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Lumifer comments on Advice for a smart 8-year-old bored with school - Less Wrong Discussion
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Provided the kid can.
The "traditional" way of stopping bullying is quite painful. It essentially involves treating the bully as a Skinnerian rat and hurting him every time he attacks you. You pay a high price in pain yourself, but if, basically, every time the bully hassles you he gets kicked in the balls, pretty soon he'll stop hassling you even if each time he "prevailed" and beat you up.
Other usual ways are to use social skills (which are usually lacking) and/or bulk up / learn effective fighting.
Of course that all presupposes physical aggression and boys.
Girls tend to go for passive-aggressive emotional attacks which can be harder to deal with.
Boys will do the passive-aggressive thing if they think they can't take you physically. I had that experience growing up; I was too big to beat up but too socially inept to handle other forms of bullying. School was hell.
Did you try punching people who dissed you? That works for some people. Especially if they practice their skill at recognising the effective ways to deploy the power.
On a couple of occasions, I did. Trouble was, I was sufficiently clueless that the people who were inclined to wind me up also managed to direct my ire towards third parties who didn't deserve it. "Let's you and him fight," more or less. Those were not shining moments in my moral life, although some bits of them do make funny stories twenty years later.
I have this mental list of people to locate if and when the government collapses sufficiently that law enforcement closes up shop....
Eh, it can be quite painful, but you just need to reach the point where bullying someone else is less of a hassle.
The rejection therapy and the Disneyland solution might still work here. Though in that case I'd look for advice from girls; I'll get to that if I have a daughter AND she gets bullied; no hurry :)
Kind of a late reply on this one, but I'll point out that this depends on what kind of bully you're dealing with. Not all bullies are opportunists or cowards, and in particular some are playing a dominance game which they will not permit themselves to lose. To respond to a challenge by changing targets would be to implicitly acknowledge that they don't have dominance over their original target, something they're unwilling to accept, so they'll respond to challenges by escalating until one side is unable to keep up. This is the kind of case where getting outside intervention is usually the most necessary.