I
managed to find a rather frightening statistic online that indicates that 46%
of children in the UK had been bullied at school at some point in their lives.
That’s nearly half the population - if we generalise this figure - and it seems
to be on the increase. School is just another survival mechanism. What we learn
and how well we do academically is supposed to set us up for the future and
enable us to get the better jobs when we enter into the world of adulthood
(obviously this is debatable right now in this day and age, but that’s another
topic entirely). But also, it teaches us how to get along with others. We
develop friendships with likeminded people; we develop our interpersonal
skills; we learn what is right and what is wrong and then we do what feels
right.
Obviously, however, what feels right isn’t necessarily what is
right. Some people are naturally more outgoing or extrovert while others are
more withdrawn or reserved. These are the people that are usually targeted by
those of us who find joy in picking on others and while we could assess this
behaviour until the cow’s come home, it’s never realised just how much of an
impact bullying can have. Granted, children – or bullies in general – don’t
consider this when they choose to act. My primary school head-teacher didn’t
think that the child he took part in bullying in his youth would jump off of
London Bridge because he couldn’t take it anymore. Nor have others considered
that the reason why someone self harms might be because they think they deserve
it – after all, everyone else clearly thinks so.
I was reading an interesting article the other day and the
following statement hit close to home:
“If you are or have ever
been a victim of bullying and failed to do anything about it, your confidence
has most likely been deflated. If you couldn’t stand up to your bully, you
probably felt ashamed, like I did… This lack of confidence can carry over to
your adult life…”
I was
bullied in primary school and indirectly during secondary school. I know the
reasons why and knowing what has become of these people warms my soul a little –
karma’s a bitch, ain’t it? But even
though I feel like I may have made my peace with it all, I look at the way I
evaluate myself and conduct myself and it leads me to realise that I haven’t.
The
article went on the further explain how this lack of confidence generated
through bullying can stop you from doing things such as approaching that
good-looking guy at the bar or something along the lines of asking for a raise
(this seems to be a female specific thing, however). And I realise that I do
this. In my entire life, I have only ever directly told one guy that I found
him attractive* – and this was over the internet. Most of the time, I’ve been
pursued by someone else. When someone has rather rudely been smoking in the
queues at Thorpe Park, I’ll usually let it go despite how much it irritates the
crap out of me; the same goes for queue jumpers – although, I’ve been working
on this. Ultimately, for the most part, I am a docile person. I don’t like to
make waves or cause trouble – even when it might be necessary. I find
confrontation terrifying – such like I experienced yesterday at work when an
angry married couple came in first thing shouting the odds about an issue that
wasn’t even my fault.
I’m
not damaged to the point of depression, but I am not as assertive as I’d like
to be – it really depends on the situation. At the same time, however, I am an
adult and a woman at that, which means I have the ability to remove myself from
an uncomfortable situation. In school, however, this is not the case. Children
are forced to endure because it’s the law that they attend school, but no
matter how many anti-bullying campaigns arise or how many times a teacher is
told, it doesn’t detract from the fact that bullying is on the rise. And where
there’s bullying, there’s low self esteem and in some cases, self-hate. And
where there’s self-hate, there comes a failure
to function adequately in society when is that not what society wants – its
people to behave in uniformity; in a socially accepted manner?
But
humans are constantly subject to human error and we continue to make bad
choices as part of every day life. We try to make up for it by instigating these anti-bullying campaigns and zero-tolerance measures in school and sometimes
they work, but when a child ventures outside those school gates or grows up and
enters into the real world, these movements lose their power. What’s more is
that society has a habit of shoving all the problem kids into one place. I
remember hearing a rumour that when a school changes its name to incorporate the
word “Academy”, it’s generally because it's quite a bad school. Similarly, an ex supervisor
of mine now works in a school that specifically takes in problem children.
These children make friends with other problem children which strengthens the
nature of their issues, so to speak. They run circles around the teachers that
they know they can get around and while the school may have measures in place,
they’ll continue to take in these children because the more of them they get,
the more money the school gets.
Imagine
that. Making money out of the misfortune of others? Haven’t heard that one before...
Fortunately,
children are impressionable and if you isolate a child – even a bully – and work
with them, I feel that they can be reformed in some shape or...form, but society just doesn’t have enough
of these resources. And with jobs few and far between, it doesn’t have the man
power either. So we get trapped in a cycle. Bullies pick their targets; targets
become victims; victims may even become bullies, or they grow up emotionally
crippled (no matter how small that scar is) and pass this on to the next
generation.
Sad,
isn’t it? :/
*two, if you count the confidence I gained via drinking excessive amounts of alcohol at a Staff Christmas Party
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