I was being bullied for a about a year - somewhere around when I was 13-14 years old - but there was nothing I would *truly* suffer from, as the whole thing was mostly about bad jokes and insults and such. While I don't think the majority of bullying cases require legal action, they most certainly require the intervention of parents and teachers to make sure it stops. A lot of people seem to think that bullying is just something kids do.
I wonder if part of why schools are bad at dealing with it is because a) the people who run them typically didn't have really bad experiences in school, because they might not want to work at a school if they did and b) wounds fade with time and the emotional beatdown of minor bullying tends to seem much less significant in adulthood. For the most part, I didn't have any personal tormentors and I did have friends. While what happened did hurt, it wasn't systematic bullying like some kids deal with. But I never got beat up, probably because I was bigger and stronger than most of my classmates for most of that time. I would also occasionally have someone choose to do little annoying things, and in 2nd grade, there was a girl who would pretend to be my friend and then turn around and insult me right to my face. I was made fun of for my weight starting in 1st grade and it continued until high school.
I was bullied a little bit, but it really wasn't as harsh as what some kids deal with.
