Had to deal with bullying pretty much the entire time pre K-12, and those who didn't bully me shunned me anyway. >_> I knew I was weird, so I never questioned the WHY of it all, and I liked me so that they didn't didn't IN PRINCIPLE bug me; had they left me alone I couldn't have cared less how much they hated me. What ticked me off, though, was the responses of the adults around me, who I was all but under gunpoint to trust blindly. "Just ignore it and it will go away," they all always said. Except if I ignored it stuff went missing from my desk; I'd know it was stolen and who did it, but because of the ADD, the assumption always was that I'd been absent-minded and just lost it and was looking to blame others for my own failures. Apparently they applied the same logic they operated by to me. >_> Then there were the social workers who spent all their time as apologists for the bullies, "Oh, so-and-so's had a hard life," and so I had no right to be the least bit bothered by ANYTHING so-and-so did, and I was rude and insensitive for being angry.
All that's to say that, IMHO, I think children are more affected by how others react to the bullying than the bullying itself. If, every time a bully starts on a student, either another teacher or a student intervenes, I think the long-term damage to a psyche can be greatly reduced. I hope that makes some level of sense...I guess what I was trying to say was that sometimes the adults cause more long-term damage to the person than the bullies.
24 Jul 2007, 2:38 pm
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