For Anti-Bullying Week 2017, TSR Community Assistant 04MR17 shared his experience with bullying...
So essentially, I'm a very weird person. My personality and general behaviour couldn't really be described as incredibly normal. I was and still am very proud of that, because I see uniqueness as a positive attribute in anyone. Moving from Primary to Secondary school was quite a challenge for me. I was going from a school with 210 pupils on average to one with 1800. From a year group of 30 to one of 300. My new school was quite far away from home too, I had to get 2 buses there and 2 buses back and that would take me about half an hour each day. The most daunting part was, I was going alone.
Now, I'm quite an independent soul, and that was probably stimulated by being an only child, but being hit by so many new faces was still a challenge. Basically, I couldn't work out who to make friends with. So I'd be nice to the majority of people and hoped that some people would reach out and I'd end up in some sort of group. That happened eventually, but in my efforts to be social and everything, I was being very friendly and nice to some people who weren't quite as kind as my friends-to-be.
It's worth me saying now that I'm disabled from birth, I have a condition called microtia (google it) which means that one of my ears doesn't work, and doesn't looked like a proper ear either. Given that I'd been with the same group of 30 people for seven years in primary school, they'd quickly got used to it, not mentioned it and treated it as normal. However, for my year in secondary school, me and my ear were an object of conversation.
So there were some people in my year, who saw me, a loner; saw my weirdness, and my disability and they saw an opportunity. And since then for about two years, I'd be called a "one-eared ****" or "bacon ear" (apparently because my deformed ear looked like a slice of bacon) or was asked: "Can you 'ear me?"
Fortunately, at that point in my life I'd been through some deep and philosophical thoughts about my disability (being an only child means you're bored easily) and it wasn't a touchy subject for me. It wasn't something I was embarrassed about or afraid of. It was a fact. And it was part of me, part of who I was, and part of my identity. So these cheap insults never affected me too much.
It was just the length of time that this continued for. Plenty of the bullies (the bad ones anyway) had left the school by year nine, through one reason or another (mostly through poor behaviour, or attendance, or both), yet walking down a corridor, or up some stairs and oh, there it was again, another snide remark. Now, this wasn't really in between lessons, normally it'd be at lunch time, or when I'd be sent on a message during lessons and they were truanting. Strangely though, I couldn't help but smile just afterwards, because I realised that these people who were low enough to insult someone for their disabilities were wasting their education (and their future job prospects) to do it. If they were getting some personal satisfaction from treating me like that then that should balance out from the personal disappointment that they might experience years later when they realise how they wasted their opportunities.
I think a lot of the reason behind the extent to which I was bullied was down to the amount of people involved. When there's 300 in your year, you don't really comprehend how the insulting voices can build up throughout the day. Once in the morning before form, once when on a message, once in the lunch queue once on the yard at lunch and once in a lesson in the afternoon. All from different people who didn't really know each other: none of them appreciated the cumulative effect. So to each one of them, it probably wasn't bullying but to me it was.
After year nine it got better. I was liked enough and by enough people that I'd be mostly left alone. Others would defend me, not that I was particularly bothered by what they'd said, and I certainly didn't want to be the cause of an argument. But the fact that they cared and went out of their way was nice.
The insults never went completely though. There was one time I remember clearly in year eleven, just being really surprised because someone shouted "Can you 'ear me?" down the corridor at me. That one day affected me more than perhaps the whole of year eight. The fact that after four or five years, someone hadn't come to know or respect me was disappointing. The fact that they still needed to try to use the same bully victim from four/five years ago, was also quite sad. If anything, on reflection, I felt sorry for them really. They were that desperate that in year eleven, they tried to make someone else feel bad. And the way I see it, they weren't trying to make me feel bad. They were trying to make 11-year old me feel bad. What made me sad was that they didn't noticed I'd grown up, and that they should grow up too.
There was also an argument I had with a friend during sixth form, nothing major, but they used the ear thing as an insult. It upset me slightly that they couldn't think of anything better than a six years old insult which most people regarded as too "sly" to use. They didn't know me well enough to have something else to use against me. That hit a soft place.
There's often a discussion about bullying and what's the difference between that and "banter". Considering the range of bullies I had, I have the following reflections:
Lots of people who bullied me didn't realise they were doing so. It was a joke for them and their friends, at my expense, because I was an easy target. They didn't understand what they were saying or the severity of it. Like a lot of eleven year olds starting senior school, there's a lot of exposure to offensive words and phrases which are quite new to a lot of students. The uses of which obviously vary in severity. There were others who I could see were much more malicious. I could see in their eyes the desire to cause suffering on others. Power-hunger in essence, in the social microcosm of a school. If you want to feel powerful as a year seven, one of the few ways to do it is to pick on the defenceless.
In myself, I've forgiven the bullies though. Not because what they did wasn't wrong, or because I survived. But I know that they will likely be worse off than me in the future. Plenty of them are involved in the local gang crime and one was already been shot and killed. I feel no emotion towards them except, perhaps, a slight degree of pity.
Needless to say, my path has been quite different. Out of those 300 students in my year I came top in GCSE maths. And fourth highest for GCSEs in general. I became deputy head boy, and I was the first person from my school in 30 years to get an offer from Oxford or Cambridge.
All a bully is is someone with low emotional intelligence. Don't let anyone else affect the way your brain works. They don't deserve that privilege.
There's support out there
If you've been affected by this story, there's plenty of support available:
Samaritans Call: 116 123
Papyrus Call: 0800 068 41 41 Email: [email protected] SMS: 07786 209697
