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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.
I was picked on by other girls in middle school, and I distinctly remember one incident with a certain girl, a former friend, who had been on me for months. I finally pushed back by writing a cruel poem about her and sharing it with another student – and the girl immediately told our teacher, and I was sent to the principal.
Advocates of bullying legislation don’t understand that the cruelest bullies are often clever, too, and will use anti-bullying legislation as another weapon against their victims.
I was bullied as a kid something fierce, although never so severe that I considered suicide for it. Maybe it wasn’t so fierce. Maybe I am better able to compartmentalize things. I wonder, in retrospect, how much of it I brought on myself. Also, I wouldn’t (and don’t) hit people back, so they know they can bully me with impunity. I was told, maybe two years ago, in the work place “You know, she only yells at you because you’re the only one who doesn’t yel back.”
There’s something to be said about defending yourself. There’s also something to be said about no escelating things. I could have yelled back at that lady, then what? It would just descend further. The alternative sometimes is to turn the other cheek.
My story is very similar. I spent a lot of years in Catholic school and was bullied by a lot of kids. It stopped the day I popped a kid in the mouth. I still have the scar on my knuckle, I’ll show it to you if you ever want to see it. I went home absolutely convinced I was toast. I told my mom what happened and she said “Good for you!”
Years later as a grown up, I had a conversation with my grandmother. She said that she used to watch my cousins bullying me in her backyard and wonder “Why doesn’t spin lay those boys out? He bigger than they are.” I told her I was always afraid I’d get into trouble.
Looking back, I agree: being bullied built character in me. I am fortunate I guess that it never drove me to suicide, not even thoughts of suicide. But it did give me tools to deal with criticism. Because guess what: there are bullies in corporate america, too!
Fred, I’d bully you for sure!
I remember a kid picking on my little brother. I went up to him and said “You see that boy over there? He’s my brother. You touch him again and I’ll break your [expletive] legs!” thinking back on it I feel like a complete fool for having said that to a little kid (I was about 22). But he never bothered my brother again.
No, the consequences of Frank’s position is that if a world without childhood bullying were to exist then it would lead to a worse culture than one where some bullying goes on. He would be worse off now if he wasn’t bullied. Argo, a moderate amount of bullying leads to best outcomes. Argo, the ideal society has a moderate amount of bullying.
My position is, even if it helped him build tougher skin, it wasn’t worth the the cost. He’s rationalizing his terrible childhood experiences, which could be psychologically satisfying, but it is not something we should be drawing these kind of conclusions about.
The underlying truth here is that hardship produces character. That has always been true, and it will always be true. A fundamental component to the downfall of America is affluence. We have no character, because we have no real hardship. Bullying is a form of hardship. It sucks to get bullied as a kid. But for many folks, that hardship built in us a character that makes us who we are now.
I think you mean “ergo”…
Well…for some people maybe it did build character, for others, it didn’t, or doesn’t, and for many it may have fostered some good things and some evil things at the same time. The live a life without pain, hardship or adversity is an unhealthy aspect of our culture, and I, like many above, are healthily skeptical of the whole anti-bullying program, mostly because it has so little power to actually address real bullying in school.
The central premise though, I think, is highly flawed. What works in one individual case may not work in another. I know other people who were bullied who never really recovered from it, or who survived by developing very unhealthy coping mechanisms they have had to deal with for years. So why would we want to encourage it. Finding better ways to help children survive bullying, whatever their needs or experience would be a more productive approach to the reality of the problem.
My experience wasn’t anywhere close to Frank’s, but any boy in the 3rd grade that wore glasses was going to get a fair amount of stick. I was only in 1 actual fight, however, and it wasn’t much of a fight. A larger kid was really giving me the business, pushing me around, etc., so I hit him. Once. Very hard. Your point about observant teachers vs. oblivious teachers is very germane; the teachers on the playground had both observed some of the build up & asked other kids what was going on. I got a swat; not a talking-to, not a time-out; a wooden instrument to the gluteus maximus. I deserved it. But so did the kid that had been provoking the situation. Never got messed with again.
Later on, in junior high, I still got a fair amount of stick for being a new kid & the whole glasses thing. Instead of the Marquis of Queensbury approach, this time I chose to ignore them until things like report card time and/or sporting events came around. It’s remarkable how a far superior GPA and/or athletic success can change minds. (con’t).
(con’t from previous)
Boys have been strong-willed jerks since the beginning of time; parents have to be the ones that shape, hone & break the will (if necessary) of these kids without damaging their spirit. You can’t do it starting in middle school; it has to start right away. They have to be taught the difference between being mentally tough and being an abuser. A mentally tough person (like Frank) can take what comes their way and not let it deter them from what they want/need to do. An abuser will need to be in complete control over his or her environment or they won’t be able to cope.
We are becoming a mentally weak society, and this fleshes out in our public policy discussions. Refuse to serve a same-sex “wedding”? You hurt someone’s feelings, and therefore must be punished. Dare to criticize a President’s policies? You’re clearly a racist. Foreign bullies seek to overrun a country in Europe? They’re involved in “19th-century colonialism”. Like that’s really going to change behavior. Sometimes, words have to be backed by overwhelming force & the willingness to use it.
I think this can be true for some kids only: kids who aren’t tormented to the extent Frank was, or who have an uncommon ability to listen only to their reason and to whom it matters not a whit what other kids think and say about them. Maybe such kids do not exist, though. Until Frank’s post, I hadn’t given the destructive power of words in some situations enough thought, I guess, but I trust his judgement about it. That’s why I said in a previous comment that I’ll be more careful when I decide to use the “sticks and stones” aphorism.
BUT, I will use it, and I’ll certainly continue to believe that it should apply to adults who should know that words are different in kind from physical force, and should know that they have considerable control over how others’ words affect their own feelings.
Maybe. Sometimes. I believe the default should be to defend myself. But, sometimes there’s sense in living to fight another day.
You’re arguing for a clear binary choice, and I’m arguing that there are other options for processing painful inputs and developing character – better options; that’s not a false middle.
Thanks…
I suspect the campus anti-free-speech crusades are something else. Lefty activists learn that if they go into high dudgeon mode, the liberals who run the colleges will indulge them by suppressing their opponents’ speech. But it’s an artificially cultivated kind of outrage, a learned response that gives them political power. Quite different from the genuine hurt suffered at the hands of real bullies.
Nobody is encouraging bullying. We are simply saying it isn’t the plague of the 21st century that everyone thinks it is.
I was bullied a bit, but never by the cool kids. Has that changed? Do cool kids bully now?
If the mere act of treating uncool kids as not being cool does not yet constitute bullying, just wait; it soon will.
I was bullied as a youth and am the better for it too. The causes of the bullying were varied and became clear to me throughout Primary and Junior High. The situation improved steadily over time as I used various methods to overcome the bullies — physical force and threats of force, resolve, wit, humour, bribery, rhino skin, etc. I learned what worked to deter different types of aggressors. I learned what could turn a follower to my side. I learned who to take out. I learned what to ignore and what to deal with. I learned to seriously review myself, improve my weaknesses (physical and verbal fighting ability) and sharpen my skills.
By high school I had judgment and a store of knowledge for dealing with the world which has served me increasingly well. I never held a grudge against those who bullied me when I was younger and found many of them oblivious to their prior behavior. Some are failures, some have been successful.
Maybe it was my personality, but I never had suicidal thoughts. Although there were plenty of times when I had to steel myself, physically and mentally, to go out on the playground.
It did teach me that the world is a hard place. You make it what you choose to make of it. It’s in your hands. Don’t be a victim.