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I Was Bullied … And I’m Better For It
You may have seen images floating around the internet lately from a photographer name Rich Johnson that try to demonstrate the harm that words can cause by visualizing them as physical wounds on the bodies of people. These have quickly become the go-to pictures on articles about bullying, such as this piece on CNN calling for it to be prohibited by law. These visuals hit close to home for me on two fronts. First, I went to high school with Rich and shared an apartment with him in college. Second, I have more firsthand knowledge on the topic of bullying than any human being would care to admit.
People generally fall into one of two camps when the conversation turns to bullying. The first group insists that there is an epidemic, and usually suggest that it requires a legal remedy, while the second doesn’t see verbal abuse as a form of bullying at all.
Though anti-bullying laws strike me as the ultimate example of a blunt instrument being used where a scalpel is needed, there is a tendency on the right to dismiss concerns about verbal bullying out of hand. While the anti-bullying crusade gets a whole lot wrong, the greater point Rich’s project makes about the scars words can leave is spot on.
At our earliest opportunity, we should retire the nursery rhyme of “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” It is a saying as at odds with reality as any in the English language. Arming children with it before sending them off to school is about as useful as sending the army into battle with swim noodles. Any child who finds themselves on the receiving end of systemic harassment will tell you this cliche is manifestly false. Its sole purpose is identifying for a bullied child which adults are not taking their troubles seriously.
I don’t think back fondly on my childhood for numerous reasons, the primary one being a dark cloud that hung over me nearly every day of my life from the ages of 7 to 14. Each day as I boarded the school bus, I hoped and prayed that it would be the day when everyone forgot I was there. In retrospect, it is difficult to tell what it was about me that made me such an easy target. Perhaps the other kids simply smelled fear on me like animals in the jungle. Perhaps I was just socially awkward. Whatever the reason, I was quickly identified as being low in the pecking order, even after I transferred from one school to another.
My average day consisted of being insulted on the bus, insulted in class, and insulted on the playground. This was my life day in and day out for years. There was seldom any common theme to the abuse. I looked wrong, dressed wrong, said something wrong, or did something wrong, and those around me would make me the butt of their jokes. Any specific example I could try to convey would seem petty and insignificant to you, just as it did to my teachers and my mother.
In truth, the specific words are completely irrelevant to how hurtful verbal abuse is, as evidenced by the common use of insults among friends as terms of endearment. Ultimately, verbal bullying tells a child the same thing no matter which words are employed: You are separate; you are lesser; you are not welcome here. Isolation and a sense of devaluation as a human being are the results. This message was hammered home to me by my classmates every day.
At first, I reacted to such harassment with violence. Someone would push me too far and a brawl would ensue. The Catholic school uniform provided handy weapons in such fights, as I quickly discovered that grabbing the other kid’s tie or jacket enabled you to pull them to the pavement quite effectively (The playground at the Catholic school I attended in first and second grade was literally a parking lot). The satisfaction of having stood up for myself was always short-lived however, as school administrators had very little tolerance for such shenanigans.
A call to my mother always followed, which in turn led to talks in her office after she had returned home from work. Explaining that you were being made fun of buys you little sympathy from your mother when the real world difficulties of keeping a roof over your head and putting food on the table occupy almost all of her time and energy. Getting kicked out of school while she was breaking her back to support the family alone was not an option and I was disciplined accordingly. A combination of punishment and guilt for what I was putting her through caused me stop fighting. As you can imagine, this didn’t lead to a reduction in my being bullied.
Her primary piece of advice was to tell a teacher when it was happening, so that they could put a stop to it — a suggestion that caused far more grief than it solved. It turns out that people don’t like it when you tell on them and make you pay for it tenfold rather than backing off. Most of the time, however, teachers and administrators proved themselves unwilling to take any steps to help in the first place. I don’t care to recount the number of times I sat being harassed in an otherwise silent classroom, while the teachers sat at their desks doing nothing about it.
The feeling of powerlessness that comes from being told that you can’t stick up for yourself — especially when no one else is willing to stick up for you either — is maddening. For years, my bus ride home and the first hour or so of my afternoon were occupied by thoughts of suicide. Not merely idle thoughts: I was considering methods. It wasn’t a cry for help, as I didn’t tell anyone. I was past the point of thinking there was anyone willing or able to help. I was just looking for a way out. What prevented me from going through with it is a mystery to me to this day.
The unrelenting nature of the bullying was truly astonishing to behold. You might think that children would eventually tire of it and move onto some other form of amusement. And they might if such abuse were truly driven by their desire to amuse themselves.
If you want to study how not to socialize children, then simply examine nearly any traditional American school. The separation of children by age insures that their primary influences in social behavior will be other children who are equally socially undeveloped. What emerges is a cultural hierarchy similar to that of a clan of hyenas. The most dominant among them abuse those who are lower in the social order, constantly reinforcing their position. Tearing down other children helps to elevate you in the eyes of your peers. Abuse in this culture travels uniformly down the chain. Those at the top are almost never on the receiving end of bullying, and those at the bottom rarely ever dish it out.
The dynamic changes entirely when children are not in school. I had many friends growing up who resided far higher up the chain than I — and we got along great when not in school. Once back in the jungle of the classroom, however, the best I could hope for was that they wouldn’t join others when it came time for my daily verbal beat down. The hope was often in vain.
The nightmare ended my freshmen year in high school. I would love to say that my peers grew up, but that wasn’t the case. What changed was the fracturing of the popularity hierarchy by a combination of mixing age groups across classes, as well as the addition of students who had attended different middle and elementary schools.
Cliques formed in place of the old hierarchy. You found your place among them for rational reasons, such as common interests. It was suddenly irrelevant if student A and B mocked you with their friends, as you were equally likely to mock them among your own group. Anything negative you received from one person was counterbalanced by friends who gave you something positive. For the first time, there were some people’s opinions that mattered to me and others that didn’t. The dark cloud lifted and living became fun again.
I harbored a rather deep resentment for a great many of those classmates for years. Interacting with them always felt strange. They’d be making small talk and all I could think was “You nearly drove me to kill myself and yet here you are, acting like nothing ever happened.”
This changed as I watched many of them develop into adulthood. I was surprised at first to observe that those who had dished out so much abuse in their youth seemed to have little in the way of skills to cope with criticism and insults. They crumbled under even mild disparagement, unsure how to handle it. It wasn’t long before I realized that, in the end, I had gotten the better deal.
I developed a mental toughness that isn’t present in many people I knew growing up. As a result, I am incredibly comfortable in my own skin. I feel no pressure to change any aspect of myself for the purpose of appeasing others, or fitting in with any culture. Meanwhile, I’ve seen friends who I respect put their tail between their legs at the first signs of disapproval from others because they can’t stand the thought of being disliked or insulted. They live for the approval of others. It is one of the saddest things I have ever seen.
Free speech is being challenged on college campuses across the country and you need look no further than this inability to handle criticism as the reason. If you are waiting for the money quote of this piece then here it is: Not enough people are bullied in their youth. As a result, the thick skin that is required for a robust culture of free speech has never formed, and adults in their early twenties run to college administrators demanding action be taken to protect them from harmful speech, much as I ran to teachers to protect me when I was nine years old.
They would benefit from the same lesson I had to learn as a child: Deal with it.
Obviously, there are levels of bullying that have to be addressed. As I mentioned earlier, I was on the brink of suicide for years. In the CNN piece, Mark O’Mara points us to the tragic consequences of severe instances of bullying, which he sees as a justification for government action.
I got involved in the conversation about bullying after a young Central Florida girl, Rebecca Sedwick, leapt to her death from a water tower in an abandoned industrial plant on September 9, 2013. She had been aggressively bullied by other girls. After one of the girls commented about the suicide on Facebook — essentially admitting to the bullying and showing no remorse — Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd arrested her. The charges were soon dropped, however, as bullying is not a crime.
Last year I proposed a bill in Florida that would have defined bullying and made it illegal. A similar bill drafted by Florida state Sen. David Simmons was introduced, but unfortunately died in appropriations. Nonetheless, over the next year I’ll be campaigning for the bill to be reintroduced, and I’ll work to rally support for the bill so we can get a sensible law on the books to protect children who are victims of bullying.
As someone who has lived through the type of hell O’Mara is citing here, reading the story of Rebecca Sedwick reveals that almost none of the adults who looked at this case have even scratched the surface of what she was likely going through. That’s a good indicator that their solutions will fail to address the real problems.
According to Judd, the girl was upset that Rebecca had once dated her current boyfriend and began bullying and harassing her more than a year ago when they were both students at a Florida middle school.
In addition to sending harassing messages over the Internet, the girl physically attacked Rebecca at least once, Judd said. She also recruited the girl’s former best friend — the 12-year-old charged Monday — to bully her, Judd said.
This explanation describes the situation entirely too neatly to actually cover the entire story. Children are not driven to suicide by the abuse of a pair of classmates who won’t leave them alone. They are driven to that point by systemic harassment by numerous people, which is never counterbalanced by positive interactions with any of their other peers. If they want to know who was culpable for her death, there are likely dozens of classmates who contributed to the problem. Arresting those who bully overtly would likely do little more than ensure that all future bullying is done covertly.
If zero-tolerance laws for violence in schools teach us anything, it’s that a one-size-fits-all approach to discipline is doomed to failure. Not all schoolyard insults are bullying, and treating them as such will only lead to an environment where children who are behaving like children find themselves randomly expelled from school for being the one who got caught doing what everyone else does. O’Mara acknowledges this in his piece.
Those who oppose laws against bullying raise valid concerns. We don’t want to outlaw childhood. We don’t want to criminally punish kids for being kids. We don’t want to make it illegal to call people names. Who would judge these things anyway?
The same people who expel kids from school for chewing their Pop-Tart into the shape of a gun. O’Mara’s faith in the common sense of school administrators seems misplaced.
To the extent that real systemic bullying exists, it has to be tackled on an individual level. Teachers have to proactively look for it and stamp it out on their own. It thrives in the dark, when the adults who are nominally supervising aren’t paying attention or don’t care. These aren’t things that can be corrected legislatively.
Rich was always talented, and the images he has created are powerful. They are being used, however, in efforts to push legislation that will do more harm than good, and leave us with the illusion that the problem is being solved. In reality, I fear it will only leave us softer and more prone to claiming the status of victim. I dissent.
The cruelty generally comes in the form of generating laughs at someone’s expense, so the funny and the cruel are often intertwined.
I have read that essay a few times before. While there is overlap, choosing to pursue interests that don’t result in popularity or that may make you unpopular (the primary subject of the essay) is sufficiently different from the oppressive and entirely unjustified bullying Frank described that I thought it was worth delineating.
I don’t think I agree with your conclusion. I would love to snap my fingers and eliminate all bullying from my youth. It left me with scars and not lessons. I’m not a different person now from having had endured it.
Everyone is different, but I’d be shocked to find you have not developed any mental toughness that you didn’t have before.
I was never bullied when in school. I was just ignored, which was fine with me. Then I was homeschooled. I confess that I’m pretty sure I turned out just fine without that tempering. I am happy being me. So while you may be able to draw the conclusion that it is better to be bullied than to bully, you seem to leave out the people that benefit from being in neither position.
If I did, it wasn’t worth it, and I doubt I had it as bad as you.
Depends on what you value I guess. Not worrying about what other people think about me is pretty valuable when I compare it to the behavior of people I knew growing up, who are now sniveling cowards when interacting with other people.
My experience was a little like Sabrdance described. I was picked on in grammar school because I was big and bashful and awkward and I wouldn’t fight back. One day I had my Ralphie moment, and my own personal Scott Farkas went flying into a wall. I pasted him one on the snout on the rebound. Mr. M, the nine foot tall black man who taught gym, broke it up and called me into his office.
The office where he kept The Paddle, the one with the air holes drilled through the blade to cut down on air resistance. The storied Paddle of Inexorable Justice. I was doomed.
Mr. M looked down at me and said in an octave Barry White could only have dreamed of reaching, “Don’t punch with your fist like that. You’ll break your knuckles one day. Now get out of here.”
It wasn’t the last fight I had, though I didn’t have to often. I still don’t like it and try not to put myself in a position where I’ll have to.
Never have broke my knuckles either.
Most people turn out just fine no matter what the specifics of their background are. There is a narrative surrounding bullying though that implies that we’d be better off if it never occurred. I’m suggesting that leads to a culture where few people are tough enough to stand a robust culture of free speech.
Har! While also having developed a certain mental toughness (partly from having been bullied), I’m, as well, old enough to have developed another discipline: sustaining my attention. I read the whole thing.
I’m one who has been glibly throwing around that aphorism about sticks and stones for years. But, I’m not ready to forego its use; if I use it, I’ll now be more mindful of the context and to whom I’m giving the advice.
What I went through when I was picked on was nothing like the torment you suffered, so I think there may be mild situations where that pithy saying may put some children on the road to learning how much control they actually have over how they feel; that they can, to some extent, choose not to let others control it.
And, even if it’s not useful to many children, I believe it nicely describes a truth about human nature we should remember, and that should be reflected in our laws.
I simply question that it was the bullying and not who you inherently are that did this.
I didn’t mind the anti-bullying homework my 10 year old brought home one night. Yes, a poster. I thought is was OK to make kids think about it. mMy wife’s advice to our daughter has always been, eye for an eye: someone hits you hit them back, insults you insult them back, my wife is Mexican. When I was getting bullied as a kid, my parents told me to fight back.
Bill Gates had some famous advice: “Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.”
Never was this prediction more evident than at my 10 year high school reunion. The class bully was working on an assembly line and Leonard, his prime target senior year, had just graduated from Harvard medical school and was thoroughly enjoying his status as “babe magnet” for the evening. :)
This is a topic close to my heart as I endured my fair share of bullying.
Today’s anit-bullying campaign is disingenuous. Kids are pure evil and must be tempered with a stern hand. The current programs are so liberal adults can pat themselves on the back more than anything.
Bullying is what it is and it’s better to learn how to defend yourself then expect others to simply stop.
As for any personal affect, it made me much less empathetic they I think I would have been.
When I was about 20 I heard that a bully of mine form middle and high school had committed suicide. Many people from my high school attended his funeral. I wished he had done it about 6 years earlier.
That was a powerful piece, Frank; it took some guts to write it.
Same here: my father was emphatic with me that he and my mom would back me up if I ever got in trouble for defending myself or others from a bully. As it happened, I didn’t have much trouble, but it was downright liberating to know I could count on them if I had justice on my side.
The difference in me from then to now is stark.
I re-read your post Frank after commenting (above) on a fellow student who had been bullied in high school. A cheerleader and member of the “it” crowd in high school, I was friendly with this individual as we shared AP courses and I was respectful of his intellect. He usually sat with me and my friends at lunch but we never really knew what happened to him on the school bus or outside of the classroom.
I believe we could have done more to help him with the bullying; that a little peer group pressure could have been the ultimate solution to the problem. No need for legislation or massive adult intervention if you can get a group of enraged popular girls on it.
That’s true. And your end of it bolsters the case Frank made that the most popular kids don’t generally do much picking on, themselves. As for me, I was friendly with some of the football players and cheerleaders and other “naturally” popular kids in school, who, even if we didn’t hang out together, would come to my defense.
Still thinking of the top/bottom alliances you see:
My freshman year of high school, on our big annual band trip (I play flute & piccolo), we went to London to be in the New Year’s Day parade. Three absolutely beautiful junior-year girls (also flutes) invited me to hang out with them for the trip, and we became friends (to this day), and it made things an awful lot easier on me. Two or three years later, before that year’s big trip (competition in Orlando) the band director came to another friend and me and asked us to take an awkward freshman under our wing for the trip, which we did.
At that point, I figured that the director had done the same for me in my freshman year. It really made a difference! That was probably the best intervention that any teacher had ever done for me. In band, there really wasn’t the picking-on that went on elsewhere in school, but what this did was get me better socialized with popular upper-classmen, which kept me from feeling isolated, and it gave me confidence and better maturity.
Thank-you, Mr. Huffaker!
Agree.
I went to high school with my cousin who was a stellar athlete and all-around tough guy. I was no wilting flower at 6’2”, 215. One day my cousin found out that a nerdy but nice guy we knew was getting bullied. My cousin promptly found the perpetrator, stuffed the guy’s head into a locker, stood back and kicked the door shut two or three times splitting the guy’s ear open. It was made clear that any repercussions would lead to additional punishment. For the record, I just stood there with my mouth open the whole time.
It had a dramatic effect on bullying throughout the entire school. The violence of action had an impact that no teacher or administrator could match.
I guess I see the more important relationship in the structure of our public schools as being a key part of the problem. Also, that structure allows bullying to flourish. In terms of being different and being bullied, I don’t think they are unrelated at all. That doesn’t mean being unpopular is the same as being brutally bullied, perhaps I should have made that clearer.
I think the social structure of our schools, and the fact they they seem like meaningless containment units to most students breeds a social environment where bullying is a natural response for bored, frustrated students, who want to lash out. That doesn’t justify or excuse any such behavior, but it in a small part help explains it. Also the fact that the students who are most likely to bully and be bullied are the two classes that have no place in the approved social hierarchy, the two social units at the bottom. Bright or shy kids who are socially awkward, and poor students from difficult and often abusive homes. At least in my experience as a student and now a teacher. The third group that does much of the bullying are members of that privileged class.
Plus, students and children are ruthless barbarians in many cases, regardless of what “system” they are in and evil knows no age limit. It seems to me that our schools are designed to produce miserable bored students, who are artificially placed together in meaningless age cohorts, and the wrong values are rewarded by the schools and by many teachers,whether intentional or not.
Students who are bullied and who seek to defend themselves often end up punished worse than those who submit to the bullying because administrators do not wanted bothered, and teachers can do little to help those outside of their classrooms, and adult intervention usually makes the bullying worse once the adults are not around.
I think there is also a danger in the fight back mentality, it can breed destructive behavior. After being brutally bullied both verbally and physically from 1st to 9th grade, I developed defense mechanism, some of which were verbally abusive in themselves, and only after I had physically fought off several assailants in 9th grade, and only through the influence of my church did I start to examine myself and seek to stop the destructive behaviors I had developed to “defend” myself, that often made me a bully. Only by college did I learn to deal with my anger issues, some of which still haunt me to this day.
Was bullying good for me, no it wasn’t. It damaged many of my good characteristics and lead me to form some evil propensities of my own. Public school was no friend to me.
Girl power!
It’s utopian, in any event, and not worth considering any more than how many angels could dance on the head pf a pin. However, I don’t agree with your proposition that the salutory effects of this tempering are as direct or as clearly beneficial when netted with the costs. Like the broken windows fallacy where it’s tempting to look at the brand new windows and the well-fed glazier and find it appealing, one really can see some benefit accruing from having been bullied and survived*. But there are other more positive ways to develop emotional strength and confidence without having to pay the high cost of having been bullied.
* This benefit is hardly enjoyed by all. Without searching for studies or something like that, my own experience tells me that it’s a 50/50 proposition at best. Sometimes the bully-ee never finds a voice and never experiences much growth.
The most common charge against home schooling – usually made by people who’ve never known anyone who was home schooled – is that children need to develop social skills and that can only happen around other kids their age. It strikes me as ridiculous to think that children are going to teach other to be civilized. It’s kind of like thinking that if we put a bunch of criminals in prison together, they’ll teach each other how to behave properly.
I didn’t expect it would be a popular opinion.
But just as if you take a 100 people and put them on a diet and exercise regimen, many will benefit far more than others, yet everyone will move by some amount in the right direction.
Similarly raising children with out adversity insures they have less skills to cope with adversity as adults.
The difference is that diet and exercise, while difficult, aren’t damaging, and the direct result will be better health; there really is no shortcut or alternative. There are ways to acquire skills to cope with adversity, though, that don’t cost the damage and scarring that bullying costs.
I reject out of hand the logical consequence that the best society is one with a moderate amount of abuse.