Gael
Senior Member
- Location
- County Down, N Ireland
It's a major issue with children especially, but what experience if any, have you had with bullying in your lifetime?
Thankfully, no Gael......
I attended a Catholic girls Convent for my education and I can honestly say it never happened to me
and I never witnessed it at all.eace:
Yes i was bullied by a few kids in state school and back then no-one took any notice of bullying,and there was a girl up the street who bullied me so much i was terrified of walking up there so went the long way round.
I was bullied throughout my primary school (4-11)years as I came from a more well off family than most of my peers. My father's advice was to hit them harder than they hit me, which I didn't take!
How did you deal with it and what effect do you think it might have had on you then and later?
I don't know it had much effect on me, apart from not liking school. At 11 I was sent to a fee paying all girls school, where I wasn't bullied.
That's an effect alright, to make you dislike school Glad you were able to escape it though.
Today they have so called anti-bullying campaigns and school policies but I notice at least in the UK, they don't seem to enforce them strenously enough.
The worst bully at my primary school was the head teacher. He had been a young teacher when my grandfather had been a pupil at the school. He was wounded in WW1, but returned after that war and eventually became head teacher, and was the head when my father was a pupil there. He used to beat the kids who came from poverty stricken homes black and blue with a stick, not a cane, for the sheer hell of it! He even beat one kid unconscious and got away with it!
When I was in grade school there was some picking on that I guess was bullying it would bother me but I got over it fairly quickly. However in the eighth grade we had just moved to southern California. I had made friends with several girls who lived on my street. they asked me to go on a shopping trip into LA with them. I went but they were not shopping but shoplifting. I refused to shoplift and they became very angry with me. For the rest of the school year they made my life a living hell with constant bullying. Maybe they were afraid I would tell on them I don't know but I never did. My mother kept trying to get me to socialize with them and couldn't understand why I wouldn't. I didn't tell her what happened until years later. I withdrew and concentrated on my school work, so the bullying did effect me.
Just a thought. Maybe instead of the entire focus being on stopping the bullying it would help if they also concentrated on helping the children being bullied on how to handle it.
My son was being bullied in elementary. The problem is that sometimes it will spread and very soon all the kids are joining in and ganging up on you. I wrote a letter to the teacher and had a conference but, when that did not stop it, I wrote a letter to all his teachers with a list of names of all the students involved. I was prepared then to keep escalating all the way to the supreme court if I had to. I was a pissed mother (rawr!). I did get an apology from the principal and all of the students were called one by one into the principal's office. My kid was made PeaceMaker (in charge of reporting any kind of bullying going on) and he never was bullied again.
... Just a thought. Maybe instead of the entire focus being on stopping the bullying it would help if they also concentrated on helping the children being bullied on how to handle it.