Perhaps by now you’ve seen Phoebe Prince’s story floating around online. The 15-year-old moved from Ireland to Massachusetts last fall. She began dating some kind of star athlete at her new school, South Hadley High, and evidently, though the details are hardly clear, that made some of her classmates angry. So they reacted in the manner high school students from time immemorial (or at least since the time there were high schools): they called Phoebe names like “slut” and “whore,” they threw things at her as she walked the halls at school and on the streets on her way home in the afternoon. Instead of handwritten notes they used Twitter and Facebook, but otherwise this was standard suburban teenage girl protocol. One day this past January, as Phoebe was walking along, one of the young women who’d been tormenting her drove by, and threw a can of Red Bull at her. Phoebe hung herself when she got home that day.
Phoebe’s tormentors were recently charged with crimes, but I doubt the charges will stick. And in any event, some of them seem a little off-the-wall – for example, two young men were charged with statutory rape, which one hopes is not referring to consensual sexual activity Phoebe might have engaged in, because that would seem a mite like posthumous slut-shaming, by you know, continuing to make her sexual activity the issue? And the growing media narrative of “pretty Phoebe” vs. the “Mean Girls” suggests a reductive reading of young intrafeminine dynamics I’m not sure I can get behind. That is not to say that Phoebe “deserved” the bullying she received, but rather to say that what she got is common, and problematic because it is common, not because it was an exceptional case of bullies targeting an otherwise pretty and angelic girl. You know, as opposed to their ordinary, more worthy targets, like ugly girls and fat ones.
Stories like this of course touch a nerve for me and I imagine for a lot of people who were bullied at school. I was nowhere near as pretty or adept with boys as Phoebe, but I can relate to people whose lives were made a living hell. In the seventh grade, a set of girls I had known basically my entire grade school life decided I was crimping their style, and wrote me a lengthy letter detailing all the reasons they’d rather not hang out with me. They told me a boy I liked had a crush on me, and I awkwardly tried to flirt with him until he came up to me and explained nicely, in the hallway, that these girls were lying to me. (Looking back I kind of admire the balls it must have taken for him to do that.) They left notes in my locker, told everyone I picked my nose, called me fat and said my hair was greasy. My experience was mercifully cut short when a friend of mine died in a accident and I became socially off-limits, an untouchable who no one wanted to set off.
But just those few months – which, looking back, seemed an eternity – have often led me to remark (flippantly!) in adult life that girls should be in solitary confinement from about ages twelve to sixteen. Yes, some of the cultural narrative regarding the nastiness of young women owes more to patriarchy than it does to actual lived experience. But a lot of it is actually reflective of young women’s behaviour, and the aggressive bullshit behavior between women is really too much to take, a lot of the time. Tina Fey, after all, had a point when she made Mean Girls – but that movie, popular though it is and was, never made much of a difference in the way we encourage young women to behave. And hell, the way we encourage grown women to behave. I’m sure I’m not the onl one here who thinks this behaviour often continues long after high school.
I’m not trying to clutch pearls here, far from it: it may not be such a bad thing that women are not the passive, docile swans that this culture would prefer us to be, swimming gracefully around the fishbowl, gently tossing polite how-dee-doos to every woman we meet. I don’t mind that we’re not always braiding each other’s hair when we have a spare moment. That said, I have been wondering recently, in reference to certain things going on in my personal life and also, hell, in the feminist blogosphere (click through for Meloukhia’s excellent recent post on the subject), to wonder if I’m ever gonna get out from under the clawing women sometimes engage in with each other. I realize that certain wounds are deep and old, and that we all need to be open to criticism and I in no way want to silence legitimate criticism, and finally that men are just as guilty of this in their own way. But I’m exhausted, on a near daily basis, by all of this. It makes me want to live in books instead of the world, and that doesn’t do anyone any good. Least of all the Phoebes themselves…
I hate how no one seems to take bullying seriously. Bullying by girls and bullying by boys tend to be different, but they both exist and neither seems to set off the adults’ “something’s really wrong here” alarms. At least not until someone dies, and then everyone is suddenly all interested in bullying for all of about five minutes, and then it’s just back to “kids will be kids” and “grow a thicker skin.”
I’m 25 years old, I can trace the origin of both my eating disorder and my depression to the ten years of childhood bullying I endured (there are genetic components, of course, but the bullying was the trigger), and I have never really fully recovered. (From the bullying, the eating disorder, OR the depression). Bullying can be a BIG deal.
Yeah, Melissa, one thing I meant to mention in the post is that it’s kind of scary how much baggage I still carry from those middle-school insults in my adult life. Yeah, yeah, I know we’re supposed to get over it, but you never quite do. Example: the girl who wrote me that letter friended me on Facebook, sending all these “oh hey, how are you, what’s up with you, your life seems great!” And I had to sit on my hands to not write back, “Do you not realize what a bitch you were?”
Oh, thought of something else I’d like to add. Even the things that bullying doesn’t directly cause (like Phoebe’s suicide, or my ongoing emotional problems) are often all part of a domino effect it’s really difficult to escape from. Did my childhood bullying directly cause all the problems in my life? Of course not. But if I hadn’t been so depressed and helpless, would I have stayed with the man who abused me for a year in college? What about the man who raped me in grad school? Probably not.
Bullying is wrong. Bullying is stupid. Bullying is pointless. And sadly, bullying is accepted as “something kids have to go through.”
Well, I went through it, and it left scars on me that haven’t healed over 30 years later. I’ll be damned if this culture of insensitivity and social laissez faire will be allowed to continue. I certainly don’t want my kids a) being bullied or b) participating in bullying. I’ve made this quite clear to our boys; I intend to inculcate this in my daughter. I also intend to hold the school accountable if it happens.
This wave of “no bullying” policies is, frankly, bullshit. School administrators don’t enforce them. They are so worried about the self-esteem of their charges, and so steeped in the “kids will be kids” and “bullying is part of life” culture, that they can’t see the forest for the trees. This kind of thing isn’t necessary. It isn’t helpful. It isn’t right.
I’m a big believer in drawing lines in the sand. You need to give kids the latitude to be kids, but you draw a sharp line and say to them “past this, you shall not cross, lest you be damned.” I mean it. Make examples of these bullies. Drag their parents in and let them know they need to get their kids under control, or the school will dump them like yesterday’s meatloaf. Make bullies apologize to their victims in front of school assemblies. Do whatever it takes, but we can no longer sit back and allow these things to happen.
No kid should be bullied — ever.
That’s a really sad story – and you’re spot on in pointing out that it’s not uncommon. I was bullied primarily by boys who called me fat and occasionally savage, and a frenemy who, though we were close once, distinguished herself in middle school by offering to be my secret friend, ignoring me in the halls but talking to me online. When I realized what she was doing, she told me she knew I was too immature to handle it and dared me to name 50 friends. I was so relieved when facebook came along so I didn’t have to try counting them myself anymore.
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It’s funny, since the more I think about it, pretty much every single way a girl or boy can be bullied ties back to the weapon of mass destruction otherwise known as The Patriarchy. Think about it: girls are bullied about their looks (obviously not conforming or unable to conform to beauty norms), deviating from the norm when it comes to dress or behavior, being too enthusiastic about learning (heaven forbid that women should rise above their station!) or in this case, dating the “wrong” kinds of boys (the popular girls have exclusive rights to them—or rather, the other way around); boys are bullied for some of the same reasons, particularly when intelligence is seen to clash with prescriptive masculine athleticism, but most notably in this argument ANYTHING that removes them from traditional masculinity: liking artistic things, having friends who are girls, being emotionally sensitive—those set off a torrent of homophobic and misogynistic slurs. I will never, ever forgive my tormentors for how they fucked up my life in middle school, but I do somewhat pity them for unconsciously choosing to become patriarchal tools.
(PSoul, I’d been intending to write about this for a while on my new blog, and this’ll motivate me to expound on it at greater length, thanks!)
PilgrimSoul, I know what you mean about the apparently complete lack of self-awareness of former bullies. I had a roommate at prep school who basically tormented me (with my tacit permission; I continued to be friendly to her) for two years, until I started to distance myself from her. (A lot harder to do when you live at school and in a 40-person dorm with someone.)
When I finally “broke up” with her, she couldn’t believe that our other friends didn’t fall in line behind her (to be fair, she’d been not-so-nice to many of them as well) and sent one of her freshman minions to my room to tell me that I’d been a terrible friend.
Said girl – now woman – recently friended me on Facebook (I accepted out of curiosity, I admit.) and has been leaving comments on my wall and on my foodblog talking about how great my life seems now. Everyone I still hang out with from high school has asked me about it, and none of us can believe the gall.
Obviously, people change as they mature, and she’s probably far less “mean” than she was at ages 14-18. But I still have no desire to actually know her in any way, shape or form.
I have a hearing loss (jaundice at birth, yippee) which in turn led to a lisp that I still have to a certain extent. These days I just occasionally sound like I’m from Boston, but in school…well. Since my last name starts with one of my problem letters, I got a lot of mocking in the Barbara Wa-Wa accent from, oh, about the third grade on.
Most of the overt bullying was from boys, but the girls managed a campaign of ostracizing that made certain that I had no friends from first grade through twelfth. As a result, I had really low self-esteem and a tendency to do almost anything to please until I finished college. And even after, though I think I’ve tamed it in the last couple of years.
The results of bullying are something that can last a lifetime, if they don’t kill you first. My bullying started when we moved to the town where my dad’s brother lived when I was 7. None of the kids in that town had ever been out of state, let alone out of the country, and when they found out I had been to England (my dad had been in the Air Force for 10 years) and that we had stopped at Disney Land on our move to Illinois from Washington state, the bullying began. It continued in jr and sr high thanks to my name and Cheech and Chong (one girl thought it was hilarious to turn my name, Mariellen, into Sister MaryElephant from one of Cheech & Chong’s routines).
So I turned to books early on and said to hell with having friends (I’ve had a few friends in my life, but only one who hasn’t shit on me eventually, and she passed away 13 years ago). Now, my husband and my books are my best friends (in that order), and at my age (56), that’s all I really need. Well, I do have my son and his family, and my husband’s family. Being fat could lead to bullying still, but FA has helped with that. I’m really good at talking back now (with a bit of snark, usually), and if it’s someone I don’t know, I don’t care what they think (if it’s someone I know and will have to deal with on a weekly/daily basis, I try to educate them, otherwise, well – my weight is not a topic for discussion and if they ignore that, then they deserve all the snark they get from me when they comment).
I was bullied off and on in high school, tormented in middle school, and was so happy in college that the bullies seemed to disappear. I will allow that I don’t help situations by having an easier time defending others as opposed to myself, but it was still annoying.
Now I have been sucked into a bullying workplace and after over two years am leaving. Adult women I have learned can be just as bad, and in a workplace like this, it is hard to maintain not only a positive attitude, but hope. I have gone to every possible person to try to stop it, and now it’s gotten to the point where one of my supervisors said to me yesterday “You shouldn’t let it bother you how poorly everyone treats each other, just choose to ignore it.” Yeah lady, and that is why it CONTINUES.
People should not ignore it or think kids will be kids, a lot of those kids grow up to be nasty adults, at which point they seem to just run rampant. Adminstrators in schools, parents, everyone, needs to say something and step up. It’s sad that in Phoebe’s case the rules were enforced so poorly and those that tried to stop it, never got anywhere. I hope people learn from this, but I worry as PSoul said, that the charges probably won’t stick. Something needs to happen though to let those kids know what they did was wrong, letting them go with no repercussions is worse.
Yep, Facebook is really the great equalizer, isn’t it? I was bullied through elementary and middle school, until I reached high school, joined the goths/new wavers, and just stopped caring. Elementary school was a cycle of befriending the class outcast (often, but not always, a new kid) – I’ve always sided with the underdog, and this also gave me some shelter from being the target myself. But invariably, at some point during the school year, the “outcast du jour” would suddenly become the most popular kid in school, and zie would invariably then turn on me in an attempt to demonstrate hir “coolness” and alliance with the cool kids, then I’d be the outcast the rest of the year, until the cycle started again the next fall. Ahh, the joys of childhood. Oddly, I’m not one of those who spend much time reminiscing for those days.
And I most definitely still encounter mean girls, even now that we’re all in our 20s-30s and in graduate school. The biological station I worked at for a while was notoriously cliquey, like high school or summer camp all over again, and I’ve seen girls there pull all the same crap they did back in middle school – teasing and laughing at other women in front of their faces and behind their back, spreading rumors, ostracizing, etc. etc. I mean, really – will these girls (they don’t quite earn the term ‘women’) ever grow up?
…oh yeah, I got off on a tangent and never got to my point re: Facebook. Several of the old mean girls have friended me now, and one of them is a neighbor and acquaintance of my best friend from high school. Said mean girl just finished a master’s degree and came bragging about it to my friend who knows our history, and who proceeded to brag about how I’m doing a PhD and blah blah blah…which reportedly shut the mean girl up right quick, and I haven’t heard a word from her on FB since. Payback, baby
@Betterfishtofry – that’s a great point about adult bullying! At the organization where I work right now there are a couple of board members who just like to throw their weight around, and in addition to being completely disingenuous in person, bring this sense of malice to their interactions that seems totally misplaced. It’s so very 7th grade.
Meloukhia’s post was interesting, but I felt like it was hard for me to grasp exactly what she meant without concrete examples. What is bullying behavior, exactly? Is it always intentional? Is it characterized by language, by tone, by attitude? I guess I mean that specifically within the online community she is talking about. Which I think operates differently than the bullying you are talking about, PS.
What strikes me about being bullied, especially from the examples left in the comments, is that years later the bullies are reaching out (via facebook). They do seem unaware of their cruelty- and I’ve experienced that, too. I wonder if they reach out because bullying was a form of self-preservation, almost- not something they wanted to do, but did out of fear, or lashing out because they didn’t want to be excluded/made fun of, so they did it first. And that can be painful, too, and looking back they remember things differently or feel guilty and want to be friendly, realizing that. I don’t know.
We moved a lot. So I was always the new kid, and after the second high school I finally said screw it, and tried not to let it bother me so much.
However, we did stay in one place for all of my middle school years, and that’s one time I really wish we could have moved. In seventh grade, my best friend started hanging out with some of her previous best friends again, and suddenly I was this HUGE SLUT. And ostracized, and the rumors were pretty epic. I’d slept with the football team, teachers, etc… All while still being a virgin.
I was fat, ugly, the fact that I did have bad skin didn’t help, and got straight A’s. Until I started self-medicating with pot and alcohol because of the constant victimization.
I have no patience for people who excuse bullying, because thanks to bullying I had to deal with a full blown case of alcoholism by the time I turned 21. Yeah, turned legal to drink just in time to quit doing it. Also, the eating disorder, and I can lay being raped right at the foot of all the slut talk. And, let’s not forget being hit with a car.
Seriously. There is nothing harmless about bullying.
Granted, most of this happened in Boise, ID – date rape capital of the world. It’s all but a varsity sport.
I have a good friend who was bullied for a year in middle school. It was so horrible that she was homeschooled from that point on. Anyway, now, 15 years later, she has ended up having some classes with one of the girls who had been mean to her. (She said this girl wasn’t one of the worst, she was more of a “follower” in the whole situation, but nonetheless…) Anyway, apparently this girl seems like a perfectly nice person as an adult. And as people have been saying, she seemed completely unaware of how cruel she had been and what an effect the bullying had had on my friend.
My friend, who I guess is just a much more forgiving person than I am, has concluded based on this that the bullying must not have been as bad as she remembers it, or at least that since this one person doesn’t seem to be an absolute monster, that it wasn’t actually that big of a deal. I don’t know. I guess I would be less skeptical if she hadn’t spent 15 years talking about how horrible the kids that did that to her were, and how suicidal she was at the time.
I had pretty much the same experience as PSoul and have often thought that if there is a Hell, it will be repeating my seventh grade year in an endless “Groundhog Day”-like loop. Tween and teen girls have a capacity for cruelty that adults downplay and underestimate, both out of sexism–because our sweet little angels can’t be THAT nasty!–and out of good ol’ head-in-the-sand unwillingness to deal.
I also think adults underestimate the way the internet gives bullies and troublemakers additional tools and ammo that weren’t available when parents were coming of age, and they underestimate the damage that can be done on-line. Thank Maude I grew up before the advent of the internets.
I’m curious about the indictment of the boys–well, young men, I guess–for statutory rape. As PSoul says, I hope it’s not some kind of retroactive slut-shaming. The facts of the case are being kept under wraps, but I wonder if it has to do with the boys themselves using their sexual relationship with Phoebe as a way of tormenting her or a reason for participating in the bullying themselves. At any rate, their indictment does make me hope that in this case the prosecutor is willing to prosecute boys for being boys as well as girls for being girls.
I’m not surprised at all to hear the anecdotes about former bullies friending their victims, and seemingly having no idea how mean they were. I think that’s a function of how much bullying is accepted as a “normal” part of childhood, and just something that kids do. Why would former bullies feel that they did anything wrong when, by and large, we live in a society that doesn’t treat their behavior as wrong unless something drastic happens (like a victim committing suicide)?
I think Cat’s comment is spot-on. Bullying and cliques are tools to enforce the social hierarchy, and the structure of any given micro-hierarchy reflects the greater, systemic, kyriarchal juggernaut. We’re all trained from a very young age to aspire to climb the social ladder, and we’re competing for a limited number of spots at or near the top. It’s no wonder kids seize upon differences, or lash out at the new-comer who swoops in and “takes” a prized social attribute like a desirable boyfriend or girlfriend. And it’s no wonder these types of behaviors can continue into adulthood.
The bullies I went to school with were boys, so I know from experience that girls are not “worse.” (Though maybe girls tend to go after their friends/former friends, which is its own brand of cruelty.) But why do girls/women turn on each other? Is there really any difference between female and male bullying? The only thing I can think of is the massive self-loathing we develop when we’re teenagers–something that I think is specific to girls. So we’re either cutting ourselves or bullying each other? Just thinking out loud.
I would guess that, as a general trend, male bullying tends to be more physical (beating people up, stealing things, etc.), and female bullying tends to be more emotional (calling names, spreading rumors, etc.). But that’s just a hunch, not any sort of proven information.
Girls are definitely not worse. But people clutch their pearls a little harder re: girls because “boys will be boys.” Boys are supposed to harass and torment other kids! And they do.
I would really like to hear from former bullies in an environment like this. You never really get their perspective once they’re grown up. Maybe it’s because they tend to grow up into people we don’t associate with (because they suck)?
Oh boy did that sound gender-essentialist. But in a patriarchal society, in which (we’ve already noted), bullies tend to be strongly influenced by the patriarchy, it makes sense to me that the bullying would tend to take forms influenced by gender-essentialist ideas of masculinity and femininity.
Wow, PilgrimSoul. You’re much nicer than I am.
Had that been me, I would have come right out and told her how much that letter hurt, and how I was surprised at her gall in contacting me. I’ve just gotten to the point where I can’t sweep that kind of stuff under the rug, and figure I have nothing to lose by telling nasty people off even years after the fact. It’s about accountability for me, and I have done my own work contacting people I’ve wronged in the past to apologize. It didn’t mend friendships, but there was a certain peace that came from it. None of my former bullies have contacted me, though a few are on Facebook.
Interesting point about wanting hear from bullies, I can’t speak for myself but I have a friend (yes, yes I do know that sounds like every crap movie pretend friend story you’ve ever heard but bear with me because it’s true).
Anyway my friend bullied another girl very badly when she was 11 years old (this was before I joined this school, I went to a lot of schools growing up for one reason or another), anyway she remains consumed by guilt for this over 20 years later.
She first tried to make amends when she was 15 (which was soon after i met her although that has no bearing on it) but unsurprisingly the girl who was bullied had no interest in her attempts to make ammends and eventually in their 20s contacted her and told her that she understood why she was trying to make it up but that she couldn’t forgive her.
Anyway the point to all this is that my friend always sites this as the one thing she wishes she could recall and the main impact it has had on her life is that she uses it as an example to her children the whole time to make it clear that bullying is never acceptable.
It’s worth noting that my friend will also admit that she bullied this girl because she was herself seen as square and uncool and she thought that if she picked on someone else first then people wouldn’t pick on her. The sad thing is that that worked and the other girl was entirely isolated.
re. Sarah MC’s question…or is it that former bullies just willfully ignore what they did? or block it out? Or are (rightfully) ashamed to admit to it? I mean, I’d hope at least some of them grew up, got their horizons widened, and cut it out (though commenters’ stories about workplace bullies prove this isn’t always true). I’m not looking to excuse what they did, but there are probably people out there who wouldn’t admit to the nasty stuff they did in middle school, or would pretend to not remember if questioned directly about it. Which isn’t really helpful to addressing the problem, of course. How great would it be if mothers of teenage daughters said “I hurt a lot of people in 7th grade, and I wish I hadn’t.”
I never had really vile stuff directed at me along the lines of rumor-mongering, but hearing “chicken legs” 100 times isn’t fun (that mostly came from boys). But what made me sob in my pillow at night was hearing the other girls talk about the fun things they’d done together that weekend/last night, that I was never a part of. They were nice enough to me in class/at lunch, but I never made it into the “circle.” My mother was right, I could have invited _them_ to do things more often, but my fear of rejection was HUGE. Like, big blinking red target huge.
Lordy, my first week at college, when I stayed up all night talking to new people, the angels were trumpeting, I kid you not.
and I didn’t see Emilyanne’s comment before I posted- great to hear that one woman is turning her past bullying into something positive.
But what made me sob in my pillow at night was hearing the other girls talk about the fun things they’d done together that weekend/last night, that I was never a part of.
I relate to this so hard, even now.
@ShinyObjects: I relate to experience of the first day of college so much. That first day I felt a bit like I had been granted a clean slate and I could start from whatever point I chose and present exactly the person I wanted to be.
I developed incredibly young so I was already and “other” in first grade. I had people make very loud, very public comments about my breasts in front of whole classrooms. When I changed schools, I was an actual “other” in additional to a physical “other”. My classmates made it very clear to me that I was the least attractive, the least desirable, the least fun, that I was at fault for alienating other for being smart, and as a result I was systematically excluded from all social engagement. I developed a serious eating disorder, and eventually gained a huge amount of weight (which of course physically otherized me even more) by which time certain instances of bullying actually required police involvement.
The scars from elementary school through high school are very painful and often feel very raw and fresh. I think for most people who are bullied those scars linger and can be reopened quite easily. As an adult, I find forums like this blog, where we can share our own stories (which have so many similarities) and empathize with each other to be one of the places where the scars can diminish.
I am also shocked (well maybe not shocked, just deeply saddened) by the degree to which administrators, teachers, parents, and adults in general who supervise minors, are oblivious to the traumatic power of psychological bullying. For far too many, bullying is still equated solely with actual and potential acts of physical violence.
What galls me the most about all this is that most of my former bullies probably are entirely unaware about their effect on me and couldn’t give a rat’s ass about it if they found out—I can just see them saying “So? She’s still a loser.” And nearly a decade after the fact, there are times where I still harbor (irrational) revenge fantasies. Maybe it’ll get better when I’m older, as I’m still only 19, but it’s extremely hard for me not to see the bullies as either evil hand-rubbing Disney-style cartoon villains contriving to ruin my life, or entirely insubstantial ignoramuses incapable of ever developing a sense of remorse. (I recently read a great article defending grudge-holding in, of all places, Reader’s Digest. Unfortunately I can’t find it!)
As for Facebook and bullies, it’s happened to me too, but I just block them outright. That shit’s unforgivable.
Those who bully others should be expelled as an unhealthy disruptive element. Full stop. There’s an anti-bullying policy I can get behind, Newt.
I remember so little of my childhood because I have blocked it out. Repressed it completely. My mother will tell me stories of how she would call the school and demand that they speak to a bus driver who allowed the other kids to force me to sit on the floor while they kicked me for 20 miles or more – I arrived home in filthy and torn clothes and was reluctant to “tell” on anyone lest I be labelled a rat. I only ever liked college. I hated school.
I think bullies don’t remember because while what was done made a major impact in the life of the bullied, the bully hirself wouldn’t have to deal with any lasting repercussions. An offhanded cruel comment a few times a week might have left an indelible mark on the target, but words and small actions take so little effort on the part of the perpetrator. Words fall out of your mouth and then they aren’t inside you any more, even if they landed in someone else.
Isn’t the common theory that Bullies are acting out to make themselves feel better? Each small, even devastating act made toward another only gave them tiny relief, which is quickly forgotten as the loneliness or desperation or whatever else is driving them rolls back in.
I fear that I may have said something or done something horrible as a child that just didn’t register. I remember some horrible things done to me that I’m sure the other actors don’t remember at all.
But what made me sob in my pillow at night was hearing the other girls talk about the fun things they’d done together that weekend/last night, that I was never a part of.
Me, three. I can remember being 10 and sobbing at the bottom of the stairs about this. And crying equally as hard at 25 and feeling the exact same wya.
OK, here goes.
I was not a bully at school. But I did engage in what I consider to be bullying behaviour within the group of kids I grew up in (family friends) all of whom are still in my life, and with whom I have really loving adult friendships with.
This all happened under the age of 10. I was the oldest in the group, so everyone pretty much did what I said. We would play a game that involved all the other kids lining up and me shouting at them until they cried, for example.
Because of this post, I was just chatting with one of the others and she remembers the shouting game as ‘army’ which she adored, apparently. She said that none of them *really* got upset. That’s not how I remember it.
I suppose you could argue “no harm, no foul”, but my motives at the time were not playful. I liked the feeling of power, and I wanted to make them cry.
I am the very definition of “bleeding heart” now, about almost everything. But there is no doubt in my mind that I was trying to bully those kids, whether they felt bullied or not.
And I have no idea why. And why I didn’t continue to behave like that. Perhaps I just grew out of being such a jerk? I really don’t remember.
But there you have it. I feel very ashamed to admit it, but there it is.
I cannot understand the logic underlying school. Yes, let us place all of the children who have not yet developed moral reasoning skills in one building all day long with only one adult per 30 children and see how things turn out. I’m sure it will work better than prison.
I was never bullied in school, mainly because of an apathetic disposition and innate arrogance, but I don’t understand why we as a society let this continue when the cause is pretty obvious and there must be less harmful way to educate the young.
@bellacoker: It’s not the idea, it’s the execution that’s the problem. One adult to 30 kids is about two times too many kids. One of the consistent features of bullying tragedies is the utter failure of adults to control the situation and lay the (figurative) smackdown when needed. Cheating-a big no. Disruptive behavior-a big no. Bullying-a big “let’s look the other way”. I fear that part of this is due to the school of thought that says this is a good toughening experience for kids, and besides, I went through it and I’m fine, so…Wrong all around.
“I fear that part of this is due to the school of thought that says this is a good toughening experience for kids”
With regards to that point: I took a lot of shit from other kids in elementary and middle school and to be honest, it did toughen me up. I’m now really assertive and don’t care much if other people don’t like me in most cases. But, I was never the focus of prolonged tormenting. I wish I could say why — luck, probably, plus the fact that I was very willing to go directly to the teachers at the slightest provocation, and I got a lot of good support at home. I think from the outside, it can be hard to tell the difference between situations like the one I was in and some of the things that you guys have recounted (and, to be fair, other people might not have reacted in the same way to those stimuli). Arguably, this means that there should be very low tolerance if any for that behavior. However, if things happen outside of class, it can be difficult for teachers to notice or to feel like it’s within their jurisdiction, especially regarding things that happen outside of school entirely. (And, to be honest, I have mixed feelings about schools policing student behavior outside of school in the first place.)
This is not to say that there aren’t situations where the teacher can clearly see what’s going on, should stop it immediately, and doesn’t. Those happen and that’s a huge problem. But I don’t think that changing teacher behavior would eradicate the problem. To me, it’s much more concerning that there are parents who don’t know that this sort of thing is going on or even encourage their children in this sort of behavior.
I recall no bullying for me growing up but that’s because I was in my own world for the longest time. I didn’t have many friends, I never really tried to make them. And when someone would approach me I often ignored them. Why, I don’t know. I don’t remember really yearning for friend either. But I do remember watching and seeing many things happen. I remember us loosing a student in high school due to bullying much the same way as this story goes. Only then it was a boy who took his life. I remember that the parents were the ones that went under a whole bunch of questions- both sets of parents. I think we empower many teenagers now and because of this most teachers feel like they can’t act as effectively. And many parents refuse to teach and discipline the kids while refusing to allow others to do so as well.
So really where can the fault land? Should teachers have more say or should parents start waking up to the fact the little sweetums is in fact human and capable of lies and evil?
I had a fairly positive elementary experience which made 6th grade that much more inexplicable to me. The junior high was 6-8 grades and they did nothing to prevent the older grades from being in the hall at the same time as the younger. This meant that not only was I TORTURED by the monsters in my grade but often by their older siblings, relatives, neighbors, and friends. I had very curly hair and the junior dudebros in math would spit wads of paper into my hair, knock my books off my desk, “trip” and fall into my breasts, and one morning when the teacher stepped out into the hall, they pushed me out of my desks, dragged me across the floor (by my hair and shirt which they tore), and turned the trash can over me. The girls openly mocked me – we were required to change clothes for volleyball and pe and the girls circled a petition which they turned in requesting that I change elsewhere because being good at sports, not being allowed to shave your legs, not being allowed to use makeup, and wearing more pants than skirts automatically means you’re a huge lesbian. The coach (who later came out several years later) was the only one who punished them but even she thought it was a one time thing.
I was also in choir and landed a lead role that year in the Christmas pageant. We had to perform for the school and then for our parents. During the school performance, I had to ignore candy wrappers, chip bags, napkins, spit balls, a banana peel, salt and sugar packets, and a sock being thrown at me. The performance was stopped twice so the choir director could tell them to stop but it continued.
I was repeatedly sexually assaulted in classes, hallways, and the bus. In fact, when I couldn’t take it on the bus any longer and began walking home, I soon had to alternate my path home as they actively began searching for me. As I walked home a few times, I was spit on, had sodas upturned over my head, had trash dumped on me, and was even run off the sidewalk into a storm drain just after a heavy rain, I was lucky I did not drown.
Not one girl would be my friend, openly or otherwise. I spent multiple days with nothing but a barrage of insults hurled at me to my face often in front of faculty. I started spending lunch in the library just to escape for a few moments (thank god the librarians were sympatheitc).
At 12, I dreamed and day dreamed of revenge and not just some bad fate to befall them but I actually imagined myself as the instrument of their demise even though I had no experience with firearms. I also began stealing my aunt’s blood pressure medication and had gone so far as to look up how much I’d need to take to make it all end.
I told my father several times, begged him in fact, to let me be homeschooled, join an education co-op, or I even went so far as to walk to a local private Christian school by myself to inquire whether they had scholarships available.
Speaking of Christians, most of my prolific abusers and torturers also went to the church I was forced to attend on Wednesdays and Sundays and I could not even escape their bullying there. I began skipping church choir and youth group to escape them. When the “concerned” directors of these programs asked my father where I was, he became irate with me. When I told him I just couldn’t take it anymore, he told me that I needed to be more Christ like and “turn the other cheek.”
My parents divorced at the end of 6th grade. My mother moved to a new subdivision 45 minutes away and when asked where I wanted to live, I didn’t hesitate to pick her just for the chance to get out of that school.
The new school, while occassionally having a few negative experiences, was like heaven in comparison.
I still have intimacy issues, sexual dysfunction, disordered eating, insomnia, and difficulty making new friends stemming from that 1 hellish year of 6th grade.
Yeah, I’ve been spat on, made incessant fun of, exluded, rejected, etc. It’s so weird to look back at pictures of myself when I was a kid and realize that I didn’t resemble the caricature of myself that was daily thrown in my face. I remember so many times wishing desperately for the earth to open so I could fall away and hide when a person came into the room. I still get nervous to the point of shaking sometimes when I enter a room of people I don’t know well. I sometimes find it hard to make eye contact.
There was one semester in college, however, that I participated in being mean to another girl. She pointed it out to me, and told me that the “it was done to me” excuse is total bs. I was deeply ashamed, and have especially since then always tried to be scrupulously honest with myself about my motives in my interactions with other people.
This acceptance of destructive behaviour does no one any good, ultimately. I have a one-year-old daughter, and am nervous about the upcoming years, knowing how hurtful people can be. For now, I try to just rejoyce in her ebulliance, and promise myself to support her to the fullest of my ability. And that includes being as clear-eyed as I can be about her own behaviour, too, as well as that of those around her.
I was also bullied at high school, by boys and girls.
I found going to the teachers didn’t help, and at one stage the questions got to be such that the girls who would do the bullying were asked what is it I did that caused them to engage in that behaviour. I had one full year of unrelenting bullying, and then the next year it lessened somewhat but didn’t stop.
I was so embarassed, and felt that it was my fault, that I couldn’t even speak with my mum about what was going on. Instead I tried to make mum change me to a new change school.
As I have gotten older, I still don’t understand why the girls and boys bullied me. I think it would be hard for me to even consider having people in my life (irl or online) that were not respectful of my personhood.
@ Cat, the harpies discussed an article on grudge holding, it may or may not be the one you are speaking of, have a look here: http://www.harpyness.com/2010/02/04/the-grudge-report/
“I doubt the charges will stick. And in any event, some of them seem a little off-the-wall – for example, two young men were charged with statutory rape, which one hopes is not referring to consensual sexual activity Phoebe might have engaged in, because that would seem a mite like posthumous slut-shaming, by you know, continuing to make her sexual activity the issue?”
Not clear how filing statutory rape charges is slut-shaming the victim. Consent is not a defense to this crime, so they cannot say she was “asking for it”. In Massachusetts, sex with a child under 16 is statutory rape regardless of the age of the rapist. Young men are regularly charged and convicted of statutory rape. These charges will stick if there is evidence.
The other charges are a mixed bag. It might be hard to prove civil rights violations, but following a girl home from school every day sounds a lot like stalking.
It would be a good bet that most of the defendants will take a plea bargain.
Strangely, while I exhibited many classic traits of the bullied while at school – very bookish, far too clever for my own good, and only good at sports the school wasn’t remotely interested in, few close friends – I entirely escaped bullying. In fact I can’t think of anyone at the place who was bullied, it was just remarkably laid back. Luck of the draw I guess, but something I am profoundly grateful for now.
Look, these students aren’t just being prosecuted and singled out for blame just to get the town off the hook, they may also be targeted to help get the school off the hook, and with that reduce the chance that school officials might be charged as well, and that the parents of the kids may become more liable in a civil suit, and maybe the school less liable.
It’s hard to imagine that given how little the school intervened that they’re liable, maybe even some in criminal ways, of something like negligence, lack of due diligence, failure to exercise a duty to care, etc.
The students involved and indicted may well be guilty of some or all of what they are charged with, but given the extreme nature of the charges (and so many charges) it seems odd that the DA would file no charges — if that’s what’s happening — against anyone besides some students, and speak so respectfully of the school:
http://bostonherald.com/news/columnists/view.bg?articleid=1243566
(from the Boston Herald editorial)
“A lack of understanding of harassment associated with teen dating relationships seems to have been prevalent in South Hadley High School,” she said.
Basically, that’s a nice way of saying teachers who might have been able to intervene in the “aggressional behavior” that drove Pheobe Prince to her death were either ignorant as to what was happening under their noses, indifferent or both.
(end quote)
…
And if you don’t mind one other quote:
Educators could have stopped the torture
By Margery Eagan, Boston Herald
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
http://bostonherald.com/news/columnists/view.bg?articleid=1243309
Read the entire editorial. The last three paragraphs are especially telling:
So here was a young girl from Ireland, new to the school, new to America, new to a high school’s cliques and brutal pecking order. Here she was left on her own against not only the nine teenagers charged yesterday and their enabling friends but also against the adults who ignored her pleas.
The public may wonder, said Scheibel, whether the failure to act “by faculty, staff and administrators . . . amounted to criminal behavior. In our opinion it did not.”
In my opinion, that failure was so monstrous it’s almost incomprehensible. But we now know why Phoebe Prince did not believe her torment would end. She told her mother, who told the school. Yet on the day she died, she was attacked in the library right in front of a teacher. She was attacked again in the hallway and again as she walked home. Two hours later, her little sister found her wearing the very same clothes she wore to school.
…
I’m interested in learning more about the school’s role in this and steps they may be taking to shift responsibility and liability away from the school, administrators, and teachers who may be involved — and who with potentially far deeper pockets than working-class parents are vulnerable to being sued.
I would like to see more reporting on the teachers and administrators involved in this case. The story goes that teachers and administrators, as this story in part goes into, were aware through multiple sources including directly witnessing incidents, that Phoebie was being severely harassed and did essentially nothing. How is it that such serious charges can be levied against minors and nothing at all against adults who were in a position of responsibility, who had a “duty to care”?
It is reasonable to ask if some sort of deal was made to help school staff avoid charges, maybe in exchange for testifying or providing other information which helped build a case against the students. If there are no charges brought against any staff or administration member, and the charges against the students remain as serious as they are, I have to wonder if part of the reason for that may be because of an agreement of testimony from teachers and administrators in exchange for avoiding prosecution, testimony which helped make the charges as serious, even to the point of being extreme, as they appear to be..
Of course the students who committed these offenses should be punished. I don’t know how much punishment they should get, but more than just being suspended or expelled, if the charges are true. But if they are potentially facing all of these charges and the school staff was as aware and engaged in contact with students and Phoebe’s parents as the story is reporting, it would seem they clearly failed to act to protect her, and ought to be vulnerable to charges themselves.
If they aren’t, there’s certainly a story there to look into.
@Jex: “An offhanded cruel comment a few times a week might have left an indelible mark on the target, but words and small actions take so little effort on the part of the perpetrator. Words fall out of your mouth and then they aren’t inside you any more, even if they landed in someone else.
Isn’t the common theory that Bullies are acting out to make themselves feel better? Each small, even devastating act made toward another only gave them tiny relief, which is quickly forgotten as the loneliness or desperation or whatever else is driving them rolls back in.”
Thank you for bringing this up. I was a very strong and aggressive kid, not mean at heart, but very active, athletic, and tough. We moved around a lot and I went to many schools. Home life was chaotic and violent; school life was just as everyone describes, somewhere along the spectrum of mildly insulting to lord-of-the-rings scary. My personality, coupled with my experiences at home, combined with having to protect myself from bullying (for being a tomboy, an outsider, smart, different, etc.) probably led me to do and say things that hurt other kids.
But no, I can’t say that I remember them distinctly because it wasn’t in my heart to hurt someone else on purpose. I wasn’t that kind of bully and often stuck up for other kids being picked on. But it’s very possible that I lashed out in pain, fear, anger, frustration, confusion, or some other kid anxiety in a way that hurt someone.
There has to be something smarter than just a “no tolerance” policy on bullying. First of all, there should be awareness “classes” (or something like that) where everyone hears the same message about behavior that’s hurtful. Kids growing up in abusive households often do not know what is ok and not ok and they often have no boundaries around these kinds of things. Education is the first step. Consequences that include sensitive counseling of all those involved is another good step. Kids being bullied can possibly be helped by knowing that the bullying was not about them personally. And the perpetrator has to know that there will be punishment if it continues, but also know that the school is also there to protect them from whatever is making them mean and hurtful in the first place.
Having kids be able to talk to each other in safe ways would be a huge help. I have friend who is an elementary school teacher and her school instituted a mediation and dispute-resolution program for the kids to learn and use to address disagreements, fighting, bullying, etc. It turned out to be a lot of work for teachers and administrators, some parents resented the intrusion in their home lives that kids with the skills sometimes brought about, and it was abandoned. But not before opening a whole bunch of people’s eyes to the possibilities for teaching kids good communication and problem-solving skills.
I am sorry for hurting other kids and I hope we can all heal over time.
[...] Girls Will Be Girls – [Trigger warning] about bullying among girls, including Phoebe Prince who committed suicide. See also: Law enforcement moves to take bullying seriously [trigger warning.] Having gone through bullying myself I find this topic very upsetting. I’m very surprised to see that law enforcement is getting involved now, since my experience was that rules for enforcing anti-bullying policy were always very lax, except when zero tolerance was applied to the victim of bullying and the victim was punished by school administration. [...]
[...] on two counts. I went out with the blogger Pilgrim Soul and others last night, and we talked a little about high school bullying, because of the posts. I [...]