I’m a former victim of school bullying.
In this newsletter I want to raise my concerns about some common, prevailing, and deeply mistaken attitudes to victims of bullying.
Most people express their sympathy for children who are bullied by their peers. But often they imply that these children have been picked on because “they don’t stand up for themselves”, or because they stand out as “weird” or unattractive in some way that makes other “normal”” children target them.
Maybe its because they’re “fat”, people say, or perhaps it’s that they give off an air of rejection, or seem isolated or unloved – at any rate just somehow “different” from the rest of us, the attractive ones who are loved and included.
I call bullshit.
The idea that victims of bullying are the saddos, and bullies the stand-up crowd, is a classic abuser’s reversal of truth. It is what is known as D.A.R.V.O, which (for those not familiar with the terminology of domestic abuse support services) stands for:
Deny
Attack
Reverse
Victim and
Offender
I know this is the case- not just from personal experience of bullying, but also from repeated observation of bullying behaviour in myriad situations.
Like everyone else, I’ve experienced, or heard about/read about online bullying, family bullying, bullying friends, bullying bosses – not to mention bullying states, regimes and governments – and bullying ideologies (hello Taliban, Incels, and not to forget - gender identity ideology).
Speaking personally, several members of my family, and several of my friend’s children and grandchildren, are former or current victims of bullying.
May I please point out - we are not all weirdos with signs on our backs saying “kick me” and something odd about us that makes normal people pick on us.
In every case of school bullying I’ve come across there’s been a ringleader.
In my own case, which started in my first weeks of secondary school, the ringleader was a girl who with hindsight I can see was someone with problems. I don’t know what was going on in her home life or what may have happened to her to make her the way she was, but she had a visceral need to vent malice on someone.
I think a combination of things led my bully to pick on me, and not some other girl.
I was an articulate, opinionated, mouthy, and flamboyant girl. Tall and rangy, I stood out in a crowd.
She was small, even undersized for her age. I remember her as having a scrunched up face and being sort of dull/colourless – easy to miss to be honest.
Maybe it sounds like ego, but I think she was probably jealous/envious – a common feature in bullying – envy of the target leads the bully to try and crush her/pull her down.
However it’s possible that she simply chose me as a target because I was the first girl she noticed. Just bad luck for me.
I know another girl who was bullied at school (please note we’re talking years of bullying, both in my case and in hers). This girl was an exceptionally pretty and sweet girl, much liked in her primary school.
The ringleader in her bullying was an angry girl whose main tactic was to bellow “Ugly!” at her target in the street, and get her gang of cronies to join in. She actually contacted the girl years later, and it transpired that the bully may have had a (stalky) thing about her victim.
At any rate - love’s young dream the bully was not. And neither was my bully.
The idea that they were the normies and we were the freakies is just so counter to the reality of my experience and understanding – I just can’t fathom why people fall for it.
Do you remember that psychological experiment everyone talks about where they divided college students into two groups and told one group they were the guards and the other the prisoners?
And there was another one where they told the kids that people with blue eyes were the target, and brown eyes were the norm?
The experiments found that people can be guided/persuaded to actually torture their fellows for absolutely no reason at all, other than that someone apparently in a position of authority designates certain individuals as “the target”.
I think bullying is like that.
The ringleader rounds up their gang of supporters and instructs them on who to persecute.
In, for example Nazi Germany, we can see quite clearly how Hitler and the architects of the holocaust built the scapegoating machinery, and what it led on to.
In school bullying, it's only kids, not Nazis or world powers. They don't have the same authority.
But they do have power.
And I think that is because we give them that power.
We give them that power when we say victims are weak for not standing up for themselves, and when we say that there’s something “weird” about victims (fat kids, speccy kids, older women, Jews), and when we imply that the bullies are superior in some way – normal, attractive, loved - Aryan – as opposed to the (rejected, unloved, neglected and ugly) victims.
In my own case, finally, after two years of relentless gang bullying that taught me never to trust authority and to have enduring contempt for herd mentality, I changed school. I settled in happily, immediately, to my new school, and was very popular.
If I was so marked as “different”, so destined to be a natural target for bullies – why didn’t they pick on me in the new school?
I think they didn’t pick on me because it wasn’t me that attracted the bullying – it was the bully that was drawn to bullying.
And this is my point.
Victims of bullying are not a specific type of people who attract their own abuse. Beautiful, strong, confident women fall victim to abusive men. And girls and boys of all natures and backgrounds fall victim to bullies.
Yes, fat kids get bullied. So do beautiful kids.
As John Lennon said – they hate you if you’re clever, and they despise a fool.
You can’t win with a bully.
Because it isn’t you.
It isn’t your deficiencies or weirdnesses that cause the problem.
It’s them.
Instead of speculating about what it is about victims that makes them a target for bullying, ask instead what it is about the bully.
I think it is the bullies who are the “weirdos” with the problems, and that we need to stop pathologising victims and normalising/ sanitising bullies.
The problem with domestic abuse is abusers, not their victims.
The problem with incels is not what women have failed to do to include and help and satisfy them. It is the incel’s narcissistic, murderous and misogynistic rage.
The problem with misogynists who goad and taunt older feminists like myself who fight sex-based oppression - who call us “ugly old hags” and send us rape and death threats - is not the older women feminists.
It is the misogynist’s fury at their own inadequacy, their mother hatred, their fear of female power, that fuels their rage and makes them seek to crush our resistance.
It is the bullies who are the unloved freaks.
Let’s stop giving them licit approval.
Let’s stop twisting the narrative to cast these absolute losers as the heroes.
As someone pointed out to me a few days ago – children have a heightened sense of justice. They see when people pile up on someone wrongfully.
Let’s support children – and adults – to stand up against the bullying and abuse they see going on around them. We could change the world if we raised our children to do that.
Let’s change the game-plan.
I’m proud to be a survivor of bullying.
I’m proud I made it through the persecution.
Bullies are wankers. Fuck ‘em.