A Bully-free World

Ilyana has been a bit grumpy lately. Unwinding at bedtime, she mentioned that she has been pushed by a girl in 1^st grade, with whom the Kindergartners share some recess time. For younger children, it can be a fine line between an invasive, pushy child wanting to be your friend and someone deliberately tormenting another child.

Bullying can become more blatant as kids get older and then, bullying can become more subtle in adult world as individuals use their power over others to their advantage.

In Ilyana’s case, the un-named first grader's behaviour appears to be a little reckless and a little pushy and she seems a bit insecure: ingredients in bullying, but maybe not yet meeting its full definition.

On hearing of Ily’s suffering, my first inclination was to get Ily to learn to physically defend herself, and secondly to get her older sister to step in to give the bully a warning. Both ideas would not necessarily have played any positive role in outcomes, but were motivated by my sense of the importance of our children being bully-free and not victims of someone else’s aggression.

Bullying has been in the news lately. Most of the coverage seems to be on the need to identify children that are being bullied and giving them support. There seems to be less coverage on the roots of bullying, on what makes a child angry and hungry to overpower others.

Our own children’s experiences routinely return us, as parents, to our own childhoods. Last night’s conversation took me back to Dean Nettle. A kid who was the receptacle of my own violence when I was at elementary school.

I was just 9 years old. I had just started at a new school. One particular day I was full of anger. I could not focus on class and remember looking around the group table where myself and a group of six boys were sitting. I sized up everyone and decided to target another boy. I was probably the tallest in the class, Dean Nettle was the next tallest.

I systematically began kicking him under the table whenever the teacher was not looking. It didn’t feel right to me, but I wanted to do it. I didn’t really know this other child and had had no particular conflicts with him.

Later that day on the playground, I continued to taunt him, and finally began to hit him. I can remember the crowd of kids gathering around us as I beat on him and beat on him. It was horrible, but I could not stop myself.

Eventually I beat Dean Nettle unconscious. This was about the time that the recess teacher showed up. Dean got up, dazed, and we were both sent to the school nurse and then the Principal’s office. The Principal was reasonably soft on me, trying to reason that the playground was not for boxing matches. I specifically remember him telling me that I was not Cassius Clay, which dates the moment.

At school I got the reputation for knocking out another kid. The glory that this world drapes on the violent.

But it is only yesterday, after talking over Ilyana’s situation with Karen, that the worst part of this story occurred to me.

After beating up Dean Nettle, I never gave him another thought through elementary school. I never taunted him. I was done. It was out of my system. What occurred to me last night in processing this with my partner, was how that other 9-year old may have spent the rest of the year coming into school worried that I was going to turn on him. So while I never gave Dean another thought that year, I now know that he was probably terrified of a repeat, unprovoked episode.

So was I a bully?

I had many other fights before that fight, mostly on the public housing project I was brought up on. Those were the fights that were critical to surviving. It was fight or be bullied. But I never had another intimate fist fight again in my life.

So what could have stopped this? Could Dean have done anything different? Could the teachers have done anything to prevent this? The short answer is No. Could I have been prevented from unleashing this violence on Dean. Yes.

Part of the reason I remember this story so vividly, is, I think, because it happened during the very worst week of my entire life.

That week had begun with a social worker driving my brothers and I away from my sobbing mother, who had been our sole caregiver. It had become the week where we were moved into a state-run group home. It was a week where I saw my younger brother savagely beaten by older kids while the social workers’ backs were turned. It was a week of feeling betrayed by my mother, who bore no blame, and the entire adult world. All this for a 9-year old child to process.

I processed it, without a single thought. I processed it with my feet and my fists. And another 9-year old was the victim, who probably will never be able to rationalize the incident.

I’m not ready to forgive myself, or the child that I was. But I am ready to dole out blame. I blame the penalty-driven, old-school social services system. I blame poverty and its weight that it bears down on families. And above all I blame an economic system that rewards bullying, economic bullying. The enemy of bullying is solidarity and equality.

Solidarity seeks to listen and hear pain, and seeks to share resources and repair the damage that the promotion of inequality does to small children and the adults they become.

With help and support, Ilyana’s struggles will not weaken her but help her to survive this rocky world that we share.