A recent video of a victim turning against his bully has made the news and is being discussed on MeFi. A specific comment is worth reading twice:

You know, something just struck me.

People relentlessly bullied as children never forget that bullying. They remember faces, names, places, and the precise actions. And that makes them angry for a good long while, possibly forever. It makes the angry and it makes them hate bullies of all kinds. It might even fuck them up psychologically. Actually, of course it does. They were kids and they were bullied while their brains were growing and while they were assimilating experience on what their life was going to be like. So it becomes part of them - they were one of the bullied kids who got pushed around, humiliated, psychologically and violently and sexually assaulted for, and this is the real kicker, absolutely no reason whatsoever. That’s now part of the structure of their brains. Speaking only for myself here, but I don’t forgive them, I have no compassion for them, and I’m not intellectualising it away.

Which leads me to only once conclusion: people who excuse bullies and say it’s not their fault because daddy was a drinker and mummy was a stripper and really they just need to be understood and talked to, they are intellectualising and therefore tacitly excusing their own experiences as bullies and this means that they were bullies themselves. Why do they say that the bullied and picked-on should go and tell a person in authority and then we can all sit around and talk it out and maybe we can do some counselling and let’s just all get along and be friends why don’t we? The reason violence isn’t the “answer” to them is because all that time they were bullies - and now they’re sympathising with the bullies themselves because they remember what it was like to be one - they were afraid of getting their fucking jaws broken, their chests kicked in, their fingers crushed, their necks snapped, their balls smashed. Because nobody deserves that, right? What’s a few fat jokes, a few small tits jokes, a few small dick jokes, a few pimple jokes, a few jabs in the arm, maybe tripping them over now and then, maybe giving them a wedgie, maybe a few pushes and shoves, maybe a few punches to the gut or knuckles across the cheek? Come on, it’s just kids, right?

Well when those fat jokes and small tits jokes and small dick jokes (or, in my case, small dick [I didn’t do it on purpose, after all] and big fat boytits, to the extent that I either didn’t shower for weeks on end at boarding school, and when I did, did it with shirt and underwear on, because it was hilarious fun for the other kids to pull back the shower curtain or run after my towel) and pimple jokes and jabs in the arm and tripping overs and wedgie givings and pushings and shovings and punches to the gut go on day after day, week after week, year after year, that is actually the purest definition of the purest kind of vindictive, evil torture: inflicting damage on an innocent person.

I guess my point is, if you were bullied, you remember, and when you see a film like this, where a bully gets what he has had coming to him for a very long time, your heart jumps with joy.

If you were a bully, you worry about a film like this, and you hem and you haw, and you say well the bullied kid should have done this, or done that, but not fought back. Because you’re still afraid, after all this time, of getting your fucking face smashed into the ground for somebody who has had enough of your bullshit.

I guess it taught me a few useful lessons, though, what I went through in school. Firstly, I’ve learned to love animals more than I love people, it’s taught me to have zero interest in people’s opinions of me, and it’s resolved me to the fact that, if I am picked on ever again in my life, I might end up in hospital or in jail or both, but I’m not going down until the other guy loses a fucking eyeball.

—tumid dahlia

The rest of the MeFi thread is worth reading, too.