Getting picked on is awful. It makes a person question their self-worth and it turns something that should be a great learning experience into a wheel-of-pain. Now that I've said that, let me make some random observations.

The first wave of this type of thing - I'm talking its modern manifestation - happened when I was young and in school. It scared me half to death. The great blame-game of culture/entertainment went into overdrive then. It had always existed on talk shows, but now the rot was becoming EXTREMELY visible and folks were pointing in twenty different directions. Is it entertainment? Guns? Bad parents?

All I know is that something shifted some time in the mid-to-late 90's. Those currents may have existed before then - they likely did - but the 90's was the flashpoint. Something was different then, despite a relatively decent economy and promising levels of job growth. Popular music went from sunny and light to depressive and antisocial. Social isolation started to become very common. Antiheroes became more popular. Goth-vampire culture became more widespread and took on a certain intensity it had lacked before.

There was an undercurrent of rebellion, but it wasn't a refreshing "out with the old, in with the new" attitude. It seemed to be tinged with a sort of "I hate the world, and they'll pay" flavor. That old "I'm gonna succeed DESPITE the odds" attitude had given up the ghost to "stick my middle finger in the air."