On the question in the first post on who's fault is it, I blame society. Society itself generally turns a blind eye to bullying, either to fears that they will get bullied themself or to the fact that it is none of thier business so they shouldn't get involved. However if society was different and we did stick up for eachother then the bully would back away. We have a basic human instinct of survival, someone isn't going to continue bullying if they are outnumbered.

I saw a comment in this thread that you are weak if you let the bullying affect you. From my own experience bullying will affect you in one way or another, even if you fight back. I was bullied for 7 years during school, I was brought up to just ignore them, because if you fight back you are letting them get to you. And so I did this for seven years, I completely ignored the insults but I changed as a person I was seen as a cold person in school due to the fact that I had no trust in the people around me, I thought everyone was an idiot. But I did this in order to survive in school. Even though I was mentally fighting the insults the bullies still affected me, you can only fight for so long until you do get affected. Sure I told the teachers but nothing was ever done, and I could never fight physically since I had weak muscles. Throughout school my only focus was to get into college, and after those seven years I had to learn how to interact with people all over again and learn to trust people.

The bullies do this for only one reason, to feel good about themselves, to feel that they are on top and that noone can touch them. But it gave me great satisfaction recently to see that the people who bullied me are now working in dead end jobs while I went ahead and succeeded and went into further education. Sure they affected me in the short term but in the long term I went on to succeed. I believe noone is ever weak for letting bullies affect you, we have emotions it's only natural, just as long as you achieve what you set out to do in the long term then you have already conquered them.