Be respected for you and not out of other peoples fear (Bullying in Schools)

Member Name: Coxy1974

Product:	Bullying in Schools
Date:	27/02/07 (158 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: No advantages to bullying

Disadvantages: can be severely traumatic

I have just read a review that really made me stop and think. It was an account of how someone was bullied at school and how it affected their whole life at that time. It made me think back to my own child hood and my own experiences at the hands of bullies.

Often there is no reason for bullying at all. Children can be evil to other children. It takes on many forms from name calling to physical violence. Most children have an understanding of what is right and wrong but still cross the line to fit in or because they don’t want to ‘conform’ by following rules and having a sense of morals. My sister has children, a boy of 12 and a girl of 14. They have both experienced bullying in school but I will come onto this later.

My experiences then……

I am basically a very shy person and lack self confidence. As a child if anyone spoke to me I would more than likely hide behind my mothers legs rather than have to speak to anyone that I didn’t know. At home was a completely different kettle of fish and I would be really out going with my family. When I started school at the age of 5 I remember feeling different to the other children. It might just have been that I was a really skinny wretch who wore a green knitted suit (my mother was big on knitting everything and we didn’t have much money either) and this made me stand out from the crowd.

On the first day of school a life long friendship began between me and my still best friend. Her name is Tracey and we had both started on the same day. She had a ‘Purdey cut’ that I was very envious of at the time. We stayed firm friends from the first day and soon went to play at each others houses and stayed over often.

I was very happy but I didn’t make other friends as easily as Tracey did. I was often jealous of how easily she did this and of the fact that she was with other friends when I thought that she should be with me. Many times I remember going to the loo and crying because I felt abandoned. This is when the bullies moved in.

I’ll call her Claire. She was very popular and was the leader of the gang – you know, the ‘in’ crowd of people who always had the latest fashions and always seemed to be with someone. Claire found me crying in the loo and put her arm around me and gave me a hug. I remember it vividly – I was 7 at the time and she invited me to join the gang. I did but I was very naïve. I pushed myself to speak to these people (remember the shyness) and I would stammer and words would tumble out of my mouth over each other and I would end up talking total nonsense. This is when the mickey taking started. It culminated in me being invited out one night by Claire to her house. I was pathetically grateful for the invitation after being faced with the prospect of spending yet another night in with my Lego (I loved Lego) so off I went.

What actually happened was that Claire had arranged for all of the gang to be on the bowling green (local park) and I was held down and severely beaten. I remember the look of hatred on Claire’s face as she rammed her fist into my stomach, making me cry. She told me I was a loser and she couldn’t stand me. When they’d had their fun they left me there. I remember feeling really dizzy and disorientated and will be forever grateful to Adam and Sean (boys who were in my class at school) for helping me home after they found me on the park. My mum went mad when she saw me. She reported it to the police but as we were all about 8 or 9 at the time there was little they could do. Sort it out with the school was their response.

My mother made an appointment with the Headmaster of the school, put on her pink lipstick and blue eyeshadow – yes she really did wear these colours but then again we are talking about 1983 here.

The visit to school made it worse. The deputy head teacher would taunt me about how I couldn’t stand up to these bullies and this made me more withdrawn. Tracey stood up for me though as we were still friends and she got into fights for me but it did no good. I wondered what was wrong with me for people to hate me so much. What had I done to make people want to do this to me?

I began to injure myself just so that I didn’t have to go to school. I thought that if I was sick then it would stop the bullies. Maybe they’d forget about me and move onto someone else. How selfish is that? To want someone else to go through what you are going through just so that you can have some respite from it.

The worst was when I threw myself down the stairs – top to bottom – to ensure that I didn’t have to go to school. The most I managed to do though was badly sprain my wrist and ankle. You’d have thought that I’d have managed to break a rib or two but no. My mother ended up getting a visit from the truant officer to ask why I wasn’t in school. It was awful, my mum would cry because she felt so powerless to help me. Seeing your mum cry because of you is the worst thing ever. I felt sick. Did I fight back with the bullies? No, I became even more withdrawn and my only friend throughout this time was Tracey. I clung to her thinking she would be the only one I could ever trust. My mum would tell me to stand up to them, hit them back twice as hard but that’s difficult. You see I am only 4ft 11 tall now so you can imagine how tall or small I was back then. They were all much bigger than me but my mum used to say that the bigger they are the further they have to fall. How right she was.

The bullying only stopped when Claire moved away with her family. I was able to enjoy my last year at Primary school free from fear of being hit, spat on, dirty toilet paper being shoved in my face, called names, tripped over in the corridor or shoved into walls.

I can forgive Claire for what she did to me and the others but I cannot ever forget. My big regret is that I didn’t stand up for myself.

When I moved to ‘big school’ or the local comprehensive I thought that I’d have a fresh start. Tracey came to the same school. By now my dad had a better job (my mum was a stay at home, bake bread and darn socks type of mum) so money wasn’t as tight and I remember being so proud of my brand spanking new school uniform. No more knitted jumpers or suits. I had slowly started to come out of my shell a little and I made some new friends. We had quite a gang going, Tracey and I and for the first time in my life I felt as though I belonged and was popular. I remember thinking that I must be a good person if these people liked me.
There was another gang of girls – these again were the ones with the latest fashions (stiletto shoes being the most fashionable item a girl could own back then along with stonewashed denims) and I actually had a pair of both. I was ecstatic when my sister gave me a pair of her old stilettos – they were a bit big for me but with fluffy socks they fitted. Yes we did wear white stilettos with fluorescent socks!

The other gang of girls was led by Janine (name has been changed) and she took an instant dislike to me. There was no physical bullying this time but a lot of name calling. When I got to the age of 13 I started my periods. Completely by surprise in school and I had nothing with me. After frantically stuffing my pants with tissue (sorry to be so graphic) I went to find a teacher. I found Janine instead who took me to a female cookery teachers class where you could ask for a towel. I was very grateful for this help and thought that maybe things had changed for the better.

Soon after I started to hear ‘Rag week’ whispered to me as I passed people in the corridor. Then someone came over to me when we were getting changed for swimming and said I couldn’t swim because it was unhygienic whilst you were bleeding. Another refused to get in the pool when we were beside the pool and cited the reason for this – in front of everyone. By this time my period had finished anyway! It was pretty clear that Janine had decided to use this as a means of getting at me further.

Thing is I was stronger this time. I had grown in confidence and refused to be a victim of bullying in any form. By the time the rumours came out that I was an ‘easy lay’ I was furious. This is when I discovered my vile temper for the very first time. When a boy at school shoved his hand up my skirt and grabbed my between the legs whilst shoving me against the wall because he’d been told by Janine that I fancied him and would do anything with a boy I snapped. I shoved him away from me and reported him to the teacher. He was suspended from school.

I was 13 at the time and I remember now very clearly what happened. I plotted it very carefully. We were in the playground at lunchtime and Janine had begun the name calling. I went up to her and asked her to repeat what she was saying. She did. I asked her if she’d told Andrew that I fancied him. She admitted this and then looked around at her friends with a smug smile on her face. I cannot remember what happened after that – only sitting in the headmasters office later on with blood on me. I remember looking down at my right hand and seeing it bruised and bloody. There were splatters of blood on my school uniform and I sat there wondering how they'd gotten there. My intention had been to speak to Janine, confront her infront of everyone and let everyone know that she was the one with the problem, not me. It hadn't worked out like that.

Janine had been taken to hospital because I had broken her nose. Apparently I had grabbed her by her collar and shoved her against the wall. With one punch I had floored her and broken her nose. I had then calmly walked away, picked up my school bag and begun to walk home. I have no recollection of this at all.

Janine’s mum reported it to the police and I remember that they did come round but all they could do was caution me because I was under the age of 14. Janine was taken out of school later on that year but no one else ever touched me or called me names again. In fact I was a bit of legend in the playground for a while. I was suspended from school for a week and did get the cane for it but to me that was not as bad as the years of abuse I had endured from people like her.

I am not condoning violence as a means to stop a bully but in my case it worked because it was the only thing she understood. I saw her again a few years ago and she came up to me and thanked me. She has pins in her nose and she said that this acts as a permanent reminder of what a horrible person she was back then. Her parents were going through divorce at the time and she missed her dad. She hit out at others as a way of forgetting about home and making someone else as miserable as she was. What Claire’s reason was I will never know as I haven’t seen her again.

The years up until me leaving school were enjoyable. I had friends (wasn’t the most popular girl in school) and they were people I trusted. Tracey had been the one person who had been there for me and stood up for me throughout the whole time, both incidents of bullying. For this I thank her although I have never said that to her – she will never know what her friendship means to me and what she did for me during those times. It is something that we never speak of. We don’t see each other so much anymore as our lives have gone off in different directions but we see each other about twice a year. Long standing friendships can be like this. I will be friends with this person for the rest of my natural.

I mentioned earlier about my niece and nephew and their experiences with bullying. I don’t know the ins and outs of it all but they have both experienced bullying or being picked on if you want to call it that from others in their school.

My niece is very big for her age so people tend to assume that she is older than she is. She’s 14 and is 5ft 7 – so she towers over me – but she was picked on because she was the tallest and biggest in the class. She stood up for herself, not by using intimidation or anything but just by saying – and this is her favourite phrase of the moment ‘Whatever, talk to the hand cause the face and butt ain’t listening!’ another of her favourite put downs is ‘Bovvered. Face, bovvered.’ She has it down to a tee and it just makes people laugh so the bully thinks people are laughing at them. Nothing is worse to a bully than to have their peers laugh at them as they see it as being undermined.

My nephew was a different case. He is 12 and started ‘big school’ in September last year. He was a very naughty boy when he was younger and I remember finding my sister in tears when he was a toddler because she thought she was a bad parent and couldn’t control him. It was around this time that they found out they could control his behaviour with his diet. She doesn’t have ketchup in the house and has him avoid oranges or any kind. He’s now one of the most well mannered boys I have ever met. So mild and sensitive. He still loves his cuddles from his auntie too and sleeps with this ted (he’ll kill me if he ever reads this) I’m not making him out to be an angel as he gets into scrapes like all other boys but he has never been in trouble with the police.

When he first started his new school he came home with bruises – when asked about them he said he’d fallen over or he’d gotten them when he was playing Rugby etc. My nephew is very active and loves to play golf, rugby, is on the local football team with a first team place and boxes. We noticed that he became quite withdrawn for a while – my nephew is very outgoing and makes friends really easily so this was completely abnormal for him. My sister was really worried. She sent his dad up at bedtime (my sister always puts both kids to bed as they like their kiss and cuddle still at bedtime) to talk to him. It turned out that he was being bullied and this kid kept taking my nephews lunch money. My sister rang the school up and they promised to take it in hand. It got worse. My niece was all for going and sorting it out. My nephew sorted it out in the end. Seems he’s a bit like his auntie in that respect as his temper blew and he knocked the other kid out with one punch.

My nephew was suspended from school and the other kids mum accused my nephew of being racist until other kids stepped forward to say that they’d also been bullied by this child. The parent still refused to believe that her beloved son could do this kind of thing but soon m nephew had his iPod, portable playstation thingy and several other items that he’d apparently lost back in his possession. The other kid had made my nephew take these things into school and turn them over so that him and his friends wouldn’t be bullied that week.

My advice for others that are being bullied is to stand up to them. Pick out the ring leader and confront them, make it known that you and everyone else knows that they are just singling someone else out to belittle because they obviously have some sort of problem.

Bullying others is the bullies problem and you are not a victim and you are not alone. Don’t ever think that you are alone because the louder you shout the more people will hear you. I just wish that I’d shouted louder earlier on.

If you are reading this and are a bully - then stop it. You're not big and you're not clever for doing this. You're just trying to make other peoples lives a misery - do you have nothing better to do?

Thanks for reading and I hope some find this useful.

Summary: Stamp it out before it's too late.