Samantha is 15. She wrote to us at Home Truths about the problem of bullying in her school. Her friend, in particular, has suffered to such an extent that that she has tried to take her own life. This is what Samantha had to say ...
"God, her laugh is so annoying, man. Let’s beat her up after school, innit."
Sounds like a scene from a film, doesn’t it? Bullying’s not something that really happens every day to your children. That’s right-your child. The one that smiles sweetly at you every day when they get home from school, assures you that he or she has had an excellent day, never has any bruises, so you assume they are telling you the truth.
By "bullying" I don’t mean the kind of violence that will give your child bruises. I mean deceptively simple verbal bullying. ("I don’t want to sit next to Karen, she’s ugly"/"God, look at Rebecca, man, her trainers are like, a year old.") So many children believe that as long as they do not physically touch anyone, they haven’t bullied them but victims of bullying are not destroyed by being hit or punched, they are destroyed by the hostility of their peers. ‘Destroyed’ is an accurate word, because that’s exactly what bullying can do.
Don’t be tempted to assume that children should simply stand up for themselves. I believe it is literally impossible for anyone to understand exactly how difficult it is to "stand up for yourself" when you are facing thirty odd teenagers who hate you, knowing there would be at least another thirty odd people who would pick on you too, on behalf of their friend the tyrant queen unless you’ve been there yourself.
And what if your son or daughter isn’t the victim? What if he or she is the one doing the terrorising? Would it be worse for your child to be mentally ripped to shreds and degraded, or for your child to be responsible for that destruction? That’s a tricky one because it seems to me that most, not all, but many bullies learn from their parents. Kids who are spoilt from an early age or alternatively have been abused and neglected themselves, some of them become tyrants of the school yard.
There is one girl at my school who beats up or threatens any other student who so much as looks at her during a particularly insecure moment. Friends carry her books backwards and forwards for her, if there isn’t a friend handy she orders non-friends around, knowing quite well they will do as she says out of fear as much as anything else. Of course, this convenient method of getting through life won’t get anybody much further than Secondary School; Bullies can’t threaten their way through GCSEs or upset future employers into giving them a job. So maybe we should be feeling sorry for the bullies as much as the victims. It’s almost as though a teenager realizes their life will be a mess and rather than make the effort to disprove their own suspicions, they become determined to ruin someone else’s too.
It’s about time everybody realized what really goes on in schools, and worked as hard as possible to put a stop to it, because I for one am fed up of this disgusting kind of power-abuse. Few adults seem to realize the magnitude of bullying, which is why I felt it necessary for the adult listeners, and indeed, any younger readers listeners too, to be spoken to by a teenager who can show you some of the affliction of bullying from the inside.
