![]() It also had consequences that come from the person who was bullied. ![]() I don’t think that it is reasonable to assume that I would be able to step up and intervene in a situation because I don’t know how to effectively do that, and I also refuse to put myself at risk.īullying has consequences, and not just penalties and criminal charges. One of the things that I am sick and tired of hearing is “put yourself in the other person’s place.” What about people putting themselves in my place? I think that because it went on for too long with people never sticking up for me or supporting me, I find it extremely difficult to know how to handle situations that involve other people. And he probably does, but it should NEVER be an excuse for it. I have heard the excuses many times that the bully probably has problems of his own. school, church, others activities because of my bad experiences and bad influences. I don’ recommend having the same peers in different groups, i.e. I feel that because of my experience with mixing peers in different groups, I heed with caution on that. I have even found that when I have had peers at school who also went to the same church, the bullying picks up and continues at church. Even when a student leaves a grade and goes to the next grade, the bullying follows them. I even played hooky a lot in the second grade because I could not take the bullying every single day. The teachers at my school would often call me and some of the other kids degrading and hurtful names, then it sparked the other kids to do it as well. I think that at school, the teachers new damn well that my mom would never intervene, so that is why some of my teachers were also bullies. Anytime I tried to talk to an adult, I always got an excuse for it. My mom only made excuses every time someone bullied me or would say that I probably started it by doing something. My dad died when I was very young, so I only had my mom and my brother and sister. I was bullied all through school, at home and in the neighborhood. Julie Garza-Withers is an award-winning community college sociology instructor and organizational diversity consultant who works with individuals and groups to facilitate collaborative solutions to gender, race, and class-based conflicts.įiled Under: Classism among Kids, Classism in Everyday Life, Classism in K-12 Education Tagged With: bullying, kids About Julie Withers How do I know? Well, think about it! When was the last time you heard about the bullying of a wealthy white kid who wears all the brands and has Lexus-driving parents? If these cases exist, they are rare, which is exactly why class is a variable in how schools deal with bullying on their campuses. The bullied poor kid with the messy hair, the weird clothes, and the angry, advocating parent will get a different institutional response than the kid whose clothing and physical presentation reflects the world of the people in charge. Now I’m not saying the dreaded “correlation is causation,” but I am saying that it’s very obvious that schools will protect the students that are most like the people who work in the institutions themselves - middle-class, white, and straight. In other words, they are systems that have historically oppressed the kinds of people who are targets for bullies. For people who were bullied as kids, the lack of institutional response gets a “yep, I coulda told you that.” Now that I am older and more educated, I know exactly what is going on: the bullying persists because the institutions where these incidents take place are classist, racist, and sexist in and of themselves. We all know that bullying is not a new phenomenon. School officials say that the bullying was not witnessed, or that there was no physical proof, or no written documentation. There are many official reasons for institutional apathy. Of course, they sure were “saddened when they heard the news.” The rub for the people on the bad end of the bullying is that so many schools already have well-intentioned “anti-bullying” policies in place to prevent harassment–but they don’t work to protect the targets. Sure, they do not like it, but in so many cases it is reported that there was little if any institutional intervention. The theme I keep coming across in my reading is the fact that NO ONE within these schools is doing much to stop the bullying. Kids and young adults committing suicide, suffering chronic depression, choosing to be home-schooled, or quitting school altogether: there’s no doubt that being bullied negatively shifts how a person experiences their daily life. ![]() I have been reading (I am sure you have too) about the many cases of bullying and the awful consequences of being a target for bullies. ![]()
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