In grade 6, I gave a kid a black eye (totally in self-defense…he was chasing me, very angrily, because I’d splashed some water on him as a joke, and when he caught up with me, he grabbed me by the hair and was about to do…something…I didn’t want to find out what. So I belted him and got away.) It was outside of school, though; otherwise I probably would have been suspended.

In grade 2 or 3, I tweaked a girl’s nose HARD for cheating at hopscotch and then gloating when she won. The playground aide scolded me and I ran off crying.

THUS, MY HISTORY OF VIOLENCE.

Yes.

Yes, yes, yes.

I was bullied in middle school (not because of weight, but for other reasons), and there were two things that hurt above all else:

1: that none of my peers ever said or did anything, thus reinforcing the impression that the entire world was against me, rather than just a small, vocal subset; and
2: that even my teachers, guidance counselor, therapist, and *family* thought I should try harder to “blend in” and avoid the bullying that way, this reinforcing the impression that the entire world was against me, rather than just a small, vocal subset.

I am 20 years old and still suffering some of the effects of this bullying, including a fear of approaching people to make friends because I’m afraid they’ll… well, be mean to me. Despite overwhelming evidence that when people get to know me, they tend to really, really like me, I just can’t get past this fear that they are going to end up hating me for one reason or another. And honestly? I think it’s because I spent my tweenage years with almost my entire world against me. The default assumption in the back of my mind is that most people are not going to like me. No matter what, parents/family ALWAYS need to be on their child’s side in these types of situations and never, EVER suggest that the child needs to change to appease his/her attackers. That sends all sorts of nasty messages that will follow a person around for years.

I’ve known about this site for less than 48 hours and already you’re starting to change the tapes in my head — not just on the subject of weight, but on other topics as well. Thanks for posting all this awesome stuff. :)

Maybe being weird as a kid is the same thing that makes me ridiculously awesome as an adult — I’m imaginative and silly and intellectual and emotional, all at the same time. And compassionate as all get-out. And I’m sick of denying those things about myself, or being ashamed of them, or affecting a false humility about them.

Apparently that makes me weird. Good.

Agreed.

As others have said, I think it’s more about the attitude that teachers and parents take toward bullying, which is often not seriously enough. Anytime anything got physical they’d be all over it, but with anything verbal, it was, as Eve said, “Ignore them and they’ll stop” or the choice piece of more explicit victim-blaming my parents loved to fall back on, “You have to make yourself less of an easy target.”

Some of those who treated me so badly in school have since sincerely apologized. It’s good that some people grow up. Some apologized sooner than others. I have an entry in a yearbook from one who got to know me because we had mutual friends and spent lunches together during a semester.

Adults are the key here. So many are so delusional that they believe kids don’t act in this way. Parents need to be more proactive about it. I got teased and I teased as well because I thought that if I did it, I could be accepted. I got in trouble for it by my mom. Some teachers just looked the other way when I got picked on while others actually said something. THe kids need to know that this behavior is unacceptable.

But the interesting thing about this study (and, full disclosure, I haven’t read the actual study yet, just the article about it) is that they linked bullying to future physical illness. What interests me about that, in particular, is that some people have posited that the disease associations with obesity might actually come from poor treatment in society.

And there does seem to be more anti-bullying education going on, and more focus on it in general in the past decade or so. What I disagree with, however, are the kind of Zero Tolerance policies that end up with ridiculous results. I think it’s an attempt on the school’s part to shift blame onto the *individual bullies*, and I don’t think that’s actually the way to go about it.

I think kids bully (for the most part) because they don’t know any better, not because they are inherently evil. And I think the only way for them to know any better is to have more direct contact with positive adult role-models — but that’s, you know, expensive and unwieldy, so zero tolerance policies get put into place instead. Because they’re cheap and they put out individual fires. But they don’t address the actual, systemic problem.

Hahah, same here! But it was in 6th grade. I gave the dude a black eye, and he never messed with me again.

As a result I was convinced that there was just something wrong with me, inside and outside. I was actually an attractive girl, before and after I got fat, but I never, ever believed that I was anything but ugly. For years I had terrible self-esteem.

And again, same here. I thought there was *something about me* that invited bullying and harassment. And I always truly believed I was ugly, even when people started telling me I wasn’t.

I was bullied for being fat, but I knew it wasn’t because of my fat, because I didn’t get fat until I was about 12, and the bullying started much, much earlier. As a result I was convinced that there was just something wrong with me, inside and outside. I was actually an attractive girl, before and after I got fat, but I never, ever believed that I was anything but ugly. For years I had terrible self-esteem. I finally got over that, though it took longer to start liking my body.

I still chase that tail sometimes: was it the bullying that made me socially awkward, or was I socially awkward because of the bullying?

I’m much better now, if anyone’s concerned. I still have a lot of feelings about what happened way back when, but I don’t feel ugly or socially awkward anymore, and I have learned to surround myself with supportive, mature people.

It also helps if the adults actually give a crap. I was bullied every single day in elementary school, and I learned that unless I was physically hit (which I think only happened once) there was absolutely no way in hell that the teachers would try to discourage the bullying in any way whatsoever (I figure they didn’t want me getting ideas that I was so super awesome special that I deserved fancy privileges like not being tormented every single day, either that or it was just too much trouble). They also didn’t tell my parents anything about it. On the positive side, they never told me to quit being so fat either. The only thing they ever told me was to “just stay away from” the people who were bullying me.

But to dealing with bullies: my mother was of the ‘ignore them and they will go away’ persuasion – which, by the way, they don’t. I didn’t know how to strike the balance of assertiveness rather than going for the extremes of passivity (as advised by my mother) and aggression (as advised by my grandfather). I think the powerlessness the victim feels contributes to the trauma. But I think there is a lot more focus on anti-bullying education for parents and kids these days. Has anyone come in contact with it?

Okay, for example, you reward a dog for pooping on the newspaper. That’s a very clear message. Punishing a dog when it doesn’t go on the paper is unclear. The dog doesn’t really get what it’s being punished for, or how to avoid geting punished by any means other than trial and error. It’s most likely just going to think that you’re just a total psycho who is acting out of sheer cruelty.

Kids…I think kids should be treated the same way. You should establish consistent boundaries, but other than that, you should always avoid just saying ‘no’.

I, on the other hand, never got bullied, which always surprised me, since I felt chubby throughout middle and high school (though, looking back, I really wasn’t) and thought I would have been a natural target. The idea makes me uncomfortable, but my parents attribute it to my “don’t fuck with me” nature; my brother was (and is) much quieter. At the same time, I’d never want to imply the inverse – that someone more like my brother is somehow “inviting” bullying. Inherent parts of who we are, whether physical, emotional, or personality, don’t ever means that someone somehow deserves to be bullied.

In retrospect, I really don’t remember much fat-bashing, at least not in high school; there were a number of bigger girls (and guys) who were fairly popular. I suspect that there was still a lot of diet talk – I know there was from my end, since I was on and off Weight Watchers for close to 10 years – but I really didn’t see a ton of bullying. I really don’t know if this is luck, obliviousness, or something else.