What's hanging? Apparently, this girl. These girls bully a girl to suicide without repercussion and a boyscout who brings a camping knife to school gets expelled? What the fuck? Focus: Share your experiences with bullying - did you have your own personal O'Doyle or were you a veritable Nelson in your younger years? Alt. Focus: Discuss this travesty.
I've been up all night, so I'm not sure how coherent or valuable this post will be. However, I'm not bringing up this story ever again, so here are some spoiler tags. Spoiler My school had a bully named Stanley. He was a truly fucked up individual. Stanley was a big kid for his age and combined with being held back for at least one year if not two allowed him to pretty much terrorize us all. I had to deal with this fucker a lot because our last names started with the same two letters and I was always paired up with the guy because as one teacher said, "I figured [Gravitas] is the only other kid big enough to ever stand up to him." This wouldn't have been a problem if it wasn't for the fact that I was a pussy. I don't ever remember anyone fighting Stanley. Everyone was so fucking afraid of him that he just did what he wanted. But I guess that's the standard bully thing right? I could rehash some lame ass stories about some of the shit he said and did to my classmates and myself, but I'm hazy on specifics. What makes me remember Stanley is how he dropped out of school by the 7th grade and sometime when he was 14 raped his male five year old cousin. Apparently the same thing happened to him when he was five. So when Stanley gets picked up for this he has to take a ride to the juvie center which in a bigger town two hours away. On the way he convinces the cop he has to take a piss, but in doing so he picks up a rock and throws it at the cop with enough force and accuracy to knock the cop out. He runs off with the cop car. Eventually he gets picked up and I don't know what happened to him then. And here is the part I just remembered and am feeling quite a bit of shame just thinking about it. My senior year in high school I see this guy again at my hometown's elementary school track meet. What the fuck? A child rapist at an elementary school track meet. I wish I was the the type of guy to just go give him a beat down. I had six inches on the guy easy, but when we made eye contact I looked right the fuck away. Some of that shit must run deep.
I was always a chubby (fat) kid, and we moved around a lot while I was growing up, so I had a lot of issues with being bullied. I was always able to put up with it, but of course it did get to me. I never have really been too confrontational, so I never had a moment where I stood up to them, like the dramatic moment from some crappy movie. However I eventually learned just how pathetic bullies are. I lost all the weight and got quite skinny. And they still made fun of me for being fat. They had nothing else that they could rib me on so they stuck with what they knew.
I was in a magnet program in middle school for science and engineering. What they don't tell you before you sign up for these programs is that they put them in run-down shitty neighborhoods to help elevate the schools rating, thereby getting them more money from the state to help improve the school. Its circular bullshit logic, but hey, that Florida for you. They think by throwing 90 science geeks into an 1,800 person "Dangerous Minds" situation will somehow improve the school. My first week of 6th grade, I was walking out to the bus just after the bell rang and out of fucking no-where, this guy hits me twice on the left side of my face and takes my backpack and swings me into a school bus side-view mirror. He took off. I was out fucking cold. I literally did nothing but walk to the bus. Evidently, he was arrested. I have no idea what happened after that. There was also a day, once a year, tenderly named, "Cracker Day". Basically, if you were white, just stay the fuck away. I had a few friends who got their asses beat because they were there and didn't know better. Goddamn, that place was ghetto, but I got an awesome education.
I remember getting bullied by two older girls when I was in, oh, maybe Grade 3/4? Somewhere around that time, at any rate. I can't even remember what they said or did, just that I was afraid of them and that they never missed an opportunity to pick on me. I told my father about it, and he gave me this sage advice: "Next time you see [bully], walk right up to her and without a word punch her as hard as you can in the face. If the school has a problem with it, have them call me." Being a girl, I of course didn't do this. I walked right up to her and slapped her as hard as I could. Never got bullied again after that. I think parents and teachers do two things to make it worse: they interfere, and they command their kids not to respond in kind with violence. If you give children the confidence and the permission to stand up for themselves, things ususally turn out all right. When you start trying to solve your children't problems for them you make them even bigger targets. Likewise, if you say that they cannot defend themselves you are robbing them of what is often their only recourse. Remember: punch (or slap) bullies square in the face, as hard as you can. Problem solved.
Sixth grade I had this same thing happen. I'm walking home one day, this dope head from the block rolls up, follows alongside me telling me he's gonna kill me, and drives off. I didn't run home and hang myself. My brother was just discovering roids at the time, I go home and tell him, and never had another problem. I learned early to keep bigger friends around. I got saved a severe ass beating freshman year thanks to smoking up a bunch of seniors over the summer and during free periods. I had a big fucking tough guy from the soccer team wanting to kick my ass for getting fresh with his buddies girl, and out of nowhere I've got a full grown man of a friend wondering what the problem was. I was never really bullied thankfully. I looked crazy as fuck from smoking too much dope at an early age. We'd walk around downtown with the crackheads at 2 or 3 a.m. with my buddies and no one fucked with us, so middle/high school kids definitely stayed back. I learned early appearance is everything. I was skinny at the time but a shirt, sweatshirt and a flannel underneath a leather jacket bulks you right up.
I really don't know how I dodged the bully bullet but besides from a handful of incidents of being picked on for my height, there really weren't any long standing patterns of bullying or a bully that had it out for me. The worst occasion was in first grade when the class bully picked me up and tossed me in the metal trash can in the bathroom during recess. By the time recess was over someone that saw it ratted him out. I really didn't know how to react and just claimed that I didn't know anything when we were taken to the principle. I became friends with him when we did a play together that same year. Unlike the poetic justice you hear about bullies dropping out in middle school or sprouting early only to be outgrown by everyone they picked on, this kid turned out to be a line backer and played for Iowa last I heard. That's not to say we didn't have our share of pint sized punks who dropped out as soon as it was legally possible. If I had to guess I think it was a combination of not doing overly "dweeby" things that make you a target for bullies and the fact that I was a sort of class clown with a really fowl mouth. I really got along with most everyone. I guess I could just be in loser denial.
Well said Dcc001. My mother was a minister's daughter, and I spent my first years in school at a Baptist Elementary school, so you can imagine that Jesus was crammed down my throat and was taught that the way to resolve conflicts was to turn the other cheek. While that worked ok at the church school, once I went to public schools, I was in for a real shock. My mom was no help; when I finally stood up for myself in the fourth grade, I beat the hell out of this kid right infront of the principal. She was mad that I got into a fight! I calmed down some for the next few years. When I would complain about being bullied, picked on, maliciously made fun of, she responded with the sage advice of telling the teachers, and sometimes implied that it was my fault, "because most people don't have all those problems," so it must be something I was doing. Yeah, that works really well, doesn't it? It was worst in Junior high. I was on the football team, and like most school teams, it was filled with assholes trying to prove to everyone what badasses they are*. I went through hell those two years. I wish I could tell y'all that I finally stood up and kicked some ass, but that didn't happen. Instead, I ended up getting transferred to the other high school, and I got a fresh start where I didn't take any shit, and the people were just better all around. It also helps that the previous summer my mom died, and I didn't have her apron strings tying me down. I genuinely feel that I wouldn't have been able to make that transformation if she had still been alive. These days I give my son the advice that he needs to stand up for himself, and it seems to be working fine. *Looking back, I'm pretty sure now that at least a few of those guys (the ones who bullied me) were on steroids. They had all the symptoms: terrible acne, body hair that most 14 year olds don't have, blast-furnace tempers, and much more muscular than the rest of us.
I moved during the summer in between grade three and four and continued to talk to some of my old friends on MSN, which was the new craze at the time. One day I was talking to Kaitlin when she told me that one of my other friends had just died the night before. She said that the friend and her mom and been driving and it had been very bright and their car was struck by a train that they didn't see coming. Obviously, I was pretty upset by this and I went crying to my mom. I stayed home from school for the next couple days because I was so distraught. My mom called a friend from the old town a couple days later and found out it wasn't true. A year or so later I was reading a "Chicken Soup for the Kids Soul" book and found the exact story she told me in there. Yep. Pretty fucked up thing for a nine year old girl to be doing.
I'm sure the females on this board can identify with this: girl bullies are the most vile, awful beings. At least with a male bully he'll just give you shit by himself. A girl will relentlessly harass and torture you and bring along her equally sociopathic sheep girlfriends to do the same. My father makes more than six figures every year. But in the true fashion of misogynist control freaks, he made my mother shop in the bargain bin for my clothing. Due to my clothing choices and the fact that I was a shy loner, I was the target for most of the cunt girls in my grade. I could mostly ignore it until I was a junior in high school. And then it got to be too much thanks to this one incident. On the day of the winter dance, I was at a hair salon getting all prettied up. Apparently, I was able to be two places at once, because at the dance, one of my friends came up to me to let me know of this. "You better stay away from Charlene. She's pissed." "About what?" "Were you at work today?" "No, I was off." "Well, her boyfriend told her that you were at work and you asked him out on a date. Now she's pissed." I thought I could easily explain away my innocence in the matter. Surely she could understand that I couldn't be at a hair salon and at my job at the same time. She didn't accept my version of events. And then came the relentless harassment from her and her vapid whore friends. I had a class with every single one of her friends and let me tell you, hearing "Cunt!" and "Whore!" whispered at you in every single class is the makings of how people snap and shoot up their schools. Not to mention that they called my house and wouldn't stop with the threats of an asskicking. My father told me to knock that fat cunt down and just fucking pummel her. My mother screamed at me that I would be grounded for a year if I fought her and got suspended from school. I honestly had no idea what to do. Finally, three weeks after this harassment started, my mother saw how badly I was being worn down. I was coming home from school and would spend at least twenty minutes in the bathroom with the anxiety shits coupled with a few vomiting sessions. I refused to come out of my room. The final straw for my mother was me, on the verge of snapping, coming to her in hysterical tears begging her to do something. She did something. Luckily she was friendly with Charlene's mother and they had a little talk. The day after, Charlene left me alone, but did throw a parting shot at me that I "needed my mommy to fight my fights for me." This time I turned around and called her a fucking bitch. She didn't say anything back and left me alone. To my immense relief, she transferred schools at the end of the year. Due to the mere fact that I, a 16 year old female, needed my mother's intervention in a bullying problem makes me feel like such a wuss. Oh, and fuck that cunt Charlene.
Most of the kids who might have given me a problem in high school were on the football team. So, I joined the football team and acted like the charming motherfucker I am. Problem solved. It's amazing how much more genial meatheads are when you're wearing the same color shirt as them.
I was never bullied in elementary, but I did stand up for one friend in grade 4. He was new, and kept getting picked on by some retard who couldn't spell his own name. After watching for a few days I remember finally approaching, talking to him and learning that he was a pretty cool guy. The next day he was going through the same routine, so I casually walked and stood up in front of him, looked at the bully in the eyes who was about an inch taller than me and told him to "Hey, fuck off." A word I had learned from my older sister a few weeks back at that time. That was the last of that. I do have that one day in Middle School when this kid named "Erik" who was a bag of douche to everyone tried to make himself look good in front of his friends. I was buying something from a vending machine when I turned around and he pushed me into the machine. He had the most "mean/angry" face ever and for some reason I always found it to be funny. He asked what made me laugh, and I said when he pushed me it tickled and told him to do it again. So he did, and he pushed me harder. It hurt, but the look on his face was priceless and I had my hands clenched into tight fists ready, just in case he swung. He thought he was so tough, but every time I got shoved into the vending machine I laughed more and more. He then turned back only to pretend to take a swing at my face, but he stopped short. Must have tried to get a different reaction. I must have looked like some crazy kid just laughing non-stop at him, so he gave up and walked away confused and a bit embarrassed because I didn't really give in.
Everytime I see a story of how somebody got bullied so bad that they commit suicide, I am particularly horrified. Not because I was on the receiving end, but because for a short time in my life I was probably the worst kind of bully. I am so thankful that it never went that far, because I would never be able to forgive myself if it had. I was always the smallest kid in class when I was younger, so I was always picked on to some extent, but in about 4th or 5th grade it got much worse. For some reason one of the "more popular" kids figured I wronged him in some way, so for about a year and change I got beat up pretty much every day by this kid and all his friends. The punch in the face technique works wonders if the bully is working solo, not so much when there are ten of them, and I got pretty fucked up a few times. Soon after that, for (incredibly enough) unrelated reasons I switched schools, where I was bullied as well, granted on a much smaller scale. That lasted until I joined the wrestling team and started winning matches in front of the whole school. I quickly found myself on the opposite side, and along with all my new-found popular friends bullied this guy "Marcus" mercilessly. We did some pretty bad shit to him, pushed him in the bushes when we were outside, threw backpacks at him, generally pushed him around and made fun of himny chance we got. I knew it was wrong, but that didn't make me act any different, (and I eventually took the same behavior to summer camp*). On the last day of middle school for me because I was going to high school a year earlier than anyone else for wrestling, the poor kid had to run from his last class to his mom's car which was running already, and peel out like he'd just pulled off a job. That wasn't enough for us, so we went to his house when no one was home and did some minor vandalism, broken outdoor lights, condom on the doorknob, peeing on his pool house, real lame fucking shit. later the cops came and we had to apologize to him and his family, but it didn't do any good, the damage was done. A year later, Marcus comes to the high school where I've already been, and he repeated so hes now a grade behind me. When wrestling season started and I saw that he was on the team, I decided that the best way for me to make up for the way I treated him was to help him as much as I could. I started training with him everyday trying to make him a better wrestler, introduced him to the other guys on the team so he'd feel like he belonged, and even introduced him to some girls. I'm not gonna lie and say he was the prom king or anything after that, but he was a much happier person than I knew in middle school, and I like to think I had a hand in that. So yeah, those stories are really hard for me to read, because I know from both sides of the coin how bad bullying can be, and I shudder to think what it would have been like if I had gone too far tormenting that poor kid. *years later one of my best friends told me that when he first started camp that I had been so mean to him that he nearly didn't come back to camp. I can't for the life of me understand why he took any shit from me at all, seeing as how he was easily twice my size, and the kid can fight. But, I still feel really bad about it.
I moved from my first school district before third grade, and went to Palmer Lake elementary for 3-6. I hadn't had to make new friends since kindergarden, I was smarter than most of the other kids, and I read a lot. Not very helpful with kids being as cliquish as they are at that age. It got pretty bad seventh grade, junior high. Remember those two or three kids that only hung out with each other because no one else would? Yeah. Anyway, for unrelated reasons, I ended up moving to my Dad's before 8th grade. I had just gotten my braces off, I got a new haircut, a whole new wardrobe... I remember thinking, "I know how the popular kids act. I can do that." So I was a whole new me in that district. Until one of the real popular kids took it into his head to try and play roller derby with me during a roller skating unit in gym. I put him down pretty hard, and he threatened to end me at the bus stop. Of course, I played soccer after school 4 days a week, and usually rode my bike the fifth, so it just got worse and worse over time because it wasn't getting released. We held a fundraising carnival on the back lawn of the school for the Oklahoma City bombing, and during it, this guy's friends kept trying to shove me into the water near the dunk tank. After the carnival, we had one more class hour, and this guy's friend kept bouncing a tennis ball off my head on the way down the hallway. I was fucking STEAMING. I went to the bathroom, splashed some water on my face and looked at myself in the mirror, thinking, "Is it worth it?" I decided it was. I went up to the one who I believed was the instigator of the group (turned out later it was his best friend, he didn't really care all that much), tapped him on the shoulder. When he turned around I cracked him in the eye, put him in a headlock, bounced him off his own locker and told him "tell your friends to leave me the fuck alone". Then I calmly went to class. A couple minutes later his best friend, the guy behind it the whole time for no apparent reason, busts in held back by a couple teachers screaming and cursing, "I'm gonna fuckin kill you faggot..." etc. I got suspended for three days, had to pay for the shirt that got ripped somehow. After I came back, a couple guys tried to prove they were tough by picking fights with me in the hallway. Following my Dad's advice, I calmly offered them the first shot. neither took it, and I never had a problem again. Granted that one group of dipshits (who got smaller and less popular once we hit highschool) carried a grudge through the rest of school (bleaching my step mom's flower bed, for instance). But by the time High School ended I was better friends with more people at school than they were, and generally accepted by every group. Some of the guys that started in that group became my good friends junior and senior year.
I've been on both ends. For most of sixth grade I hung out with a bunch eighth graders from my neighborhood. I think they only let me hang out with them because I had an Xbox that I would bring over so we could system link Halo. This was admittedly a different kind of bullying then shaking a kid down for milk money. After all, I could stop hanging out with them any time. But I didn't, so they always treated me like shit. Here's something that's changed since you gramps were in school: Airsoft guns. It seems like every motherfucker in my school had an airsoft gun, and we even brought them to school in our bookbags then took them out as soon as we were off school grounds as we walked home. This was bad news for me. All my "friends" had the power to instantly cause me a welt's worth of pain since they were fucking packing heat. I was shot point blank in the head execution style more then once. That fucking hurt. I suppose old fashioned fist beatings might actually hurt more, but there is a lot of psychological terror involved with being surrounded by loaded guns. Don't buy your kids weapons. After those dicks went on to highschool we pretty much parted ways. I then took a lot of pent up aggression out on other kids, one in particular named Aaron. I was pretty much constantly mean to him for the next four years, which I feel bad about since we are still friends-- I hope I didn't permanently make him a cowering pussy (he kind of is). I would: - Impose a tax on him at lunch. Literally, for about a year I think I forcibly took a dollar from his wallet every day. -Me and other kids would go to his house after school while his parents were still at work. We would split up and basically wreak havoc on his house. Some of the shit was just terrible, like impaling his favorite stuffed animal on a tree, and some was funny, like downloading gay porn on his family computer.
I was tall, really skinny, and had the upper body strength of a female in grade school and high school. An easy target, I was afraid of fighting, mainly because I was afraid of getting hit. In college I joined the MMA team, participated in full contact sparring, and hit the weights big time. After that, I was hoping someone would start with me so I could practice. But at that time I was 6'6, 240 pounds solid, so it was a lot harder to start a fight. The day my kid comes home and mentions a bully, I'm going to take him in for boxing lessons and get that fucker into fighting mode.
I went to Primary school with a cunt of person named Sam. Sam's parents were rich, snobby, and generally let Sam get up to anything he liked, and for this Sam thought he was better than everyone. Sam managed to get his crew of friends to follow him around everywhere he went and would all join in in rediculing anyone he felt like, and on more than one occasion I bore the brunt of it. Some of you may read my post in the "beatings" thread, so going to my father would've only ended in him giving me some bullshit advice that made him think he was doing a good job as a parent before turning back to another beer. So I took it, kept it to myself, and continued day to day with my life. When we changed schools, Sam and I ended up in the same high school, and were on the same bus. Several weeks into school, he managed to get a few more cronies to jump on his bandwagon, except this time I wasn't having a bar of it. He tried to pay me out, and abuse the shit out of me, but I turned it round on him - I can't exactly remember what was said, but I was relentless. I kept on and on abusing him, standing up, yelling in his face, and not one of them said anything. This guy went home crying, and as shitty as it may sound, I felt fucking good about myself.
I was short, skinny, and could barely speak English so yeah take a guess which side of the coin I was on. Combine that with the fact that when I moved here I was way ahead of the rest of the class academically so I always knew all the answers. The worst part was, I was so low on the totem poll that I didn't even get picked on by the bullies. I was picked on by the kids who the bullies picked on. I guess they felt they had to get their anger out somewhere and why not on the little kid with an accent. This was all in elementary and early middle school. My afternoons were spent with videogames and books as my friends. I managed to gradually lose the accent and had a couple friends at least in later middle school. For high school our town merged with a neighboring town and they outnumbered the kids from the town I was in by about 3:2. Because of this the entire hierarchy was completely shaken up. Really through sheer luck of having some classes with the popular kids from the other town, I ended up becoming friends with most of them. By this point, bullying wasn't really a big thing anymore at least in our school and I was fairly tight with most of the popular kids so it really was a totally different world for me.
I was one of those "moves between the tribes" nice guy-types that got along with most people, but earlier in public school I was picked on by this typical fat kid bully named Andy that pushed every kid around that couldn't knock him over single-handed. He focused on me because I was small and shy, and when I became fed up finally, I did something about it the kids deal with this type of thing: impulsive violence. While most kids back then had plastic lunch boxes in early public school, I opted for one of those metal kinds construction workers used because I thought they looked cool. Right when school ened, he was waiting for me one foot off school ground like usual (he WAS easy to outrun, at least). I marched straight up to him with my lunch box and cleared his sinuses with it, and he dropped like a wet pasta noodle to the ground. I wasn't a hero, in fact most of the people that witnessed it thought it was an asshole cheap-shot but fuck all of them in their puckered assholes. That was the only time I was ever sent to the principal's office in public school.
I got bullied every single day of elementary school. I remember one of the guys shoved me to the ground at one point, then started to walk off. I picked up a rock and threw it at the back of his head and hit him bang on. Got in a fucking heap of trouble. My parents were called in and had to talk with the principal. Basically my parents acted entirely sympathetic to the principal and told her that I would get punished at home. On the way home my dad commended me on a job well done. Frankly I didn't mind guys trying to bully me because I knew I could always fight back against them. The worst part of getting bullied was having a group of girls tease you every single day. Those thoughts are still extremely painful for me and I really dislike thinking about how I was treated in elementary and middle school. It's probably a strong contributing factor to my intimacy issues and distrust of women.