Bullying: has it happened to you?

[Elfgore]

In Elementary School, since we live in such a rural area, everybody got along. I hated no one in my class and in turn no one hated me.

In Middle School I had this one guy who would pick on me in band. It was nothing serious just some punches or some stupid comment. Never really bothered me though. I did get picked on once or twice because of my love of fantasy but it never went further than them calling me nerd.

Lastly High School... Not at all. Everybody broke into cliques so anyone I was near had the same interest as me so, it was nice.

 

[uzo]

As a kid-teen, I raged at everything. I saw injustice everywhere and it fucking infuriated me.

I was taught that bullying was bad, that might =/= right, brain over brawn, and even just the simple karmic idea of 'what goes around comes around', all that shit. Did I see it in action? Fuck no. I got the shits because other kids got bullied. I got the shits because kids who knew better fucking did it anyway. And I got the shits because teachers would often just 'look the other way'.

A few people tried to tease me - I wouldn't say bully because it never got that far. I had a short fuse because - as I said earlier - they fucking knew it was wrong. And I reminded them. As hard and as fast as I could. In the face.

All the kids who were bullied or exiled from their various cliques for some transgression would flock to my group of 'outcasts'. They knew they were safe with me and mine, could find acceptance, whatever their batshit character may be (most of the time - there are some kids who just don't fit, and are probably better off alone).

What have other's experiences been?

My experience was quite bad during grade school (Kindergarten to Grade 7, mostly), particularly after I unintentionally let the bullies know that I wasn't allowed to fight back. (yeah, seriously - my parents were a bit before their time with the "Go to an adult to solve all your problems." line of parenting) The bullying started in a fairly normal way - older kids picking on younger kids. I wasn't a geek or a nerd or a dick, I was just a younger kid and the older bullies would look for the weak link to pick on. That was me, and when the kids my age who would be come bullies found out that I wasn't allowed to fight back, it was pretty much open season on me.

So the bullies beat me up, I went to teachers who were still "old school" and they told me to fight back, while my parents told me that fighting for any reason was wrong. There was also a slight insinuation from my parents (inadvertent, I found out years later when all this was finally brought to the surface in ways that can only be found in family arguments) that if I got into a fight it was because I wasn't able to deal with the problem in a mature manner and it was a failure on my part, so I was very hesitant to tell anyone about being beaten up so regularly. Which only served to encourage the bullies more; I wouldn't fight back and I wouldn't tell anyone. A rather nasty, vicious cycle that went on for 4 years or so.

Then one day I decided that my parents were full of shit and when one of the bullies decided to beat me up, I bloodied his nose with a single punch - not due to skill but due to surprise; he'd always been able to get away with beating me up without me fighting back so he was woefully unprepared when I did fight back. In my situation that was all it took to stop the bullying - all the bullying, not just the physical bullying. The teasing stopped, the ostracizing stopped, kids decided I was okay to be friends with, etc. Unfortunately by that time it had been about 4 years of torment by most of these same kids, so I spent 1 year (Grade 8) being "friends" with them before we all went to high school and I stopped associating with them entirely, to the point where it wasn't until Grade 11 or so that I finally even talked to any of them in the hallways in high school.

High school was pretty good for me, comparatively anyway. I was a minor jock, a little bit of a geek, a guy in the band and not a teachers pet. Some guys did try to bully me but it never lasted more than one or two attempts before they decided I wasn't an easy target. I also made a conscious decision that I was leaving my hometown and never coming back, so I didn't bother trying to make new friends in high school; why bother making friends with people I'm only going to have to interact with for another 3 or 4 years? Not being part of any clique meant that I wasn't socially obligated to be a jerk to other cliques, so I didn't set myself up as a target that way. 2 months after graduating from high school I left town and never went back.

All in all my own experiences with bullying have taught me that when you're a boy, dealing with boys who are bullying you, physically standing up for yourself is a damn good thing to do. Whenever I hear people try to deal with bullying by "talking" about it, I flash back to the four years I spent in grade school being beaten up, and how that all stopped, literally, with a single punch. How much better would my ENTIRE life be now if I had thrown that punch in Grade 3 instead of Grade 7?

Bingo. Here's the truth of it. I used to get infuriated because I found the whole 'turn the other cheek' thing to be utterly worthless. No, bullies don't 'get sick of it', or 'only do it to provoke you'. They do it because it makes other people miserable and they fucking enjoy it, and they'll keep enjoying it until the risks outweigh the rewards. A victim can either let it escalate and escalate and escalate; or nip it in the bud and attack the fuckwit. Even if they lose the impending fight, the bully will remember that this kid bites back.

You might as well tell a rape victim to just ignore the rapist until he goes away. I wouldn't be surprised if many cases of molestation are simply bullying carried through to an extreme (citation needed - I have no proof for that - I'm just mouthing off at this point).

 

[an annoyed writer]

Is this a question? I don't think there's a single person here who didn't suffer bullying if they went to school.

Anyway, yeah, I did get bullied, but it came to a stop when I cracked a few bones here and there(no joke). Hell, one time I was at summer camp, I was being bullied by a bunch of older kids and they decided to steal my hat and play keep-away with it. Instead of hovering around in the middle of these douches trying to catch the hat, I jumped on the back and wrapped my lunchbox strap around the leader guy's neck. He collapsed, I put my hat back on, and walked away. The guy had breathing problems ever since the altercation. After that, bullies were few and far between. Turns out you get a reputation of sorts if you show that you can go all hit-girl on their asses.

 

[Kolby Jack]

I got picked on here and there, and I picked on others. Only one instance where I really was bad though. I don't really know what was with me back then. But it's in the past. I don't really hold myself accountable for anything I did as a kid, because kids are brainless dumb-asses, and I was no exception.

 

[Dead Seerius]

Is this a question? I don't think there's a single person here who didn't suffer bullying if they went to school.

I have attended school (still do) and never been bullied, at least not in the sense of ongoing harassment. Being teased, on the other hand, I think everyone has experienced one time or another. I dunno, I suppose I put bullying on a higher level in the "damaging effects to your emotions/body" scale.

So yeah, never. I do, however, remember the first time I witnessed bullying happening to someone else. Probably around 4th grade. Day after day some poor kid had his stuffed animal taken from him at recess by a group of older kids.

I remember feeling angry. I didn't understand why the bullies never just got tired of picking on the kid. It's not like he bothered putting up a fight. I guess the word "unfair" was what I saw it as.

Didn't get involved, though. I can't really blame myself, but still, looking back it's one of those things you know you could have done something about.

 

[Kuilui]

I was bullied and harassed through school on and off. Not physically mostly because I had a very feared older brother at least that was during middle school. High school I was flying solo and playing card games and hanging out with geeks wasn't exactly doing me any favors. Luckily I still had plenty of friends from elementary school and middle school who I could talk with and stuff. Still I was publicly humiliated on a large number of occasions. Thanks to that and some stuff going on at home I developed very terrible anxiety problems. School was pretty terrible for me after awhile. Let me put it this way as far as humiliation goes. When I first got into high school there was this wall where notes for all the new kids were left. I was 5ft 1 at the time and very thin. All of them said nice things, except for mine which simply said "Why don't you grow". I won't even talk about Gym.. Well okay one gym story. The girls used to "cheer" me on when we played like kickball or something...Except it was more like the way you "cheer" on the special kid(in a patronizing you can do it, god don't you feel bad for that poor thing kind of way)... Not to mention the teacher used to make fun of me on occasion. Sorry I wasn't born with an over active thyroid and didn't hit puberty when I was 11 like the rest of the kids in my class apparently did. School really obliterated my social skills and self confidence that's for sure..

Funny really after I finally escaped school clinging to whatever I could to hold myself mentally together became the worst almost two years of my life. Finally free from the place that made me feel so horrible and my family problems I was finally able to do anything I want, finally free.. So I hid in my room for about 2 years and only left to go to family events and suffered from horrible depression. I think I would have been a much happier and far more normal person if I just stopped going to school after elementary. I certainly didn't learn anything much from school after like 7th grade. I was just mentally tortured the rest of it.

 

[Gameguy20100]

oh yea since I was 5 I was tormented relentlessly I was treated like dirt I was constantly being assaulted verbally and physically the teachers never gave a shit and this went on for my entire school carer.

Even tried to kill myself once when I was 14 but that's a different story.

 

[Johanthemonster666]

I was viciously bullied in middle school (homophobic witch-hunts were common among guys in my classes). Being slammed against lockers, taunted, grabbed, poked, stabbed...everything they could think of just because I was a 'fag' in their eyes. Instead of having people to fall back on, I was unfortunately left to my own devices.

Years later I did come out of the closet, but back then I was WAY too young, sheltered and immature to understand sexuality, let alone my own. I think these episodes are what delayed this self-realization by 6 years coupled with the puritanical household I was raised in.

There was a brief time when I entered high school where a swastika was spray-painted on my locker with a threatening messaged (I never told the school, my folks or anyone but a few people)along with a ton of insults about my skin -I had a rather rare form of acne that couldn't be treated by conventional products or medicine-.

I won't pretend that my problems stopped there, but a time came in high school where I became confident in myself and people either respected me or left me alone because I was unapologetic in my sense of self-worth, and self-identity.

 

[Casual Shinji]

I was bullied a bit in high school. Being a shy kid sorta makes you an easy target.

I also had a girl pretend to be in love with me at one point, which I almost bought into if it wasn't for one of my friends casually stating how stupid she was for thinking that joke would work on me. That was a close call. Still took a blow to the ol' self esteem though.

I never actually got beat up or became a huge target or anything though, thank God.

 

[BathorysGraveland2]

Well, back in high school, I'm rather ashamed to admit that I, for the most part, was the one doing the bullying. It's nothing like what happens in most bigger schools I imagine, it never really ascended from teasing and name-calling, but still, not exactly a high point in my life. The reason why I bullied was mostly influence from my "friends". There were some kids my circle of friends didn't like, and I'd kind of follow along with the teasing and shit. I've since broken contact with them though, and haven't really been negative to anyone since.

I know there's a lot of justice/revenge fetishism on this site though, so fear not! Quite a few years back now, while I and my family were away, that same circle of friends ended up destroying and vandalising our house, which caused us to move out. So I guess you could say I received my "karma", if you believe in that sort of thing.

 

[Atrocious Joystick]

I was never really bullied. The first few years I remember having a hard time making friends but then I sort of grew out of that. The only real bullying I remember was directed from older boys at all of us younger boys in school. That was mostly something we considered fun though. We'd tease them and they'd chase after us and we'd make sort of a game out of it. Of course if they caught us they really did beat the snot out of us. A game with high stakes then.

 

[Strazdas]

I was bullied for 12 years. there are plenty of stories to tell from being thrown into a pit to clothes being ripped apart, but i have neither the wish or time to exaggerate to great detail. Lets just say breaks at school were the worst thing possible and back then i would have raither took death than that.
I did not end up growing up the way other people did and while i adapted and learn to pretend to be a member of this society, im still weird and the way i am without the mask is not really what most call human.
What you, OP, did was not necessarely bullying. That really depended on what that kid though of it. If he took it as a friendly poking then fair enough. The fat people around here were used as boxing bags because "Thier big and soft". So he got away quite easily either way.

Then one day I decided that my parents were full of shit and when one of the bullies decided to beat me up, I bloodied his nose with a single punch - not due to skill but due to surprise; he'd always been able to get away with beating me up without me fighting back so he was woefully unprepared when I did fight back. In my situation that was all it took to stop the bullying - all the bullying, not just the physical bullying. The teasing stopped, the ostracizing stopped, kids decided I was okay to be friends with, etc. Unfortunately by that time it had been about 4 years of torment by most of these same kids, so I spent 1 year (Grade 8) being "friends" with them before we all went to high school and I stopped associating with them entirely, to the point where it wasn't until Grade 11 or so that I finally even talked to any of them in the hallways in high school.

Except that your parents were right and your teachers were full of shit. and you were very lucky it worked. been there, tried that. ended up unconciuos that day.

 

[Miyenne]

Badly in middle school. Once I hit about 12 (puberty) I started gaining weight rapidly. Being put in swimming, badminton, archery, baseball and hour long bike rides every day did nothing to stop the weight gain. It's insane how quickly it happened; I was looking at pictures of myself as a kid and there I am cute and skinny, and then bam! fat, all within about a year. I remember the weight gain was so fast and crying about all the angry red stretch marks I suddenly got all over my body. Genetics suck.

So I went from being a happy kid in elementary school into the horrible place known as middle school.

I was teased and insulted for my weight. Daily insults, the kids were very creative. Then came the physical bullying. Even though I was a girl I would be attacked. Mostly it was people coming up behind me as I sat in my desk and poking my "back rolls" with pens or grabbing the extra fat on my arms and jiggling it, and so on.

Then came the real emotional abuse. I hung out with a crowd of girls and guys who I thought I was getting along well with. I even had a crush on one of the boys. My best friend at the time was a beautiful girl who had "bloomed" early and even at 13/14 had a nice huge rack. Someone told the boy that I liked him, and one day in the hall when I was walking with the girl he stood behind us and said "I'd do the one with the boobs, but not the fat slob."

Then the girls started using me for things. I was always well above my grade level, so they kept taking my notes to copy and ditching me on group projects.

One guy even made sure he paired up with me for a big essay. He was the hottest guy in school at the time and every girl was in love with him. When he and I were somewhat alone to begin working on our essay he started groping me saying if I got him an A he'd make it worth it. At least I had the sense to push him off then.

It all culminated at the sports festival at my final year at that school. My group of "friends" had a big blanket on the hill and a nice spot. They all got up, wanting to go inside and buy drinks and snacks. I got up to go with them, but they pushed me down and said I was only there to keep watch on their blanket and their stuff, and it led to them all admitting they hated me and they were just using me. It got messy.

I walked away from school and never went back, I missed graduation and everything. (I still passed, of course.)


High school was better, I found a group of people who really did like me for me. There was one pretty perfect girl in the group who went out of her way to make me miserable and said outright that she hated me, and she made it a point to not include me in anything right in front of everyone else. Sometimes those friends stuck up for me, but they never outright challenged her. I did walk home in tears once or twice because she wouldn't drive me home with the rest of the friends as she didn't want me in her car.

I still can't lose the weight, but I keep healthy and thankfully after high school my body shifted and I ended up rather pretty, if still fat. I have honest amazing friends now and I have a good life and a lot of confidence. But I don't trust people. Can't, as much as I try. As much as I want to.

 

[DanielBrown]

Had some minor bullying problems when I was 12-14, then puberty stuck me like mad and I became bigger than everyone else. Beat up one of the bullies and was never bothered again.

 

[Angie7F]

I was the bullying type. However I have had run in with racist remarks and have had to learn to deal with it.

 

[Little Woodsman]

I was bullied for 12 years. there are plenty of stories to tell from being thrown into a pit to clothes being ripped apart, but i have neither the wish or time to exaggerate to great detail. Lets just say breaks at school were the worst thing possible and back then i would have raither took death than that.
I did not end up growing up the way other people did and while i adapted and learn to pretend to be a member of this society, im still weird and the way i am without the mask is not really what most call human.
What you, OP, did was not necessarely bullying. That really depended on what that kid though of it. If he took it as a friendly poking then fair enough. The fat people around here were used as boxing bags because "Thier big and soft". So he got away quite easily either way.

Then one day I decided that my parents were full of shit and when one of the bullies decided to beat me up, I bloodied his nose with a single punch - not due to skill but due to surprise; he'd always been able to get away with beating me up without me fighting back so he was woefully unprepared when I did fight back. In my situation that was all it took to stop the bullying - all the bullying, not just the physical bullying. The teasing stopped, the ostracizing stopped, kids decided I was okay to be friends with, etc. Unfortunately by that time it had been about 4 years of torment by most of these same kids, so I spent 1 year (Grade 8) being "friends" with them before we all went to high school and I stopped associating with them entirely, to the point where it wasn't until Grade 11 or so that I finally even talked to any of them in the hallways in high school.

Except that your parents were right and your teachers were full of shit. and you were very lucky it worked. been there, tried that. ended up unconciuos that day.

Yeah, I'm always amazed at these stories of someone who fought back successfully...I mean to me what makes it bullying is when the aggressor does it in such a way that the victim *can't* fight back. The bullies that I encountered always favored odds of at least three to one. They would also use the school environment, knowing that completing school was too important to me to throw it away on a fight and the knowledge that the school administration would automatically take their side to their advantage.
There were a couple of instances of guys challenging me to a fight one on one, but that wasn't bullying in my book, that was just a fight.
Unfortunately the "just walk away" advice is just as bad or worse...turning your back on three people intent on physically assaulting you is *NOT* a good idea. I wish that it were possible in practical terms to show people the actual results of trying to "walk away".

 

[Harlemura]

I was lucky enough to never be a proper target of bullying. Being a nerdy kid sitting at the nerdy table meant putting up with the odd sweeping insult thrown our way, but that was pretty much it.

I have a feeling that it's down to going to what was regarded as the worst secondary school in town. All potential bullies were too busy going at each other to focus down individuals.
I'm glad that mess of a school closed down last year.

 

[Tom_green_day]

Is this a question? I don't think there's a single person here who didn't suffer bullying if they went to school.

Ummm... Nope, I didn't see it.
I've been to three schools and I haven't seen any evidence of it happening. Sure there's the occasional nickname people get, but 99% of the time it's more fond than aggressive. Also, the recipient understood this and went along with it. I say this but I was never one of the cool kids nor the uncool kids, I was perched somewhere in the middle so maybe I missed something, but everyone was fine with each other.
Occasionally someone crossed the line and became a dick, but then we just pointed this out to them and they got on with their lives.
Saying that, upon leaving school there are several people who have claimed they were bullied, be it to people they went to school with or (semi-) anonymously on forums, such as this one for example (but not actually on this one). They exaggerated and often fabricated events, and I really don't know why. As far as I've seen, bullying was nonexistant.

 

[nvzboy]

Middle school was hell to me. Plain and simple.
I arrived in middle school knowing barely no-one and the ones I did know were quick to make new better acquintances than me. In one of the first activities we did in school, it was some sort of teambuilding, I tried to be friendly but got laughed at instead "look at this guy being all eager". I came out of elementary with only one good friend at the time so I can't really say my social skills were all that good but I was soon known as sort of a goody-two-shoes. It also didn't help that they found out I had a phobia for sharp and pointy objects at the time. They'd pick nettles and hold them to my face saying things like "you like that, huh?".
Eventually it let me to being solitary most of the time, in class I had nobody to turn to when the name-calling started again. This got to the point that I grabbed one of the guys standing next to the guy calling me names and held him by his collar while holding him half out of the window. It didn't make people like me, but the name calling in class eased up a bit after that incident.
I still can't forgive those people that made it a point to laugh at me when given a chance.
The years after that I got a chance to start over and had good mates during high school.
Captcha: How interesting
*Sigh* the irony.