I was bullied throughout most of my time at school. I remember some of it, not of all, but I came out the other side of it relatively unscathed.
I am not alone in that. Many of us were.
It breaks my heart when I hear about people who are bullied to an extent where they do then feel they can no longer cope and take their own lives.
This is a post I wrote last year about bullying and the consequences for one young man who was suffering from homophobic bullying in school. I cried when I read that. It breaks my heart to think of that 15 year old being taunted. And actually of “you are gay” being something to beat people up with.
I was utterly devastated to read this today: How Bullying in schools has devastating effects (I apologise that it is the Daily Mail).
It is 2012 for {insert expletive} sake. When will this stop?
How many more people have to die before this sort of thing is stamped out forever?
It’s not all bad- a lot of schools are making incredibly positive steps to combat homophobia- downside is with the new governments reluctance to have proper anti-bullying guidance and make schools sign up to it (previous government had a good one but that has been thrown out with bath water) also schools need not to be so afraid to tackle homophobic bullying. Discrimination of all forms is wrong and needs to be challenged.
I was also bullied. For years and years and years, then I turned bully in order to turn the pressure of me. Not something I am proud of. In fact, I was vile to one girl, all name calling and whispering. I tracked her down on facebook and apologised. She was AMAZING and we are now in regular contact.
Our school has a zero tolerance towards bullying. It still goes on though. As it does in most schools. Not sure what the answer is TBH. It is horrific when you read of youngsters taking their lives. Another reason why I am not letting mine have facebook.
My son was bullied in secondary school thanks to the for other pupils socially unacceptable behaviour of a ‘friend’. This went on and on over the years and led to him being shunned by many who he got on well with before. There were loads of incidents, including him being hounded by a gang of them when he and this friend were cycling through the local park where he was pulled off his bike and got involved in an altercation. It was minor, (if you can call an exchange of punches that) physically, but scary, mentally. This so-called friend hid, while my son was left to try and get out of the situation and find a way home away from the bullies.
It culminated in an incident much later on where I received a call on my mobile from my son one afternoon, he was terrified and crying ‘Mum come quick’. This gang had followed and cornered him on the very short walk home from school, and had started knocking him about. It happened near houses at a time when loads of parents and pupils would have been about. Nobody helped. Nobody queried what was going on.
We went to the school and reported it. ‘It didn’t happen at school so not our business’. We went to the police. ‘Not our business, the school ought to deal with it’. In the end we had to get very forceful with both authorities before they would go and do anything.
The police went and saw the parents of the main perpetrators. And promptly the big brother started hounding my son in school the very next day. This was an absolutely awful time. He would not want to school because this guy ‘was going to kill him’, he said. This was obviously an exaggeration, but it describes clearly how he felt at the time. He did come home with an absolutely massive abrasion and bruise that spread over most of his shin one day and said that the big brother had kicked him. A steel toe cap, if you ask me, would have done that. We met a guidance teacher and all we got was ‘I can’t understand it. I know him as a really nice boy’.
Bullying has got better? Yes there is zero tolerance. The schools here operate that, too. But I was told by a head teacher once, that a head who says it’s not happening at his/her school is lying. The important thing is, how you deal with it.
Unfortunately there aren’t many tools on offer nowadays, the rights of the bullied child are so much stronger than the victim’s. Parents are often uncooperative because they don’t like it when someone criticises their kids’ behaviour. And so the bullying goes on, as the bullies get a free run.
I was bullied when I was at school, though I never thought of it as that, then. It was mental and physical, but compared to what goes on nowadays it was positively harmless childplay!
I don’t believe for one minute that it has got better, nor is it going to. In fact with the readiness for violence and hurting others increasing, all manner of weapons being used and fuses getting ever shorter, personally, I think it will get worse. As long as there is no definitive punishment for children who beat up others or call them names or hound them otherwise, it will get worse. Much worse. Sorry to be so negative, but these are only some of my experiences, I could list hundreds if I wanted!
To sort this out would take a concerted effort of society in order to totally shun that sort of behaviour. But that isn’t going to happen in a hurry, since a lot of the adults, even in prominent positions, don’t behave any different from the average schoolyard bully.
I got that wrong in my post about the tools of dealing with bullies – I meant to say the rights of the bully are so much stronger than those of the victim. Sorry.