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In reply to the discussion: Have you ever been bullied? [View all]jobycom
(49,038 posts)I went to a rich private school a couple of years, and there were two main bullies who turned on me and a couple of others. They had a small gang around them, but these were rich kids, so they weren't very physical. I was a poor redneck, so when they tried to get physical, I just stood up to them, and they backed down without a fight. They mostly tried to bully me verbally, and I'm pretty good with words, so that didn't work out for them, either. And I would just admit whatever they claimed. They called me redneck, and I said "Obviously, but I'm smarter than you." They called me gay, and I said "Yep. Wanna kiss?" (It helped that they knew I wasn't gay). They eventually just left me alone, and a couple of their gang actually became my friends instead of theirs. The next year one of the ringleaders left, and the other didn't have much steam on his own. We even became nicer to each other, though we never liked each other.
I used to think that was the secret to handling bullies, and that people who were bullied were just bad at handling it. Arrogant, I know. Then my daughter started getting bullied. They broke her stuff, called her names, sabotaged her meals... they didn't get physical, again because she wouldn't back down, but they made her life hell. Teachers made it better, but couldn't fix everything. The worst was when some kid she didn't know from another class walked up to her at lunch, asked her if she was (her name), and when she said yes, said in a calm voice "I hate you." She cried the rest of the day.
My job let me take afternoons off with her, and I helped her through a lot of it. If she had to go to an afterschool program with these same kids, it would have been unrelenting. I don't know what would have happened. But she saw it as an interruption to her day, more than as a lifestyle. And her mother and I both have a friendship type relationship with her, rather than just the dead parenting I mostly see these days, so she told us about things when we asked. Things got better last year when she went to middle school.
Anyway, yeah she got bullied, and it wasn't just a matter of standing up to them or not letting them hurt you. It was overwhelming to her.