Different kinds of bullies

I was home schooled until 6th grade, or about 11 years old, and while that was great for my intellectual development, it wasn't good for my social development. Don't get me wrong, I never would've been an extrovert or social butterfly, and who knows, maybe if I'd gone to school earlier I would've been bullied even more. I know that there are some great homeschooling networks, but since we lived in a small mountain town, I didn't get a whole lot of socialization.

The groups that we did go to on occasion were generally nice and no one bullied me there, but the three or so people I hung out with most often could be pretty cruel to me. Two were siblings and would often team up against me and make fun of me, and the other was older and forced me to do stuff she wanted to do and... er, did inappropriate things to me. Though that's more accurately termed as abuse, not necessarily bullying.

Anywho. By the time I went into a small charter school in 6th grade, I was extremely introverted. I'm pretty sure I barely talked that entire year. There was one person in particular that bullied me for all three years of middle school, and it started right off the bat by telling me that my friends where saying horrible things about me while also trying to convince them to stop hanging out with me. I'm not entirely sure if it was malevolent or just chance, but as she got me removed from a group of friends somehow she'd always end up following me to the next group and doing the same thing.

This was a small school, with only a few people coming or going a year, so I started to run out of people to be friends with. I tried my best to fit in with the popular folks, but that really just isn't my style and caused me to be even more awkward because I was trying to be someone else. In 8th grade I made friends  with two other people that were bullied constantly, and I think it's telling how each of us reacted.

I tried desperately to fit in, to wear the right clothes, have the right hair, and talk the right way.

The boy of our group revelled in being the "bad" guy; he made advances at girls that he knew didn't like him, somehow made everything he said sound lecherous, and often acted snobby when he went to go be by himself. I hung out with him outside of school once, and he was a perfectly normal guy, but the moment we were back in school his voice and body language changed dramatically (and he of course tried to say that we had been on a date). In the very beginning I engaged in saying mean things to him along with other people, but after a couple of weeks I realized that not only did it not help my own social standing, but it was cruel and not something I should be a part of.

Finally, the third person that was bullied at my school was another girl. She went mostly the same path I did - trying to fit in and often resorting to hanging out with younger students to avoid people in our own grade. The difference was that she also became a bully and physically bullied me. It took me a really long time to realize it, because all of her words said that she was my friend, but friends don't throw pointy things at your face, knock you over onto concrete, or try to smash your face in with a basketball.

The basketball incident was when it finally dawned on me and I spent the evening crying with my parents, saying I didn't want to go back to school - if even the other bullied kids were doing this to me, what hope did I really have? - and my mom talked to my teacher. I overheard part of his conversation with the girl, and I couldn't help but feel bad for him as he was a first year teacher that had two sobbing 13 year old girls on his hands.

Things got much better when I went to high school; I found new groups of friends, often very extroverted friends, that were just fine having a quieter person in their group. Though one did end up kind of bullying me teaming up with another girl to loudly complain about how quiet and passive I was, high school passed pretty smoothly and college was where I really found my confidence and became proud of being smart and geeky.


As I look back on this rather long post, hindsight is showing that the people that bullied me probably had a lot of issues of their own, and insecurity about their own social standing. As evidenced by the other kids I saw being bullied, those that feel powerless often try to find power over others in other ways, and can become bullies themselves.

All of that to say, I have no idea how anyone could start to get rid of bullying in schools. There are so many reasons why it happens, and just about any blanket rule would leave lots of loopholes.

Bullying happened to me too

I never realised I was bullied until I left school. I never felt like I was bullied, I knew people didn’t like me and I had been the victim of being physical bulling but it never actually occurred to me that I was being bullied. It was just a part of going to school that I had to put up with.

I was never popular when I was at school right the way through from primary to secondary, but I guess pretty much all the bullying I experienced happened in secondary. When I was in second year, about 13 years old, I was commonly described as a “goth” because I like alternative music and wore skinny jeans and a lot of black. This mainly cause a problems because the large majority of my school were neds (The wiki article isn’t great in my opinion but it should give you rough idea), so anyone who is different from them is a target for them, I knew people who “swapped sides” so speak in order to avoid the bullying. I never changed because I always thought, “This is me, why should I change?”

Bullying wise I’ve been spat on, had chewing gum in my hair, all kinds of things thrown in my direction, sly comments, water poured over me in home ec and probably a lot more but I just can’t remember anymore. Writing this out makes me wonder how I never knew I was bullied...

The most direct kind of bullying I remember ever happening to me happened during, I think, my third year. In Scotland everyone has to take RME (Religious and Moral Education, which obviously didn’t work) and most people don’t want to be there. Unfortunately for me two of the most disruptive neds in my year happened to be in the same class as me and a few of my “goth” friends. I remember dreading going to that class because none of the teachers were any good at controlling or keeping their pupils safe. There is no story to this attack other than that I was sitting in class talking to my friend when he jumped off the table behind me and kicked me in the back. Everyone saw. The teacher saw. But nothing was ever done. I feel this speaks more about my schools attitude to this kind of behavior, like there was no point in doing anything because they’d do it anyway. I mean one winter a large group of were standing outside and we were having balls of ice with stones and all sorts in them thrown at us, I remember sitting for ages waiting to see the head teacher about it and then being told to just go to class.

Now that I’ve left school I haven’t actually experienced any bullying and it’s pretty great. I know it sounds stupid but being able to sit in a room and not having to worry about what people think or checking that all my belongs are with me or being scared that something is going to be thrown at me is pretty great. It makes life easier.

Bullying Stinks

There was generally not a lot of bullying in my elementary school. It was a really small school, so there was a pretty low student to teacher ratio. Also most of  the teachers were really good about maintaining a safe and positive atmosphere, and most students' parents were pretty involved in the school community, which helped. That's not to say people never got picked on, but it was the sort of casual thing that shifted around and was directed at whoever said something dumb/wore something ugly/cheated at a game or something like that and was forgotten by the next day.

The one exception to this was this one girl in our class whose personal hygiene was not so great. Her, uh, distinct odour got her stuck with the nickname "fish" for years, poor dear. I was never involved with the bullying, it was mostly the boys that did it, but I also never stood up for her or went to a teacher about it or anything either, which I feel bad about now that I'm older.

Most of my experience with bullying was in junior high. There was one guy in my class who bullied me a lot for three years straight. A few of his friends were in on it too sometimes, including two who were on my bus and used to make fun of me there, but he was definitely the worst one and the ringleader of it all. There were a lot of day-to-day incidents like name-calling and him going through my stuff and things like that, but the worst was in French class. Our teacher always made us do presentations in pairs that could be about anything, but we had to use a certain number of verbs conjugated in whatever tense we were working on, and sometimes he and his partner would put mean jokes about me in their presentations in front of the whole class. The worst part was that the teacher never did anything about it, and so I didn't see any point in going to a teacher or anyone about it, since he obviously knew it was a problem and just didn't seem to care.

Junior high was also the only time I can ever remember really being a bully, too. One of my friends had been acting bitchy for a while, so my best friend and I decided we needed to do something mean to her... junior high logic really does not make sense to me now. Anyway, we took one of those survey-questionnaire things that people fill out about themselves... you know, the kind of things people used to do facebook notes with all the time? Except at this point they went around through email. So we made a fake email account in her name, took one of those surveys and filled it out as if it was from her, but made all the answers really mean and embarrassing things, and then sent it out to everyone we knew. The next day she called everyone it had gone out to, telling them it wasn't really her, and asking them not to read it if they hadn't already. I remember how guilty I felt as soon as she called me and I heard how upset she was - and I think that was the moment I decided to try my best to be a nice person.

In high school the bullying stopped almost completely. The nice thing about going to a big school is that all the social cliques are big enough to live in their own little worlds, so I could more or less surround myself with people I liked and never had to deal with the people I didn't. The fact that most of my classes were IB probably helped to since most of my bullies weren't the type to be in IB classes. I really only had one experience with bullying in all of high school. A guy I knew broke up with his girlfriend because he wanted to be with me - although the major flaw in this plan was that I had absolutely no interest in dating him. I'm really not sure how he overlooked that very important detail. I almost feel like he used me as an excuse to get out of the relationship or something. Anyway, his girlfriend didn't seem to care that I wasn't interested (and I can't really blame her for that, even if she was wrong - I mean, I'd be pretty pissed too, if I were her). It also just happened that she went on my bus. So for a few weeks after that she and her friends would sit as close to me as possible and trash talk me the whole way home. I didn't really care that much since I hadn't even done anything and nothing they were saying was true, but I was upset about it for the first little while because I was concerned that it would start rumours and get spread around to more people. That didn't end up happening though, so basically it was the least effective bullying ever. All in all, high school was a pretty good time, and there was not a whole lot of bullying. Although there was some major public bullying directed toward the only openly gay student at the school, and it got pretty awful sometimes. Basically it all culminated when another guy threw a chair at him on Halloween because he was dressed up as a flapper. I wasn't there for this, but he got caught by a teacher and from then on all the teachers kept a close eye on things and as far as I know most of the bullying died down after that

And that is pretty much all of the bullying events I have ever had any experience in. That sort of thing seemed to get left behind pretty much completely at university, I guess people finally grew up.