tiredTo begin with, please go read Kate Harding's excellent post on childhood bullying. A lot of it applies universally. The part about people being willing to say "but he/she's really a good kid" about bullies especially speaks to me, because I heard that when I was younger. I heard that a lot.
So here, full disclosure time: I was a weird kid. I was too smart for my classmates and too socially inept for my teachers. I was years behind in the areas of "giving things up," clinging to My Little Ponies and imaginary friends long past the point where it was "cool." My family was poor. I didn't have fashionable clothes or lunch sacks full of things to trade. I couldn't throw birthday parties, and when it was my turn to bring things to share with the class, they were always homemade—not the best way to look cool when the other students could afford fancy things from fancy bakeries. I liked books better than I liked boys. I watched cartoons. I sang in public. I wrote weird stories for class assignments. I came from a single-parent household. I stood out, no matter what I did, no matter how much I tried to be "normal." "Normal" wasn't in my skill set.
The kids I went to school with were exactly as understanding of all this concentrated weirdness as you'd expect them to be. They pushed me around, made fun of me, stole my homework; they ripped my books in half, shoved me into closets, knocked my lunches out of my hands. I can't stand the thought of getting a library card, because they stole my library books, leaving me with a fine my family's welfare-level budget couldn't pay. I was from a family so poor that ketchup really was considered a vegetable, and the little creeps I went to school with stole my library books. Not because I fought back, because I didn't. Not because I'd done anything to them, because I hadn't. Because they thought it was funny.
I listened to the adults when they told me it was my fault for being different. That if I just ignored the bullies, they'd go away and find an easier target. That if I was willing to change, to conform, that the bullies would be my friends, and not my tormentors. Why I would want to befriend people who once pushed me into traffic because, again, they thought it was funny...that part was never explained. I ate a lot of lunches in the office or the library. I got better about keeping my head down, about not crying where anyone could see me, and about answering "How was your day?" with the obligatory lie.
Fine. My day was fine. I had a lot of "fine" days back then. It's amazing how often "fine" meant "horrible, terrible, mortifying, humiliating, dehumanizing, brutal." All I ever had to say was "fine."
By the time I was fifteen, I had attempted suicide multiple times. Luckily for me, the Internet wasn't around to make it easier, and I had to rely on (often inaccurate) second-hand information. Right around the time I started to fully understand what it would take for me to kill myself, I started meeting people who understood what it was like to be different, who didn't make fun of me for being myself. It helped that my high school was across the street from a junior college, giving me easy access to a whole new social circle. There are times when I honestly believe that if I'd gone to a different school, I wouldn't have survived to graduate.
In a way, I was one of the lucky ones. I was a member of my school's dominant racial group. It was a college prep school, and most of the students were too focused on scholarships and golden tickets to make hounding me their life's goal—I was a hobby, not a vocation. I was rarely the target of violence. When I came out of the closet, I got some additional mockery, but not much; not enough to truly make things worse than they already were. My life could have been much, much harder...and I say that as someone who literally developed stress headaches and ulcers by the age of seventeen, from the strain of coping with the bullying.
It didn't help that for decades—and I do mean decades—I blamed myself. There had to be something inherently wrong with me, right? Otherwise, the bullies would leave me alone. Especially since so many of the bullies had friends, had favorite teachers, were golden children who could do no wrong. I was convinced that I was somehow flawed, and that I was just too stupid to see it. It was the only explanation that made sense.
Only it turns out that there's no explanation. Some bullies come from broken homes, or have low self-esteem, or need to prove themselves on the pecking order. Others...don't. Some bullies are wealthy, smart, attractive, and have everything in the world going for them. Some bullies do it because they can. Oh, I'm sure that every bully has a root cause, but at the end of the day, you bully, or you don't. One choice is right, one choice is wrong. And way too many people make the wrong choice, because it's easy, because it gives them power, because it's fun to kick the people that nobody will defend. Most bullies seem to learn early that their victims have been trained to "be the bigger person" and "turn the other cheek." You know what? Ignoring a bully just makes it more fun to torment you, because then, if they get you to react, they know they've won.
We've known for a long time that school bullying was out of control, but every time it gets "uncovered" again, people react like it's some sort of shock. Kids can be mean? HORRORS! Kids bully other kids? HORRORS!
Bullshit.
Everyone at my high school knew that bullying happened. If you were a bully, you knew. If you were bullied, you knew. If you were neither of the above, you tried not to align yourself too closely with the bullied, because there was a chance the big red target we all had painted on our backs might rub off. No one in the American school system is ignorant of bullying. But still, we take the word of the bullies over the word of the bullied. Still, we allow for the mistreatment and marginalization of anyone labeled "different."
And still, kids are dying over it.
This whole situation hurts my heart. Please, please, speak out against bullying. Break the cycle. Humanity will always have the potential to be cruel, but isn't the world already difficult enough? No one should die for the crime of being different. No one should learn the lessons so many of us were forced to learn.
No one else should die because we didn't stand up and say "enough" to the bullies of the world. The fact that I have to write "no one else," and not "no one," just shows how bad the situation has become.
Please. Break the cycle, before it's too late for someone else.
Please.
Rant ahead. Sorry. Sore subject for me too.
October 13 2010, 21:17:58 UTC 6 years ago
Seven.
My first therapist used to put me through forty-minute long interrogations as to how exactly it was I was "bringing it all on myself," as if the fact that I didn't fit was an act of willful noncompliance on my part that could be broken by explaining to me, repeatedly, that I would have to change if I wanted the other kids to stop holding me down in red-ant nests for fun. (It utterly shocks me how many actual instances of assault I underwent as a kid that nobody did anything about.)
My father, who is an exceptionally gentle fellow and not prone to violent talk, much less actual violence, (and who hates conflict so much he'll tie himself in knots trying to please everyone, so that he took this much initiative shows how bad he thought it was) eventually told my mom (who didn't like that the therapist wasn't getting results, but was too timid to tell him he was doing a lousy job) that there were two options: we found me someone new to see, because clearly any seven year old who talked about wishing she didn't exist the way other kids talked about wanting a new Barbie needed SOMEONE professionally trained to try and talk her into believing she had a right to keep taking up space, or he would be forced to punch him in the eye at their next conference.
I have since learned that this was considered the appropriate way to deal with bullying in the early eighties. You blamed the victim, because it was (conceptually anyway) easier to try and get them to adapt in ways that would render them less objectionable than it was to try and deal with the bullying behavior. Even as a little girl I thought this sounded bass-ackwards: it didn't seem fair to me that *I* had to change who *I* was, even though I wasn't hurting anyone, in hopes that the children who were so very cruel to me target someone else--that my goal should be to pass my tormentors along like an evil hand-me-down, that the best I could hope for was to pass the pain along like a bad penny.
They--my teachers, the professional staff at the school, most of the parents, MY parents--weren't unaware of what was happening. They just chose to reframe it as my fault, and then yell at me for being "self centered" when I became mortally afraid that I was somehow responsible for all evil in the world.
You know what? I got through it. I got through it damaged, and I got through it with emotional scars that I'm still trying to let go of. My mother once asked me if I took any pleasure in the era of Facebook of getting to see how much "better" I've done for myself than my tormentors. I did do "better"--if by completing both college and a professional degree with some amount of distinction is "better"--than nearly all of them. I take no pleasure in it. Why should I? The damage they did to me can't be fixed by one-upsmanship. I'm still hurt and they probably don't even remember, judging by the "oh, so nice to see you doing so fine!" comments they leave on my Wall.
And do bullies outgrow the behavior? Are they just "good kids"? Look around you and look at how many people seem not to understand that their behavior has actual consequences and that other people have the same feelings, hopes, fears, and human integrity that they themselves feel they do, and try to tell me again that letting bullies behave so badly they scar some of their victims for life and drive others to their deaths doesn't really hurt anyone.
Consoling yourself that a bully is "just a good kid really" victimizes the bully by letting them learn that treating others in horrifying ways is fine as long as they don't have power, and victimizes the bully again by telling them that their pain doesn't matter enough for you to inconvenience themselves enough to intervene.
Re: Rant ahead. Sorry. Sore subject for me too.
October 14 2010, 01:11:31 UTC 6 years ago
That is. Insane.
I am so sorry.