Emphasis on "credible". It's not really a credible threat if you lose the fight and suffer ten times worse whatever harm you inflicted. Getting stomped into the ground by a group of thugs you failed to take out will put you in the hospital if not the morgue.
It's not really any different than literal gangs of criminals to be honest. The best way to deal with such violent people is to avoid them. You can't avoid bullies at school. If your plan is to defend yourself, then you better be able and willing to dish out extreme violence when warranted because that's what it's going to take. The ability and willingness to do that is the threat you speak of. Victims of bullying pretty much always have neither. Chances are the bullied kid isn't some hardened street tough capable of taking out three guys before they do the same to him.
Even if these victims were that tough, they can't do that because schools don't really like it when kids create liability for them with violence like that so they impose harsh consequences to violence regardless of how warranted it is. So not only are victims weaker and outnumbered, schools will also punish them for defending themselves as is any human's right.
Violent confrontation has consequences, even in school. At the very least, it attracts significant attention from authority which nobody wants. So it changes the bullying risk/reward calculation, at least for "conventional" bullying for "fun" (if they're after your phone/money/etc, you will need to put up more resistance to counteract the higher "reward").
If you get into a proper fight you will lose, however most bullying is verbal and even bullies have no interest in escalating it to physical violence if it risks yielding consequences (if not for the violence itself, but their other behavior, that might otherwise fly under the radar). So merely showing the intent to fight back will make them move onto another target.
Yes, this is completely different from gangs and I'm not talking about those. If your school has a gang problem, this advice won't help you. However below "gangs" there will generally be a clique of people that may engage in occasional verbal bullying (because it's fun for them and/or bolsters their social status) but otherwise generally do well in school and have no interest in jeopardizing that standing - therefore violence will not be in their best interest, regardless of whether they'll actually win the physical fight.
> You can't avoid bullies at school. If your plan is to defend yourself, then you better be able and willing to dish out extreme violence when warranted because that's what it's going to take
You can't avoid 100% of them. You can avoid 90% of them by being stronger/more difficult than the other targets.
> So merely showing the intent to fight back will make them move onto another target.
This is magical thinking. "If I do A, he will do B" as if it were a cosmic law. No such deal exists! Bully has a whole alphabet of responses to choose from, including taking you up on your challenge.
You need to take a hard look at what you're suggesting here. You're describing people who are verbally violent. You're telling people that the way to get them to stop is by using physical violence. You're escalating the situation. You're doing this on the assumption that verbally violent people are not willing to go further. This is false. The problem with violent people is there's always someone willing to go further than you.
What you're actually doing is telling kids to make a threat display. Like a thug displaying his gun to intimidate the other person into backing down. This is an effective deterrent but you better be able and willing to follow up on that threat if necessary. If you do this, all bets are off. There is no guarantee that your opponent will back down. It's also possible that your threat will be perceived as a challenge to his masculity, especially if you do it in front of his peers. He'll think he'll have no choice but to take you on because he'll lose face if he doesn't.
If you're going to do this, you better be able to quickly incapacitate your opponent. I don't mean punching his face once and walking away victorious. I mean literally breaking his jaw and then following up with more attacks until he's unconscious on the floor. Then you better hope that this display of extreme violence was enough to intimidate any other bullies hanging around or you'll have to do the same thing to them before they gang up on you. If at any point your confidence in your ability to do this ever wavers, you should not attempt it.
No that really doesn’t hold up. You do not have to be able to win the fight. You simply have to demonstrate that you’re willing to resist. Bullies, thugs, prison gangs, etc. will almost always leave you alone if they think you’re going to retaliate. That doesn’t mean you’re making an enemy of them of course.
> Bullies, thugs, prison gangs, etc. will almost always leave you alone if they think you’re going to retaliate.
You're putting people in actual danger with this advice. There's any number of things people can do in response to your threat display. You're telling people the aggressor will always fold. They might call your bluff instead.
Can you actually retaliate? Because eventually someone is gonna wonder if you're for real and you're gonna need to make good on that threat. If there's even the slightest doubt in your mind about it, you can't.
Or they kick your ass extra hard for having the audacity to even think you could beat them and proceed to humiliate you twice as hard next time just to teach you your place. I think you underestimate how self-centered these people can be.
