Were you a victim of Bullying?

Yes, I was teased every year of my school career.

Yes. All through junior and senior high school three boys made it their business to really give me a hard time. No violence, but it really affected me. I could not wait to get out of school. Why did they do it? Somebody tell ME.

As a child in school? Yes, but it wasn’t nearly as severe as some of the cases in the news today. Even when I reported a case of habitual abuse to the teachers, nothing was done. I just tried to avoid them.

If my children were being abused, I don’t know what I would do, other than finding out more about the situation, asking the child what they wanted, and asking if they wanted intervention.

I was bullied throughout Junior High.

My oldest son was harshly bullied from grades 3 to 5. After trying to hold the school accountable by meeting with the principal, calls and letters to the school board and then meeting with my MLA I realized that nobody was really interested in addressing the problems. I pulled all my kids out of school and started home schooling. We haven’t looked back since.

I was bullied through eighth grade. It stopped when I left and went to homeschooling. I’m being bullied now. I’m going to ignore one person and address the rest. I don’t need destructive people in my life anymore.

“Why did they do it? Somebody tell ME.”

For different reasons. One of us had a crush on you but wasn’t independent enough to separate from the group and approach you individually. Another was jealous of you, your independence, and the strength you demonstrated the last two years of high school. You see @furball11, we were a group of nobodies, and we were looking for an easy target that we could use to make ourselves feel superior. And the last of us, well… sorry, but I was looking for any kind of aggressive outlet to deal with my family situation. A young male full of testosterone who grows up fatherless won’t get much good rearing from an alcoholic mother who teaches nothing but hatred. You seemed like a pretty safe bet to bully around. And just know that your suffering was well spent, for without it, I probably would have done far worse and turned to crime or maybe really hurt somebody bad.

Sorry for all the trouble we caused you.

I was bullied from the day I started school at age 4, to the day I left at age 18. Kids hate other kids who are “different” in any way. Being noticeable disabled, being the only poor kid in a rich kid’s school, and maybe some of the queerness showed through before I was aware of it because I was called a “lezzie” long before I knew what a lesbian was. It didn’t stop, until I just left school. When I asked for help, if the bullies were confronted, it would stop for a day or two then afterwards it would get worse. Mostly nobody did anything to help. I still feel bitter about it after all this time because I feel that living in fear of school for so long totally sabotaged my education.

I was bullied for a couple of years in secondary school by a group of “popular” girls who decided that they didn’t like me simply because I was friends with someone else that they didn’t like. It was mostly verbal bullying but they intimidated me a lot by surrounding me (there were four in total), they rarely touched me, however.

After a good few months of keeping this a secret I had had enough and broke down and told my parents evrything. They tried to get the school to stop it but they were useless so in the end my mum , who is somewhat of a fiesty character, took matters in her own hands. She saw the girls outside of school hours hanging around the school gates and made it very clear to them that if they bothered me again they would regret it. She also told them that, she had eyes everywhere and would know if they were still giving me grief whether I told her or not.

Anyway, this didn’t stop them straight away and they kept threatening me that they were going to tell the police that my mum had threatened them. However, over the course of the year, as coincidence had it, my mum would bump into these girls a lot. It wasn’t deliberate, she just happened to see them and gradually they got more and more scared of her. The bullying just got less and less and they moved on to someone else who’s mother was creepy!

Yes I was. I was bullied visciously. My freshman year in high school was the worst. This person bullied me everyday. He would harrass me every chance he got. The other classmates pretty much cheered him on or did nothing. The teachers did nothing. They claimed they had no idea but the knew because it happened in front of them. I was chocked in the hallway. He pulled a knife on me. During art class ( a class he was in as well) he would destroy my artwork. He would threaten to beat me all the time. The other students did nothing at all. They just cheered him on. I did nothing to deserve it. He made my first year in high school a living hell. After that I started working out and got bigger and muscular. They turned from picking on me to fearing me. They didn’t bully me anymore but the did find other ways to make my life a living hell. They would start rumors about me that were horrible. They would lie to the faculty and police so they could get me kicked out of the school. They never had any proof sufficient to kick me out and all attempts at this were futile. This high school I attended was full of chicken shit to say the least. I never will forget it and I will never support the high school in any way. I will forever have bad memories of that school. I won’t vote for any levies for the school and will vote to cut funding from the particular school. My way of punishing them for traumatizing an innocent person for not fitting in to their standards.

@Leanne1986 Popular girls are the worst. They tend to have their way and the faculty usually does nothing because they like them as well. It is the worst because the school doesn’t do anything because the see these girls as the future. They are usually wrong about that.

@Mikewlf337 I know what you mean. These girls were very popular with the Sports Department and consider talented by the sports staff especially. Seeing as the school was very proud of it’s sports department it looked good to have students of such a high. athletic standard. None of these girls have gone on to do anything even remotely sporty and two of them are definitely no longer a good advert for an athletic, healthy lifestyle.

I was bullied mercilessly through all of middle school. The teachers and administration mostly turned a blind eye to it. It got so bad that I was suicidal for a while.

Then I fought back. Little bastards left me alone after that.

I was popular and much tougher in highschool, so it was only an issue for three years or so.

I was also bullied mercilessly through eighth and ninth grade. I was the new kid and I was put into the gifted and talented group who had not had a new person join their little group since elementary school so there was a label on my forehead that said “Fair Game.” My mother insisted that it was my fault because I wasn’t trying hard enough to fit in, so I got no support from home either. I spent hours alone in my room playing the guitar as a result.

My last day at this school (and knowing I was moving to Japan for the next school year), they had a talent show and against the wishes of some teachers (who I think were trying to protect me), I entered the talent show. I played “Heart of Gold” by Neil Young and demonstrated playing the guitar and the harmonica at the same time and sang (when I wasn’t playing the harmonica). It was well-received and my worst tormentor came up to me after and made a comment like, “Well, we didn’t know you had any talent.” I said, “And you never bothered to get to know me to find out.”

When I later played in a band, after having played for this less-than-receptive audience, I never had stage fright because I knew it really couldn’t get any worse than what I had already experienced.

Yes, I was bullied throughout my junior year of high school. It stopped when I moved away and attended another school.

It was hell.

Schools have to take responsibility for building a culture where bullying is unacceptable. Unfortunately, most don’t seem to want to deal with it. Maybe they don’t know how to.

It’s not so different from teaching tolerance—educating kids about racism, sexism, homophobia and all the other isms that hurt people. The bullying has to be raised in a class, and the consequences shown, and real conversations had about it. That scares off most schools. Administrators and teachers are just too wimpy to confront it, as so many stories above have shown.

My children went to a school that confronted these things head-on. It didn’t eliminate all the problems, but when there was a problem, the teachers intervened. This was a private school, so they had to do what the parents wanted or they’d lose students. It was also a small school, so news about anything flew around the school instantly.

I don’t know exactly what went on in their program. My daughter has given me bits and pieces of it. But I think mostly everyone has to be on same page—teachers, parents and administrators. They have to commit to educating the kids about bullying and to eradicating it. They have to be willing to intervene at any time.

At my children’s school, the teachers loved the kids. They cared. I think that in many schools, teaching is just a job. They don’t want to put out any more energy than they have to. It’s very sad. The stories above are heart-rending. It shouldn’t happen, and it doesn’t have to happen.

Me too.
Mostly in the first few years of grade school. It’s the sad fate of most awkward kids. I had no idea what to do about it, so I just cowered and tried to stay away from them.

I was bullied for a few years by this one particular girl. I have no idea why she hated me so much since I never did anything but stay out of her way. She was just a strange, angry girl though, and looked really unhealthy. She looked trashy, she talked trashy, she walked trashy… I think she slept with about half the randy boys in our school.

Anyway, one day, I’d finally had enough after she tried to push me down the stairs and I finally fought back. She ended up with a cut on her forehead from the locker I’d slammed her into. Luckily, the vice principal who had been watching the bullying go on for a while was proud that I finally fought back and didn’t suspend me, but warned me to never touch her again because she “had something very bad that I didn’t want to catch”. They scrubbed down, disinfected and over sanitzed that locker.

Just a couple months later, her skin and hair was looking more unhealthy than ever then she totally disappeared from school. We later found out she had AIDS.

i was bullied not by the girls, but by the boys. In 8th grade, this guy used to put thumb tacks on my chair at school, and called me names constantly. In 10th grade, I was the only girl in a class of boys, and I was overweight with glasses and braces. I was called names constantly, punched, and once they put glue in my combination lock, which ruined it. I ended up leaving that school for another school. In both instances, I found the bullying and name calling terribly humiliating but I did not push the issue, with the teachers or my parents, because it was so embarassing.

I think there is probably more bullying than we know, because the kids don’t want to make an issue of it, for fear of retaliation, and because it’s so embarassing and humiliating.

@WillWorkForChocolate “We later found out she had AIDS”
That must have really sucked for those randy boys that had sex with her… :(

@downtide I’m sure it did. I never did really hear about any results, but I remember quite a few guys were talking about scheduling blood tests.

@Leanne1986 lol yeah that’s a common occurance amonst the popular girls who play sports. The teachers and other faculty love them and the other students want to be them or are envious of them. They are put on a pedestool and then BAM! Reality kicks in after high school when they enter the real world and find out that’s a whole different story. :D

I used to be bullied but they finally realized it’s not worth it for them because I would either have no reaction or I would hurt them.
I think anyone who is a bully should get a lecture from a police officer and showed the inside of a jail cell in an attempt to scare them straight. If we let bullies get away with bad behavior than the world is screwed.

I was bullied ruthlessly in 6th grade and would come home crying everyday. A boy teased me abou my weight (I was not big!) and he compared me o the obese woman in the movie ‘Shallow Hal’ and told me that I exceeded my desk’s weight limit! My teacher (a young guy fresh ou of college) never did anything! So I was homeschooled in 7th grade and 8th grade was a great year for me!! Then freshman year, there was a guy who sexually harrassed me every day and he bullied me about my weight, told me to shave my “mustache” (that was nonexistent) and he sat behind me and always tried to mess with my bra straps and (this guy looked like a jack-o-
lantern!) he was really creepy! But the teasing got so bad and the harassment made me feel filthy; I made a suicide plan. I knew I wouldn’t really go through with it, but when I thought about it, it was so easy to just end all of my pain really quickly! Obviously I never followed through with my plan- I picked up my Bible to move it one night and I decided to read; I flipped it open and read for about an hour before I started crying and realized that even when I was in my darkest hour, God was there with me. God literally saved my life again! :)

@daytonamisticrip The bully in my school was the policeman’s son.

@wundayatta well that’s kind of a backwards. Why did his dad never do anything?

@daytonamisticrip I’m sure he did do something. I’m sure that kid got belted a lot. That’s why he took it out on people with less power than he had. On the other hand. maybe his father never believed it of his own flesh and blood.

Fathers tend to not want to think of their sons as victims, and some would rather their son be a bully than a victim of one.