8 year old kid gets pepper sprayed by the police.

[shilala]

There was question to the kid's mental condition.
In the interview, there was mention that the child was afflicted with PTSD. The interviewer picked apart the PTSD thing, and it appears he has PTSD from being bullied.
Which brings me to bullying...
If some of you do not have kids going to school right now (we have 3, 9-14), the latest and greatest craze is the "just say no to bullying" campaign. There are assemblies, "special people" come to the school, non in-house police visit the schools, there are homework assignments, and tests on how to handle a bully.
Mind ya now, this is no sh1t coming right here...
If a bully, say, grabs your arm, you are to pull your arm away and shout "NO!!!!" That will instantly and effectively eradicate the bullying, at which time you are to immediately go to the office and file a report on the incident.
To this point in time, that's it. The kids haven't been instructed in self defense, haven't been taught how to break a nose, they weren't even so much as taught to run screaming to draw attention. Nothing realistic to protect themselves.

I don't really want to make light of this, because I guess some think it's become a great big problem. I can't imagine how bad I'd feel if my child were regular bully meat. I was fortunate growing up, I got bullied once by a kid much bigger than me. He took to writing on my face with a marker. I slapped the marker away and he was fixing to whip my ass when my brother came around the corner. The ass whipping immediately changed ownership, and said bully never came within 50 feet of me the rest of the year. By the following year, I could take care of him myself. Thank God for big brothers.
That leads me to a point/question...
There's gazillions of "kids band together and banish the bully" feel-good movies out there. None of our kids (5) have ever had a problem. Is this one another blown-up media hypesicle, or do your kids report that it's really gotten worse?
Mine have not. If anything, it's the opposite. There are penalties in place now for violating another kid's personal space that weren't in place when I was coming up, but on the other hand, the kids can say most anything without fear of reprisal. There's a big difference there.