I found this post on bullying saved as a draft from last year – looking it over, I probably had more to add, including some of the referenced links from my Facebook page – which by then had been deleted and since rejoined. But I decided to post it because of the comment from Kipling, and deleted most of the remainder of my blather.

You can find references to bullying in the most odd places. Following links from the Wikipedia article on H. Rider Haggard (at which I had arrived via a circuitous route from the article on Goldman’s ‘Lord of the Flies’) to Kipling, describing his childhood after being brought to England from India:

Kipling remembers, “Often and often afterwards, the beloved Aunt would ask me why I had never told any one how I was being treated. Children tell little more than animals, for what comes to them they accept as eternally established. Also, badly-treated children have a clear notion of what they are likely to get if they betray the secrets of a prison-house before they are clear of it.” [Kipling, Rudyard (1935). “Something of myself”]