Bully for me (a little long)

In junior high there was this one girl who would always torment the other girls- but only during gym class. It became the most dreaded hour of the day. She was bigger, taller, dirtier- both in hygiene and language, and more mean than any other person in class. She regularly stole money, clothes, anything that she wanted. Outside of gym she left us alone-
She was only there one year- I never knew what happened to her, nor did I care.
 
In grade school I was tiny, with fair hair, thick glasses, allergies to everything, and reading three grade levels above my peers. In fourth grade I was sent to the Sixth grade class for reading and the teacher decided she didn't have anything to teach me so she let me do crafts.

One of the sixth grade boys, who was probably struggling, decided he didn't like that. He came after me on the playground.

Understand, I had almost no social skills whatsoever. I never played with neighbor children- by choice. I was an indoor kid, an early reader and cripplingly shy, and completely naive. With few exceptions, other children frightened me. They were loud and rough, the opposite of my kind family.

Anyway, this huge kid came after me. I don't remember many details, and I'm going to resist making up stuff. I doubt he intended to harm me, but I was scared. Basically, I went Ralphie on his Scott Farkus ass. I remember there was blood, and it wasn't mine.

Two years later my little brother's classmate (he was four years younger), a mean little viper of a girl, stole his toy six-guns from his cowboy Halloween costume (you could take toy guns to school back then) and was taunting him while we all waited for the bus home. I got out of class, saw this, took the guns away from her, and pushed her away. Her older sister, a large and ill-tempered girl, saw this and came to her defense. Heated words were exchanged, until she reared back to take a swing at me. I socked her in the eye, hard. It was only the testimony of several younger students that the elder sister was a frequent tormenter saved my ass.

I wasn't picked on, but I was whispered about. I think. I thought I was whispered about, but it may have been the paranoia setting in.

When I got into junior high and hit puberty and still had very little social development, I started getting harassed, and I got even worse. I wonder sometimes that I survived at all. I've blocked a lot of it out, but hardly anything I do remember am I proud of.

I got better.
 
I started this thread and then I had to back off it for a while. Too many memories opening of. I have once again been trying to read Odd Girl Out; I tried once before, but again, the wounds reopened. One of the things I have read about in that book is the problem with trusting people who are nice. There is always that nagging doubt that behind my back, they are whispering. I don't have that issue with most people, but there are a number of people at work I really do. There is one woman, whom I've discussed before, who I wouldn't trust as far as I can throw her, but that's probably wise.

I wonder about the bullies though, whether they continue the behavior into their grown up life.

I have a very close relative who was a bully in school. He's thirteen years older than I, so I didn't witness it, but I hear tales. He has continued some of the bullying behaviors. I wonder if that's typical.
 
When I was in elementary school, I read a book called "The Bully of Barkham Street". Told from the bully's point of view. You were supposed to feel some sort of rush of understanding after reading it, I suppose.

I didn't.
 
When I was a youngster at school I was one of the smarter kids. I wasn't very large and I think I might have looked like a victim to a bully. I remember a couple trying but they didn't realise that I was much stronger and tougher than I looked. When they pushed I pushed back. Bullies are often big chickens who won't bother if it takes any effort. So I never got bullied.

My own kids ran into it a bit and I could only tell them what I knew. Stand up for yourself is probably the best advice. Tell on them works well if the school responds correctly. Consequently my son encountered very little bullying. My daugter ran into some. It seems that girls are some of the worst bullies now days.

My daughter's school called me once saying that they wanted to council her because she was getting bullied. I said great but what are you doing for the bully. They said nothing. I pointed out that the bully was the kid with the real problem and you could council his victims all day long but the bully still remains. Stupid school. No offense to any teachers here but school teachers can be real freakin' morons sometimes.

I noticed an interesting system of justice at that school. The first child to tell was believed. Any subsequent stories were categorically dismissed. No attempt to find the real truth was ever taken. The kids knew this and used it.
 
My experience is, some of them do, some of them don't. I suspect that any behavior which is successful will be repeated, so the ones that stop had a chance to learn that it doesn't work as a long-term strategy for dealing with people.
 
Do bullies continue? I suspect that the reasons for bullying are as varied as the bullies. A good friend of mine says he was a bully in school. He is not at all like that now and has said that he would love to apologise, profusely, to one kid whom he particularly tormented. It now bothers him that he was a bully.
 
LL - first things first. :clap: for being able to talk to your former tormenter (as opposed to taking her out).

I was rather tall as a child. Um.... well, horizontally, anyway. I was enough of a clown and socially adept that I only had regular trouble with one bully in elementary. No bones broken. He was a year older and I mostly learned to be where he wasn't whenever possible.

One summer I went to camp and managed to get a gash in the back of my head. As the nurse cleaned up the wound before the stitches, she asked me about school - what I liked, what I didn't like. While I don't remember what I said, it got back to me that she was the bully's mother and apparently I had really opened her eyes. I didn't have any trouble from him anymore. On a side note, one kid who got on all fours behind me so the bully could push me over ended up being my best friend in elementary.

I am ashamed to say I did bully one kid in 6th grade.

In 7th grade, my parents made me choose a sport. Since I was too uncoordinated for football or soccer, I chose wrestling. There being very little running involved helped my decision a lot. Between finally getting in shape and suddenly hitting my growth spurt, I had no major problems after that.

My son was small in elementary. He was bullied for a while. I found out later that year that he also was bullying a kid smaller than him. :sigh: The parent of the kid he bullied wouldn't talk to me about it. As he got older, he found a way to talk himself out of most situations. As he got more and more confident in his own infallibility, he began to mouth off a bit to people he considered less intelligent (which according to him is most people :rolleyes:). We will see if he survives his senior year without getting his clock cleaned.

Bullying will happen. Nothing can prevent it completely. But I strongly believe in the bully being called out for such behavior. The decision to retaliate (or not) is a personal one and I will rarely gainsay someone either way. Blaming the victim just makes my blood boil.

CT
 
I have told this story before but it's a good one so here goes again. I was in the third grade and this bully from the fifth grade decided to pick on me. He was bigger than most kids in the fifth grade so I had no chance against him so I had to bite my tongue and stay silent while he verbally abused me and pushed me around. He got me so angry I spent most of my waking hours thinking of a way to get even with him. Finally I came up with this solution. I got an old book and cut holes in the pages in the middle of the book to fit my squirt gun. I filled my squirt gun with methyl eugenol which is a fly attractant. I walked around school looking for an opportunity to use it. Finally after about 3 weeks of lugging the thing around I was walking behind the bully and no one behind me. So I squirt him good and put the gun back in the book. He doesn't have a clue so I do it 2 more times. Later in the day I see him talking to his "friends" and he has about 30 flies on him and he is constantly chasing them away. Then for a while I don't see him in school so I approach one of his friends. His friend tells me that for some reason flies suddenly started to chase the bully around and he became convinced it was a sign from God that he shoudn't be a bully and was going through a born again episode and was being tutored by members of the church. I was horrified. That was far worse punishment than I had intended and in those days my view of the world was us kids against the grownups so I hated that the grownups had gotten control over this kid. I told his friend what I did and that I was going to tell him what I did. He laughed and said the bully deserved it and I shouldn't tell him and if I did it would likely result in serious injuries to me and maybe death. Suddenly I thought the friend was a victim of the bully and asked the friend and he said that he was and that in fact all his friends were victims at one point or another. I was still determined to right this wrong I had done and talked to several friends and every one of them tried to discourage me from telling the bully the last one pointing out the his best friend said don't tell him. I never told him what I did and he never bullied me again or anyone else as far as I knew.
 
I wonder what he thought God wanted him to do before the flies...
 
Piscivore said:
Her older sister, a large and ill-tempered girl, saw this and came to her defense. Heated words were exchanged, until she reared back to take a swing at me. I socked her in the eye, hard. It was only the testimony of several younger students that the elder sister was a frequent tormenter saved my ass.
Click to expand...

I knocked a girl out in 9th grade. Before math class I was sitting in my chair when this kid walked in, grabbed my pencil out of my hand as he walked by and then went and sat at the back of the class. I got up, went to the back of the class and, as he waved my pencil to taunt me, I grabbed it out of his hand. I turned around and headed back to my seat.

A girl who had a crush on the guy, jumped up in front of me and open hand slapped me, really hard, across the face. I grabbed her by the lapel with my left hand and punched her as hard as I could right in the face. Of course, as my fist was making contact the teacher walked into the classroom. He came running over, yelling at me. I told him what happened and he said he didn't care. Boys were not supposed to hit girls.

So, down to the office I went and after explaining it to the principal, he told me that boys were not supposed to hit girls and that I was being expelled for 2 weeks and there might be criminal charges.

I lived way out of town and rode into town by train on Sunday, stayed in a dormitory all week and went home on Friday. He had to phone my parents to let them know what happened and that I would be home on that evenings train. I waited in the hallway while he phoned, thinking of all the hiking and camping I was going to get in during my time off.

When the principal came out, he told me to go back to class. My mother apparently had asked him if the girl hit me first. When the principal said yes but that doesn't matter, boys shouldn't hit girls, my mother blew her top. She told him that I had 5 sisters and I was not allowed to hit girls UNLESS they hit me first. Then I was free to defend myself.

She insisted that if I was going to be kicked out for two weeks that the girl should be kicked out for three, plus, she wanted the police called and charges filed against the girl.

They came to an agreement that nothing would be done. :D

Awhile after this, a cute girl from the 8th grade slapped me really hard as well. I had been teasing her and because she was so shy, she couldn't retaliate fast enough so she slapped me. Then she covered her face and burst out crying. I told her I was sorry for hurting her feelings and that I was just teasing her.

She lookied at me through her fingers and then burst out laughing. "I know you were teasing! I was crying because I thought you were going to punch me!"

Instead, she agreed to let me take her to the dance the following week. :D
 
You know, after reading through this thread again, I have to say, I had a great childhood. Whenever I think about it, I only remember sunny days lazing about, playing all types of sports, hiking, swimming, camping, fishing, riding bikes, etc. I had so much freedom that I cannot imagine having to live the way kids today do.

I do not remember bad things. I know bad things happened but they were so few that it is hard to recall them. The incidents I have written here are the extent of the bad things and I did not even see them as bad at the time. I enjoyed them.

Later on, I had a lot of classmates die in accidents and a few close friends as well but even then, I am very thankful to have known those great people. I do not remember them with sadness, we had too much fun together.

Great memories!
 
During my childhood I was bullied a lot. I once had a win against a bully. I was about 9 or 10 at the time. I apologise to all teachers for telling this. However the bully was the headmaster of the school, who was also my teacher. He was often criticising students for the smallest thing and ensuring everyone in the room could hear, so that people would think the students were stupid. I had it worse than most students. I grew sick of what he was doing. I did the last resort. I hit him. He took a few seconds to recover. He then completely lost it. Then he started hitting me hard around the ears. Several times. And threatening to send me back to the previous class. This was silly. I knew he could not do that. My big worry was that he might injure me. But he did not. After that he treated me with respect.

My parents later told me he could have been sacked for what he had done to me. I have never regretted what I did.

NB. To any student who has a bully for a teacher. This is a last resort treatment. You need to have several significant problems before this is considered. If you have a bad teacher ensure you have told your parents and other people. And document everything.
 
I don't think I was ever bullied as a kid, but there were many isolated attacks. These were motivated, I think, by my status as one of the very few non-Australian kids at my school.

Here are a few I remember:

In grade 5 a kid held his hand behind his back and told me he had something for me. When I asked what it was, he said something and swung his fist out and hit me in the head. I don't recall what it was that he said.

In grade 6 (I was maybe 10 or 11 years old) I was stabbed in the back by a kid with a Stanley knife. I ran home crying. I admit it; I'm a wuss.

In year 8 or 9 a guy who decided to form a gang thought it would be fun to pick on me. He taunted me for a few days, at first verbally then physically. I ignored it until one day my threshold for abuse was reached. I didn't even realise I had a threshold, and I was more surprised than he was when I flayed him with weak punches, backing him up against a wall until he cried. He wanted to be friends with me after that but I wasn't interested.

Sitting in class one day, against an open window, I was targetted by a girl walking by outside the room. She threw some white powder, I think it was flour, over me through the window. Much to the teacher's chagrin, I leapt (ok, stepped gingerly) out the window and chased her. When I caught her, she tried hitting me. I just held her at arms' length to prevent her fists from reaching me, and I didn't really know what else to do. By this time a group of kids had gathered around us, chanting that old standard, "Fight! Fight!" A teacher came over and defused the situation.

I was never big, I'm only five foot five now and was smaller then.

The biggest bully of the school, all six foot two across the shoulders of him, once challenged me and my mate to a fight. Who knows why. Word spread quickly around the school that there was to be a fight at the back of the shops after school. When the time came my mate hopped on his bike and rode off in the opposite direction to the shops, taking his usual route home. I walked in the direction of the shops, which was my usual way home.

A large gathering of kids were eagerly awaiting the afternoon's entertainment. I didn't feel as if I could avoid it, so I resigned myself to the inevitable and walked into what was an arena thronged by salivating bloodthirsty kids. OK, maybe that was a little melodramatic.

Bully was there, in the middle of it. He saw me approach. I walked up to him and stopped a couple of feet in front of him. There was no escape route, and no way of backing out now. I was scared.

He looked down at me and said "Umm, it wasn't you I was after. It was yer mate."

I told him "Oh, he's gone home." He said "OK". The crowd dispersed. That was the end of that. I think he was trying to save face. If both of us had turned up, the possible outcomes would have been: He beats us both up, confirms his reputation and status; or, he gets beat up by both of us, which is still ok as there are two against one. But faced with the possibility of fighting one person, and for some reason being unsure of the outcome, he backed down.

Two kids racially taunted my mother on one particular occasion, in my presence. I became livid and gave chase. One went this way, the other went that way. I chased one of them through a hole in the fence, around the pavilion and into the oval. His gang was there.

It was night time. He ran into the middle of the gang. I didn't know which one of them he was, as I hadn't got a really good look at him. I was still exceedingly angry. I stood in front of the gang and asked for him to come forward, but he didn't.

I couldn't believe his cowardice, and said "How many of you are there?", to which one of them made a great show of counting and replied "Twenty, why, you gonna fight us all?"

I said, and looking back I can't believe my effrontery, "I would, but you're all a bunch of ****ing pussies and wimps. Not one of you's got the guts."

And, I was right. Luckily for me, not one of them made that decision to lead them into an attack. I walked away, feeling as if I had scored a major victory.

There are many more stories, but they are mostly along the same lines.

Funnily enough, the only time I've felt bullied was last year. Who'd have thought that years after school I would find myself in a situation of being bullied? It was by a friend of a friend. I put up with it for a while, for my friend's sake, until it became too much to bear.

I dealt with it by calling her on it. That's all it took. She stopped once she realised that I wasn't going to play the victim.

These experiences, and others like them, were not defining. I'm sure they've had some impact on me, but so have many others.

Like the girl I met on the bus that wrote "Hello Logical Muse" on the petal of a rose she gave me. Or the messages in the guestbook of my web site saying that the world would be a better place if more people were like me. Or the professor, a leading authority in her field, in fact, the leading authority in her field, who requested to co-author a paper with me even though I don't have a PhD, a Masters, or even a Bachelors degree.

Or just my friends who smile when they see me.
 
Yeah, I have good memories too.

But I'll do ya one better. I have a great PRESENT :D. I'm happy with where I'm at, right now. Not much bad happening and no real worries right now, it's great! In other words, I'm happier now than I was when I was a kid.

Rereading this thread, it appears that for some people standing up for themselves worked. I'll just say that's not always the case. Certainly in my case standing up for myself only made things worse most of the time. That said, I never stood up for myself by punching someone, but I just didn't have it in me to be physically violent except in response to someone, and that was a rare occurance. I'm not saying I was innocent. I was just afraid of escalating what was only mental abuse into physical abuse.
 
In fifth grade, I was on the swings just about to start when some bastard kid grabbed me by the throat from behind and started to choke me. All I could think to do was grab his wrists and try to pry them off my neck, which wasn't easy because I wasn't very strong. Simultaneously, I dug my nails as hard as I could into his wrists. That's what stopped him, and he ran crying to the teacher on playground duty (who up til then was my favorite teacher). Who then punished ME for injuring the bastard. I asked her to ask him what his hands were doing around my throat. She didn't think it was worth pursuing, since I was obviously the aggressor. Despite the fact that I had never gotten in trouble before and the other kid was always getting in fights. Not to mention the logistical impracticality of inflicting those sorts of wounds unless someone were actually choking you from behind. Did she really think I walked up to a bigger, stronger kid, grabbed his arms, and started tearing at them?

That's when I lost the last vestiges of trust in adults. She didn't give a damn about her students or justice. She was just doing a job. And if by any chance you're reading this, Miss Harrison, I hope you realize what a unfeeling jerk you are, and also that you choke.

Wow, past injustices can really still upset. I'm almost shaking in anger decades after the event.
 
Were your parents supportive? At that point mine would have escalated to county officials or police. And if there is a hell, I hope there's a special place there for teachers and other authority figures that enable bullies.
 
Please pardon the length of this post

There were a few bullies in our little country school, but one stood alone: our school principal and superintendent, Warren Willard, the Bull.

He earned the nickname. He had been a heavyweight wrestler at the University of Nebraska, a good one I’m sure, back in the 1920’s when college wrestling was a lively sport. He stood six feet tall, very heavy and thick, and dismayingly strong. His head and face were gigantic, with a big salient nose and a huge chin. In winter, that is during much of the year, his skin was a closely marbled red and white. He had a strange tic, a sudden twist of the head simultaneous with an indrawn grunt to clear his sinuses: grraankh. I think he may actually have followed this with a snort. I said he earned his nickname.

Everything was physical to him. He seemed to be an almost entirely instinctual being, living beneath thought, not a prey to his impulses but existing in them naturally. And I attended his school uninterruptedly from the time I was six years and three months old until I was a few days short of eighteen.

He was ferocious to little boys. I don’t mean ferocious in language or expression. I mean vicious: he mauled and beat children of seven and eight and eleven years old. He had spent a kind of sabbatical year at the Nebraska State Penitentiary (!) in the 1930’s, and he seemed to have acquired his zest for battering while there. He brought his chosen hobby into our lives, and of course there was no escaping him.

He wrenched ears, at least once permanently damaging a boy’s hearing; he threw boys down long flights of stairs; he wrung necks; he slapped; he twisted arms; he kicked. Something shrill and frenzied would possess him at times; he once beat a boy in my class for fifteen minutes; we heard the crashing and bellowing in the hallway -- and there was a clock in our classroom; I know that it was a full fifteen minutes. Then, whistling with rage, he came back into the room and made a kind of pilgrimage up and down the rows of desks, threatening other boys with a huge red hand raised over his head: “Do YOU want some, Dick? Eh, boy, eh? Do YOU want some, Billy? Eh? Do YOU want some, Eddie? Eh, boy?” The memory is surreal, like the actual event. I think I was ten years old.

“But what did your parents do?” people ask in horror now when I tell about this sort of thing. Do? What were they supposed to do? They needed a school superintendent; not many men would take on such a job, year after year, for such pay. (The Bull had to farm a piece of land in the summers to make a living.) But we children almost never told our parents, after one or two experiences of being shouted at to stop that lying right now.

You won’t be surprised to hear that we kids took a sort of delight in the Bull. We traded stories, some of them decades old, of his thrashings. Like country children everywhere, we admired physical strength, and the Bull had plenty of that. When the whim took him, he could bat flies far out into the weeds of our huge playing field, accurately calling to those boys who had mitts to try for them. He insisted on rolling out wrestling mats in our gymnasium (why did our little school possess so many wrestling mats? because the Bull would have it so) and pitting boys against each other with boxing gloves. (I recall the unscientific pummelings we gave each other; my head ached for an hour afterward.) When he cared to, he could give valuable coaching in basic wrestling techniques (you see? not a bad education for a small public school out in the sticks).

I’m sure that no school principal in America could have matched him in dedication to his job. He was completely devoted to that little place; he worked quite sincerely to make it better – probably his word would have been stronger. The local school board was lucky to find and retain anyone who would – who possibly could – make a career out of our remote little institution.

There’s a story that one small boy grew up into a tall man and came back to get even. They say that he successfully gave Willard Warren a beating. Maybe so; it was a long time ago and I had left Wyoming long before. But I note that the fellow waited until the Bull was old and sick before he tried it on.
 
I have to say it, to me that sounds like the argument of "he made the trains run on time"... though I completely understand your point.

I can't bring myself to imagine respecting him, though. He was assaulting children enstrusted to him, can there be any worse crime? ETA: Yes... but my sense of outrage remains.
 
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