Schools should step up and address bullying

I have been consistently bullied for 8 years since the age of 6 years old. I want you to imagine living every day of your life being the butt of somebody else’s joke, being the laughing stock of every kid who can see you daily, for as long as you can remember. That is a small look into my life and many others across the state, the country and the world as well. 

Bullying is a global problem that has still yet to be dealt with, despite bullying being shown to have horrible effects on not only the victims, but those who bully too.

In a study done on how bullying affects kids, it was shown that those who bullied others were significantly more likely to continue to rely on violence as they got older, which led to dropping out of school, criminal convictions and getting into dangerous fights.  While kids who got bullied had decreased academic achievements, an increase in health complaints and a major increase in depression and anxiety.

I am rather lucky in life to have supportive parents and friends who will support me if I am in need of it, but this is not the case for all people.  With bullying being as major of a problem as it is, it is unfortunately not surprising that so many kids suffer so greatly from this issue.

I remember when I was in first grade there were some kids who would make observations that I was different from them in size, but those comments that started as observations born of kids meeting the new kids in their class, soon turned into the out-casting of me because I was bigger and slower.

When I was in third grade I remember a group of girls who sang a song about me being fat that they made up just to make me mad. I don’t remember a single one of their names now, but I still vividly remember this happening and think of it as the first major instance of me being seriously bullied, and after this when I started to accept bullying as a normal part of my life. 

While I completely accept myself for who I am, and what I look like, sometimes it still hurts just to hear somebody I don’t know and have never met before make a comment about me in the hallway.

In 8th grade while walking to a class in the main part of the building, a kid younger than me, whom I had never met before, looked at me and called me a fat-ass to my face and kept walking – with no attempt to hide it like it was the most normal thing ever. That is how common this behavior is. And I realized that it barely even made a difference in my day, which is a horrifying thought to have – that something like that was so incredibly normal to me in my life. It was just another event in the day I had to worry about, like my classes or my homework. That behavior should not be normal to me, and even knowing that, it still is.

A similar thing happened to me at the beginning of this year. When I was walking to English class, I heard somebody walk past and tell his friend I looked “super fat”. I responded by laughing at how funny that was to me, before realizing just how bad it was as well.

I am even okay with jokes about my size if we’re friends, and I know there is no actual harm intended in those words. After all, it is the truth that I’m larger than most people, and a lot of the time those jokes are funny because they are rooted in truth. But, those kids in the hallway, along with all the other kids who have called me mean spirited names like “used tampon” when I dyed my hair red, were not telling jokes where the intent was to all have a laugh together. The intent was to make others laugh, by using an insult as a vehicle to get there – and to hurt me.  

Some might say that bullying is something that is already being taken care of by the many anti-bullying organizations and videos they show at schools. But, I can say from experience, that this is blatantly untrue. Bullying is a problem that goes far deeper than a few educational videos.

Schools need to invest actual time and resources into the root problems that cause bullying, like the mental health of those who bully, and what events might have led them to take their anger or insecurities out on others.  I know that on occasion, I take that anger I feel from bullying, and push it onto somebody else – before I even realize what I’m doing is the same thing that has been done to me.

This is me pleading for schools to make a difference where it really counts – to make sure that more kids who grew up like me don’t have to experience what I had to.  To really make bullying a problem few and far between, that can be dealt with sufficiently, instead of waiting for the problem to go away on its own.  To end lazy attempts to stop it, when all those attempts amount to is something people can point to and use to waive away bullying, rather than acknowledge what it really is – an ongoing problem that is severely damaging to those who bully and those who are bullied.

That is what I am communicating to you here today. Thank you.