Bullies

A Facebook friend was telling a story today about an adult bus driver bullying her 5-year old daughter, including berating her for crying after the adult had been yelling at her for awhile. Today someone at work sent me an email that had a not at all veiled threat in it. Not to my physical safety, but basically a "help me or I will go above you" threat. And I've been experiencing a lot of triggers and flashbacks to times in my life where I am been on the wrong end of bullies, especially one of my bosses at a previous workplace.

The thing is that so often what I see about bullying is aimed at helping the person on the wrong end of it cope
 There is little to help people stop the bully. My experience has shown that this is a particular problem in the work place. Instead of dealing with the inappropriate behaviour, it seems that managers are more inclined to try to find ways to make ot easier to deal with the bullying, but all this does is reinforce the idea that the target has done something wrong, when nothing could be further from the truth.

I know that is a lot of places paperwork needed to deal with inappropriate behaviour is ridiculous and I can see how that might deter people from addressing the issue. Managers can deal with the targets as there is no disciplinary or corrective action needed as they haven't done anything wrong. In almost every case of workplace bullying I have heard of it ends up being the target who moves on because no one will do enough about the buly to make the situation tolerable. This is just wrong.

Ok, so I am a bit all over the map tonight. Where do adults get off bullying children and then telling them that it is unacceptable behaviour? Where do adults get off bullying other adults and then shifting the blame to the one they are bullying? What makes a person think that being SO mean is an appropriate way to be in the world?