The Empowerment Movement - Alex
It’s interesting to me that I can’t conjure an image of someone I’ve met who hasn’t had the experience of being bullied at one point or another, but at the same time I think it’s important to make a distinction regarding exactly what we’re talking about when we use the word “bully”. In the last several years we’ve extended the meaning of the word to include workplace behaviour, online harassment, and a host of other scenarios that are definitely worth addressing, but that might not fit the use of the word I’m going for here.
To me, bullying isn’t typically a single incident of confrontation. It’s not being stuffed in a locker, or having one’s head dunked in a toilet. It’s not schoolyard brawls or nasty messages scrawled on papers sneakily passed from hand to hand in math class. It can be composed of these things, but these things do not individually constitute bullying. In my mind, to be bullied is to be excised from the normal order of things, to be pointed at and ordered out for being different, or simply just for being. Bullying is systemic expulsion, and the long-term effects of that expulsion are only now being measured.
I was raised predominantly by my mother, who chose to leave her career to stay home full-time with me and later my sister. My father worked extremely long hours to make this happen, so I rarely saw him and his influence on my life was limited. My mother had been a child and youth worker specializing in what used to be called “disturbed children”, so conflict management was a major part of her suite of parenting skills. As a result I was raised with a very nuanced and grown-up conflict resolution style for my age. I was also singled out at an early age as being high-functioning, at a time in Ontario education history when there were fewer integrative options for so-called “gifted” children. Oh, and I really liked “Star Trek”. Like, probably too much.
So, weird from the outset. Anybody familiar with this narrative (so basically everyone who’s ever seen a coming-of-age film) knows this is a setup for what we’ve come to think about as classic bullying. But, with nearly 25 years of retrospection, I’ve come to some interesting conclusions about how and why these things happened to me.
I attended three very different public schools. In kindergarten and part of first grade I attended a very diverse school that was attended predominantly by children from impoverished and struggling families. My family was also poor, but we were fortunate enough not to be living in what amounts to the projects: many of my classmates were not so lucky. As a result, a lot of these kids grew up pretty rough, a fact I discovered when I tried to employ reason in resolving conflicts with them, only to be met with a boot to the chest. My mother raised me to believe that words are always, always more effective than physical violence, so I quite literally didn’t know how to fight back, and talking only made them madder. Funny enough, I remember being afraid to lash out because even as I was enduring the daily beating (and make no mistake - five year-olds can be truly effective fighters) I didn’t want to hurt them back. I think it’s worthwhile to note that the kindergarten teacher was equally physical with the class – while she didn’t actively strike children, her behaviour would be enough to see her removed from her job nowadays. When she wasn’t grabbing and hauling children around, she was belittling them in front of the class, shaming them for their mistakes and encouraging the class to laugh along with her. This was...a departure from what I experienced at home, in no small way.
Not too long after I hit first grade a spot opened up at another school’s “gifted” program, so I was spirited away to what my parents fervently hoped would be a better environment for me. At this point I was so primed with anxiety about going to school that I routinely suffered from night terrors and began a life-long habit of biting my nails and grinding my teeth (the nail thing has evened out now that I’m an adult, but the teeth grinding became so ingrained it’s costing me a small fortune to fix my teeth at age 31). I also developed what I can only term “associative racism” – since my former teacher and many of my classmates had been of Caribbean origin, my six year-old brain associated violence predominantly with Black people, to the point where I expressed concern that my new teacher, the bus driver, or the principal might also be of this ancestry. My mother nipped that in the bud pretty quickly, dispelling my associations to the point where they didn’t stick, but I shudder to think the kind of person I might have turned out to be if she hadn’t.
Switching schools was a blessing and a curse. My first grade teacher was a brilliant man who was no stranger to bullying himself, being an identified gay man (living with AIDS to boot) in the teaching profession in 1990. He was the “blessing” part of the equation, and I’m happy to say we remain friends to this day. He was instrumental in helping me learn the social skills necessary to relate to kids my age, since my natural talents led me to share more in common with adults than other children. This was a pretty common problem among “gifted” kids, apparently, which led me to the second half of my bullying experience.
I’m convinced on some level that bullying is at least partially attributable to things like classism and racism. Many of the kids who bullied me in my first school were from low-income families that (I found out years later) were quite often violent atmospheres to grow up in. I was regularly accused of talking down to them, or of assuming myself to be “better” because of the colour of my skin. Of course I was just a weirdly articulate child with no prior experience dealing with other kids, but I can see retrospectively how it must have tracked that way to kids that lacked some of the benefits I grew up with.
The kids who bullied me in the “gifted” program – allegedly my intellectual peers – came at it from another track altogether. Here was the opposite end of the spectrum: while I was comparatively privileged in my old environment, in my new school I was the “poor” kid, especially in the segregated “gifted” program. The other kids had their birthday parties at country clubs; they had the latest and greatest in toys and clothes and all the other material goods wealth can bring. They didn’t do chores because mom and dad had a maid. In short, they were living in a world very far removed from mine – while my parents worked very hard to ensure our clothes were good quality and that we didn’t go without as far as material goods were concerned, there was still a very visible difference between where I came from and where they did.
Their intellectual aptitude played a role as well. Here were kids who had grown up side-by-side with one another, constantly verbally sparring with each other and sharpening their wits. I, in contrast, devoted my intellect to scholarly pursuits at that young age – reading voraciously, engaging in imaginative play, making art – and the messaging I was exposed to (both through media and family) was hopelessly positive and optimistic and earnest. There was no room in me for the kind of spite and snark and duplicity I would experience from my classmates. Remember “The Karate Kid”? My classmates were the intellectual equivalent of the Cobra Kai – really good at what they did, but using it to hurt other people rather than as a tool of self-development. In the intervening three years I was introduced to passive aggression and dishonesty used to embarrass and shame me publicly. While the physical beatings mostly stopped in this environment, the emotional and mental abuse ramped up to the point where I was barely able to function at all, retreating into my fantasy worlds more and more. My classmates delighted in “pressing the right buttons” to upset me, then watching me lose my composure altogether. It probably doesn’t sound as bad as getting beaten, but for my money it was worse. Even more than a physical beating for me, this sort of behaviour stripped me of my ability to fight back, because I just wasn’t operating in the same sphere as my attackers. They could make me feel small in a way that a poor kid smashing me in the face never did. I can say with surety that I never fully recovered from those years.
By the time my family moved out of the city and into a small commuter town halfway to Barrie, I had learned enough lessons to be able to acclimatize reasonably well to my new situation. I flatly refused a spot in the local “gifted” program because I decided I’d much rather get beat up than have to put up with the kind of abuse I took in Toronto. But here’s the part that bothers me. Upon entering the regular stream at my new school, I quickly realized that I was now in a position of power – that is to say, I was smarter than my classmates by a considerable margin, which meant I exercised a degree of authority I wasn’t used to. I spent the rest of grade school and almost all of high school turning into exactly what I’d hated about my “gifted” classmates: a master manipulator with a sharp tongue and the ability to make others feel small.
I’m relieved to be able to say that I never targeted my classmates. I wasn’t a bully, and I didn’t become one. But understanding how to use my talents in public speaking and manipulation to get what I wanted – and to protect myself from being hurt – turned me into the sort of person I’m not proud of. I know I wasn’t proud of it then, because to counter how I felt about myself, I turned to drugs and alcohol to lower my inhibitions and make me feel better about gaming the system. That was all a long time ago, and I’m pleased to say it’s all in my past, but it still happened, and I think that’s important.
The true danger, I think, of how bullying influences people, is this: when you make someone an “other”, when you cast them out and make them fight to get back in, they learn how. For some people that means learning how to take a punch and dole one out. For me, it meant learning how to control people around me and make them do what I wanted by manipulating their feelings. These skills are valued in adult society in specific ways, which means they’re not necessarily bad by themselves, but there’s a problem. Kids aren’t usually capable of the critical thinking necessary to use those skills in a positive way, but adults who have grown up with this sort of treatment can self-justify using them in a negative way. Sometimes bullies breed victims – people who spend their lives scared of other people. For me, bullying very nearly bred a bully, and it’s only the strength of the moral teachings I was raised with (by both of my parents; I should mention my father became a huge source of inspiration and strength for me by the time I moved to my third school) that kept me from it. Other people aren’t so lucky, or so self-aware. I’m convinced that’s where we get the bullies we see in the adult world: the CEO who enjoys belittling his underlings or harassing the admin; the police officer who takes pleasure in using his authority to justify his terrible behaviour; the parent that raises their child to live in fear of them. This behaviour doesn’t spring out of a vacuum.
Is there a solution? I don’t know. I don’t know how to change people in this context. All I know is that a cycle is very obvious in the generation of these behaviours and these patterns of thought and action. The result is a dice roll – does the abused become an abuser, or continue to be a victim? Neither option is attractive. But one thing is for certain: there’s more going on here than what John Hughes movies would have us believe about bullying. I think it’s worth sharing these stories and working together to find their commonality. I think it’s worth inviting people back in who’ve been excluded for so long. Ultimately, it’s foolish to assume we can get rid of bullying entirely – to a degree, this kind of social interaction is endemic to the human condition – but I think it’s possible for us to ratchet it back to the point where kids aren’t killing themselves over how they’re being treated. At least I hope it is.
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