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Yes, absolutely; in fact, I would have no a priori reason to distrust any of the individual women that I’ve talked to about it. It’s when all of them are telling me the same somewhat fishy-sounding thing that I start to be suspicious.
Shouldn't that make you less suspicious? A worldview where the more people you trust tell you something makes you trust the claim less, seems a little odd surely?
I was a nerd growing up, but almost every nerd I speak to tells me tales of being bullied. I was never bullied nor have I ever seen a nerd being bullied (except in movies/TV shows) yet the more nerds who tell me they were bullied shouldn't be evidence against the claim, presumably. Especially if they are people I otherwise consider trustworthy.
I was the son of a feared teacher at my school, and then I was the father of my kids at a school and now I am a professor at a school, which means I am in all cases in a bubble, where people who bully are probably going to avoid doing it near me. While it is probable some of the people who claim to have been bullied are making it up, it seems unlikely they all are. So the more claims I am told should raise my belief in bullying not make me suspicious.
Now that is a separate issue as to whether it might be interesting to explore some of the claims, because perhaps what some say saw as bullying I just saw as fighting. And I was in a lot of fights as a kid. If a week went by when there wasn't a circle on the all-weather pitches with some kids throwing bad punches at each other then that was a slow week. Usually over something stupid which was forgotten by the next week. But I wouldn't call any of those kids either bullies or victims.
I think part of it must surely also be generational / geographic. For instance, I went to high school in the early 2000s and saw all of one fight, and it resulted in one kid suspended and the other expelled due to a zero tolerance of violence policy. I didn't see any bullying of nerds through my school years, but if there had been any there it's likely it did not take the form that is usually depicted in older TV / movies (definitely no swirlies or people being stuffed in lockers) since that specific form of bullying would be punished harshly. Other nerds around my age I met later in life who reported bullying during high school basically all reported it as taking the form of verbal abuse, things being stolen or online harassment rather than physical violence . It's possible their teachers at the time would have reported no bullying happening because the kind of bullying they were looking out for (and that they had grown up with) was different than the kind of bullying occurring.
Norms around school bullying are definitely changing. Here's a sample from Wall Street Journal: "When kids exclude peers from group chats and texts, is that bullying? (With lots of "yes" answers from various authorities.)
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