Standing up to the bullies

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I have seen quite a few threads online about bullying, mostly at schools. There is a growing and alarming number of cases of kids driven to attempted and even successful suicide by bullies in the playgrounds, classrooms and even on Internet cyberspace. I was a victim of bullying at school in the 1970’s. What was disturbing was how easily the Teachers and housemasters turned a blind eye to it, and often seemed to protect the bullies. The attitude was that life was tough and a little teasing helped to toughen us up. We were told that we must be provoking our assailants in some way and that it takes two to start a fight. Not true, as bullies start fights just for the sake of it. Some of the bullies chased me when I was going home of a night. I sometimes beat them by hopping on a bus (I usually walked home), and went past where they waited for me. One night when I had no bus fare, I knew there were five of them waiting together to get me. (They would announce it all day in advance). I took a lump of wood with me, and produced it in my defense. They fled and then reported me for attacking them. When my tutor challenged me on this I questioned the absurdity one of me attacking five of them, and I was told that he could only have dealt with them if I had let them assault me. I was hardly going to let myself get beaten to a pulp so they could be told ‘don’t do it again. It’s not nice’. My Mum expressed her fears about me being bullied at the school and my head teacher sent me to see a child +psychiatrist, who decided I was perfectly OK, sent me home, and sent an angry complaint to the school over how it was wasting his time sending in kids who didn’t need his services. My school seemed to work on a social Darwinian survival of the fittest attitude. Everyone hit everyone to prove who was the strongest. My parents sent me to judo classes to toughen me up. Though I enjoyed the +judo, the club I joined taught it as sport rather than as self-defense. I found it useless in confrontations. It got so extreme in school that I took to hiding away in corridors and open classrooms during breaks. I became a reclusive ghost and many people wondered how I managed to rarely be seen between classes. I was reclusive and my books and comics were my best friends, but I was quite lonely. The bullies simply forgot that I existed and took their frustrations and Angst out on others. I felt as if I was a coward, as I read of The Hulk bravely taking on all the evildoers. Most of the school thugs left at sixteen, and I stayed on to the Sixth Form, where I met decent students and got on with my education properly. Without bullying, school is great. With bullies, school is the lowest circles of Dante’s Inferno for the victims. It’s shocking to see that despite so much political correctness, bullying still goes on, if anything worse than ever. I was never driven to contemplate suicide, and I can’t recall other kids going so far in their despair either. Now, such reactions seem frighteningly common – teachers are still too sympathetic to the bullies and seeing the intimidated kids as too wimpish to concern themselves about. It’s time the bullies were treated with greater punishment and intolerance. It is only what they do to their victims when all is said and done. Bullying is a crime - criminal assault. Arthur Chappell