Bully for you!

My new Wonderland column is up, and it's about bullying. Read it if you know what's good for you.

And wow, may I just say, now that I've done all this reading about school bullies, I am looking forward to Henry's entry into kindergarten a little bit less. Would it send the wrong message if I sent him to school in a helmet? Or a bubble?

I'm also realizing how easy I got off, bully-wise, in school. I regularly received threatening notes in junior high, but no matter how many times I learned that I would soon get the beating of my life, I never did. Perhaps the sniveling dissuaded my enemies. No one likes to get their fists wet.

The worst that happened is that the girls who wanted to beat me instead grabbed my LeSportsSac, mocked its contents, and broke my frosted blue eyeliner against the outside of the school. The sight of glittery light-blue smudged on brick can still move me to tears. Oh, Wet 'n' Wild Azure Dreams! You never had a chance!

Comments

[Lindy]

I remember sneaking out the side door of the gym & running all the way home to avoid getting my butt beat in school. It never happened but I think that was only cos I was the fastest runner in my class.

[Jenn @ Juggling Life]

Who was it that said the blogosphere was like all of us being on our periods at the same time? I posted about bullying on Tuesday, the NY Times did something, another blog I read had one, and now you.

Great brains think alike.

[Jenn @ Juggling Life]

Who was it that said the blogosphere was like all of us being on our periods at the same time? I posted about bullying on Thursday, the NY Times did something, another blog I read had one, and now you.

Great brains think alike.

[Ginny]

I disarmed my high school bully with humor and she finally laid off (just like in the movies!) I never did find out what her problem was with me anyway. I reminded her of it at a wedding 10 years later and she was properly mortified. It was still very weird, though.

[Kathy]

The sexual harassment was so rampant at my high school that I didn't deal with -- or successfully managed to ignore -- girl bullies. That came later. (Bullies, unfortunately, tend to stay bullies. And adult bullies have learned the subtleties)

Hearing stories about cyberbullying, I'm so glad MySpace didn't exist when I was a teen.

[jules]

When you were a kid, did you ever see the movie My Bodyguard? (NOT the Whitney Houston movie!!!) That is one that left such an imprint on my sister & I that we recently Netflix'd it for my teenage nephews to see. Matt Dillon at his finest bullying/cowardly self, and Joan Cusack when she must have been about 14. It's so similar to my 8th grade year (being around the bullies and the people who got bullied-- usually I was able to avoid direct contact!) that it STILL gave me chills.JulesHouse of Jules

[jd]

Ok that is straight up sad and funny at the same time. I hate bullies. I remember being the weird one in Jr High. Braces, perm, and I wore my head gear at night. I should have my self.

[jd]

I should have bullied myself. (that was what I meant) Maybe i should bully myself into getting some writing skillz?

[Holly]

I remember My Bodyguard-somehow I talked my father into taking me to see that. I must have been in sixth grade. Another good movie along the same lines is Three O'Clock High.

There was a girl in elementary school who picked on me a little bit, but I think I was too clueless at the time for it to be much fun for her. It's only in retrospect that I've realized how mean she was. I can also remember my fourth grade teacher picking on me. She hated my handwriting and would complain about it to the whole class whenever she had me write answers on the blackboard. Good times.

[PlanningQueen]

Bullying has always been around, but it does seem like there is just more ways to do it now. It confirms for me even more, why I need to work on resilience with my kids.

[3 to get ready]

Um, I had frosted blue eyeliner. That I wore from about 7th grade throughout college. Yes, the same one. By the end it looked like a bullet because when the cap was on you couldn't see any of the pencil. And except for getting slammed into the lockers by a large boy when I was in 8th grade, I was pretty much exempt from bullying. Maybe it was the eyeliner that protected me!

[angelawd]

Ugh, I had an awful girl bully in high school. She was tall and terrifying. For weeks she and her evil gang kept harrassing me, and then one day she came up behind me and slammed my head into the lockers. I hit her with my clarinet case and the fight was over. Luckily it was near the end of the school year, and the following year she just ignored me.

[Bether]

I recently learned that I'd been a minor bully in elementary school: I found a booklet of nice things my peers wrote to me in fifth grade -- one of those everyone-is-special-for-a-week-each things, where they made everyone write nice things about the special person and the teacher stapled them together. Anyway, I was reading it, and this girl who I remember as having a funny name had written, "Please stop calling me cootie girl. It hurts. I would like to be your friend, because you are beautiful."

I don't remember talking to her at all. I mostly remember being afraid of her and ignoring her, but I guess I must have been awful. It was pretty humbling.

[Thea]

I think I had that exact same eyeliner. Ah, Wet N' Wild!

[Stephanie]

You seem more like a L'Oreal silver city kind of gal.

[Jen on the Edge]

I'm with Jenn @ Juggling Life, we must have bullying on the brain. I too mentioned something about it on my blog the other day.

I personally was a lavender and purple eyeshadow kind of girl in junior high.

[Laurie]

I see bullying everyday. I work at an elementary school. The kids are actually better than the adults who work there.

[Anna]

I totally had a LeSportSac. And also a LeClic camera...in hot pink. I rocked elementary school.

[Kristin]

That must have been a traumatic day for you. Seriously. And how tres 80s of you! Loved the LeSportSac, back in the day.

[Frema]

I've had two bullying experiences, neither of them very exciting. One was in fourth grade, when a fifth grader shot me some smart-aleck remark and I TOLD THE TEACHER. The next was in fifth grade, when I was the president of a group called the Chicago Chicks Club (oh, yes I was) and was cornered after school by some girls who were mad that I wouldn't let them join. A fellow classmate shooed them away, I ran home crying, and my mother walked with me to every single one of their houses to talk to their moms. Apparently they all went to school together. Who knew?

[Aimee]

I got off without much bullying in my school career, too. A little shit talking, a few threats, and it seemed to go away.

Sending my son to kindergarten scared me, however, as have grades 1-5, and while that all seems to have been a-okay, sending my sweet baby to junior high scares the ever-lovin' CRAP out of me. I don't know what I will do if my son comes home and some kid has been bullying him or beating him up. I'm a little scared for him, for myself, and for whichever mystery kid might whomp on him, because I know I will want to run down there to kick the crap out of said mystery middle schooler...

If y'all see a story in the news next year about some crazy lady in LA getting busted for this, you will know it was me.

[sarah]

do we have a sense of why there's a rise in bullying? is it one of those things where the scope of what's included in the word "bullying" is increasing? is it correllated to a lack of school time for physical activity, or something?

i remember a lot of cruelty levelled back and forth in elementary school, though it just now occurs to me to think of it as "bullying." doing so makes me feel guiltier about the meanness i was a part of, but it also makes me feel a little worse about the stuff to which i was victim.

of course, i never experienced anything like billy woolf did. that article totally knocked me out.

[sarah]

um, i just realized that "knocked me out" is about the least appropriate expression in this context. let me revise and say: those kids literally "knocked billy out," and reading about it disturbed me greatly.

[Aimee Greeblemonkey]

I'll run over to Wonderland later, but one thing I love about Declan's school is they have a program where the older kids mentor the younger ones both on the playground and in the library and it REALLY helps eliminate the bullying. It's like they take responsibility for them.

[lis]

I didn't really get bullied until I was an adult. Workplace bullying is so much more subtle, it's freaky—the NYT did an article about it and I went, oh, wait, you mean you don't have to get yelled at or shoved into a locker bank to be bullied? But I think for kids or for adults, it's a culture of non-visibility and silence for the targets that allows it to rise and spread. I know this is especially true for gay and lesbian young people, as their risks are much higher to be bullied because they have an even greater fear of voicing their harassment. But overall, I know when one is a target of chronic bullying, not just a single assault, and no action is taken or the target is blamed for some perceived personality trait—which is completely wrong-headed—a kind of silent fearful "I don't want to be a snitch" culture develops, and the bullies reign free. I think it's important to teach kids to stand up for themselves and for others. Aimee's comment about the older kids mentoring the younger ones is a great point—by taking responsibility for others, one feels more protective of the community as a whole.