage Vivienne experienced so instantly to deal with the situation she encountered. I have on an occasion. One situation I simply backed against a wall and slid down to sit on my haunches leaning back against a wall so as to sit out someone’s emotionally abusing me with a delivery of how stupid and neglectful of myself to help so-and-so. Some many months later I received a heart felt letter of apology. That was from a woman.
Another occasion when I was in a situation of employment as security various attempts were made to wear out my cool and management ability including diverse trickery that was malevolent. That took patience along with being clear on regulations to eventually deflect so it did not end in anyone being hauled off by constabulary. I was unmercilessly bullied by one woman who ended up bursting into tears and apologising.
There is sometimes a bully who will apologise, a trickster who will stop trying to get an excellent team player the sack and so on. Living on the streets when someone is homeless, it is a rare thing if someone there is never bullied. Learning those tricks is to learn survival at its rawest to all intents and purposes. However come back on into the fold, so to speak and then witness bullying in professional work places, in political corridors, in professionals’ rooms where sometimes the poor are sadly bullied because they have prejudice facing them. Trades example I can cite is an all women’s trade school and the entire student body ended up exposing the situation for its corruption and the degree of bullying that had been experienced there. I was Chair/spokesperson for the student body and did not anticipate that would lead where it did that the whole Board resigned in the face of the unity. I do not like it when anything gets so bad that a victim is left to suffer while bullies are supported and my experience is long enough now in the tooth to suggest trades is not the place where bullying mostly happens. In any one person’s shoes potentially is where the most bullying happens is really the only ‘most’ statement that can be fashioned out of the subject.
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The person capable of apologizing is still within the realm of hope and might well have been bullied themselves earlier on. The really dangerous bully is the one who thrives on unhinging others for the sheer pleasure of it. They are usually sociopaths that have no insight and never will.
Here are their main traits.
•Glibness and Superficial Charm
•Manipulative and Conning.
They never recognize the rights of others and see their self-serving behaviors as permissible. They appear to be charming, yet are covertly hostile and domineering, seeing their victim as merely an instrument to be used. They may dominate and humiliate their victims.
•Grandiose Sense of Self
Feels entitled to certain things as “their right.”
•Pathological Lying
Has no problem lying coolly and easily and it is almost impossible for them to be truthful on a consistent basis. Can create, and get caught up in, a complex belief about their own powers and abilities. Extremely convincing and even able to pass lie detector tests.
•Lack of Remorse, Shame or Guilt
A deep seated rage, which is split off and repressed, is at their core. Does not see others around them as people, but only as targets and opportunities. Instead of friends, they have victims and accomplices who end up as victims. The end always justifies the means and they let nothing stand in their way.
•Shallow Emotions
When they show what seems to be warmth, joy, love and compassion it is more feigned than experienced and serves an ulterior motive. Outraged by insignificant matters, yet remaining unmoved and cold by what would upset a normal person. Since they are not genuine, neither are their promises.
•Incapacity for Love
•Need for Stimulation
The list goes on. Have a look at this;
http://www.mcafee.cc/Bin/sb.html
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Children were frequently sent home who are the victims to remove “the problem”. They sometimes still are. Adults are told to “stay away” from the bully so as to “solve the problem”. There won’t be any more bullying here, Gez, I’m tipping or it will be so blatant you do not need to fret. Manipulating meaning to attempt advantage is obsession and calling or implying someone is weak is as old a trick in the book that there is. I imagine the Roman centurions did it among themselves just as it was likely done to them. Even Blind Wullie ought to be able to get it after all these centuries. Sure, reflecting on the link, there is actual danger and I am, sadly, aware of that. That we have to live with. Off to bed for me, Gez lickity split. I hope you are enjoying sweet dreams.
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Thank you Shoe, I doubt that the return of putting words in people’s mouths or the occurrence of snide personal remarks will raise their ugly heads again. It takes the will of a few in supporting a better way of communicating without insults or abuse.
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Bullying still goes on in the workplace. Some are very subtle, and it’s carried out by stealth, the obvious whispering behind someone’s back, etc, etc. One of the girls at work was being bullied, so used to come to me in the middle of a shift, clearly upset, but at the time, no evidence, just whispering, or refusing to help check drugs, etc. Two things changed. One is that we had a long talk about what was going on, and she decided to ‘man the f&^% up’ and stop reacting. The second was that the big boss found out about other acts of bullying by the same little group, and came down on them like a ton of bricks, allocating members of the bullying group to other ends of the ward, not allowing them to be in charge of the shift, etc.
I think the last time someone verbally tried to bully me, I asked him to step outside for a free and frank discussion, but warned him that he was pretty out of shape and would come off second best. Of curse, it should never come to that, but sometimes it does.
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“….and she decided to ‘man the f&^% up’ and stop reacting”
It’s very well to tell someone to man up, but sadly the bullying is most times directed at the weak and vulnerable, who are not capable of defending themselves…the bullying can also drive them to suicide… Confident capable people are not usually bullied, that’s why this manning-up advise is pointless…and it’s up to the society, friends, work mates, the public to step up and to tackle the bullies. Too often people think it’s interfering, when it’s about protecting the weak among us.
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I agree, H, but this person suddenly realised that her victimhood mentality was fuelling the bullies. Two and a half years down the track, the same bullies now regard her as a competent, trustworthy nurse.
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…and I agree with you that there are plenty of these poor-me people about, always seeing themselves as victims…your method works with them. I was talking about people who are vulnerable, lack confidence, low self esteem, the ones who are not able to defend themselves, the true orphans of this world.
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Big M, the nurse was fortunate to have you to tell and to cry. You talked about it with her. You lent the ear of belief. The issue was a terrifying situation. The nurse could arrive at some healthy conclusions with support…and those all perhaps did lead to a greater sophistication managing the event of bullying in the workplace. Unless of course she threatened to take out the bully with a piece of 4×2.
Your addressing a bully with a threat might well have altered the future of their life experience. They might have stopped bullying anybody. Well done you that you felt so purely angered and have that capacity. Situations like that can get very nasty on the flip side. There are security personnel in jail for less.
Let’s see someone “man” up being threatened repeatedly while good ‘men’ stand around and take contradictory viewpoints while the bullying goes on eg watch some weekly television programme out of a diet of seeming trash. It is almost all about bullying. In Hollywood, the big bloke who got the role as the cop walks around the corner and finds the bully and threatens to cut their danglies off. Male culture.
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Victims need help. There is a point when a victim recovers when they are assisted. I recently received some excellent help from a kind woman who is a worker in the system, after battling alone with a situation for nearing 6 months. I have a support system now and I am getting well and look healthy. There are far fewer examples of habitual victims in the social system we inhabit than the media or popular culture would have us believe.
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