Bullying should be a crime that affects millions of children
A great tragedy occurs when someone is bullied; It can be in schools, colleges, workplace or in the playground in your community. It can be a physical, psychological or mental abuse and happens frequently to those who are weak and vulnerable. It should be condemned and prevented by those in authority.
Many of us grow up with painful memories of being bullied in our schools when young. In schools and colleges around the world, bullying often inflicts damage that cannot be undone to so many boys and girls. Most grow out of it and put it down to a nasty episode during their childhood and get on with their lives. But there are many who feel the pain years afterwards and cannot shake off their humiliation in the hands of bullies who tormented them every day.
The bully is a gender neutral culprit. The girls are just as vicious as bullies as the boys and will often gang up on a smart kid who is ahead of everybody in her class and minds her own business. If she is pretty to boot, it causes intense jealousy among not so smart girls so they bully their classmates.
In the movie Forrest Gump, the poor boy with braces on his legs was bullied by other kids so he learned to run away from them even if it was very painful for him to run with braces. His only friend was Jenny who said Run Forrest run so that he could escape the torment.
The school ground is a fertile place where the bullies have the power over meek and weak students who cannot run away like Forrest and suffer the consequences because the teachers or the principal cannot always protect the weak and humble from the bullies outside the classroom.
During our college days we knew about a severe form of bullying by older students that was called ragging. They beat up new students as a part of their initiation rites to join their fraternities or sororities that often resulted in the death of the student.
It happens here in the Philippines where many have lost their precious lives because of ragging so now the schools and colleges are expelling the bullies and file criminal cases against them but it still goes on because such bullies often come from families with money so they can bribe their way out of their problems where the justice system is corrupt or where they have powerful people to back them up.
The vicious female bullies force the new applicants to their sororities to perform degrading acts including sexual humiliation before they accept them in the name of initiation rites while their male counterparts resort to violent methods that are condemned by all but still in practice in many college campuses. It is more common in the western societies but also happens elsewhere.
When I was in high school, there were some bullies who came from uneducated and poor families and thought that bullying kids who came from educated middle class families was the thing to do to prove their worth. Most of them did badly in school and dropped off because they were not smart and their parents could not keep up with the school expenses. Many such bullies got into violent crimes later on and ended up in jails or worse so their life was pitiful.
Later in college, I was confronted by a bully who one day put a huge dead insect in my pocket to see my reaction. I promptly put it back in his pocket. He never bothered me again.
You will notice that most bullies are that way and end up as social deviants hooked on drugs and crime that finishes them off but there are some who get wiser and grow out of it later blaming it on their excessive testosterone that makes them aggressive.
Humans have the animal instinct due to excessive hormones so some of them get into fights easily over women at a certain age just like the animals. In the animal kingdom the females mate with the winner in a dog fight to inherit stronger genes for their offspring so I wonder if it is also true in us humans. Our ancestors were apes if Darwin is to be believed.
The act of bullying is an overt expression of sexual aggressiveness at a certain age but it also shows the mental immaturity of a person who feels manly by showing off his brutal nature to a weak person this way.
In the movie The Karate Kid we saw how the kid Daniel was bullied relentlessly by stronger kids who took karate lessons and practiced on him until Mr. Miyagi came to his rescue and trained him to be a karate champion.
It is interesting to know that most bullies are cowards but in a perverse attempt to hide their cowardice they become bullies. They back off when they face a strong person who takes no such nonsense from anyone.
Among the kids, the harassment starts early in their life when they get on their school bus and find that no one gives him a seat or they take his food from his plate in the cafeteria. The bullies enjoy the sport of tripping someone who falls down on his face and gets hurt or they spill food and drinks on him or her just because it causes great embarrassment to the victim. So any form of bullying is a sign of immaturity and inferiority complexes that they try to hide by acting aggressively toward someone who means no harm.
Later you see the extreme form of bullying in the army boot camps where it is done to toughen up the new recruits who receive punishment for very minor infractions in front of other recruits. The sergeant who is responsible to shape up the recruits is a vicious person who has no mercy and no limit to his vulgar vocabulary. It is all done in the army tradition in the boot camp where they pick on people who are not strong enough or who fail in their endurance tests and call them faggots meaning homosexuals.
There was a movie I cant recall the title of where a tormented cadet got so unhinged because of constant bullying and name calling that he took his gun and shot dead the tormentor.
There is a similar situation where a kid of Korean descent who was ignored, often harassed and looked down upon by his white classmates became revengeful and one day shot dead scores of innocent people in a campus in Virginia to express his rage. He also lost his own life.
Most bullied people do not resort to violent actions of any kind and try to cope with their situation as best as they can or change schools if that helps. But many suffer from the memory of bullying later in their life.
There is another severe form of bullying where someone with authority like a priest takes advantage of children and molests them sexually with the threat of expulsion from the church if they tell anyone. The church ignores such crimes and often hides them to protect the priests although many have been exposed and defrocked who are now facing criminal charges in many countries.
What is so unfortunate is the fact that a confession made by a victim of such abuse or a perpetrator himself is kept confidential because that is the church law even if a crime should be reported to the police.
But the bullying can also start at home where a very strict father bullies his children or spouse all the time that can have severe detrimental effects on the child or the spouse. I know a case where a fellow in our neighborhood so mistreated his only son that he grew up hating the parents and one day shoved his mother hard who fell down and died. The father had been dead a long time but the animosity in the kid lingered resulting in the tragedy.
There is another case where a person so mistreated his very intelligent daughter that she became insane and was locked up in her home all the time. We could see her pitiful face through the window but could do nothing to help her. Finally the people in the community could take it no longer and asked the fellow to leave because he was also abusing his wife.
So bullying in any form whether mental, physical or psychological should be treated as a crime and the perpetrators punished to the full extent of the law but sadly such laws are not enacted or poorly implemented in many countries. As I mentioned earlier, often such crimes are unreported due to church laws or because the bully is the son of a prominent politician.
What is the solution?
I think the solution to the act of aggression that leads to bullying can come from the parents. Those who fail to teach their children that bullying anyone is a crime and do nothing even if told that his kids are bullies are the problem so they need counseling.
But such people cannot be helped unless they admit that they have a problem and are seeking a solution. The counseling should include their children who should explain why they do what they do to get to the root of the problem. It may expose deep psychological or other issues that are behind such behavior that need to be addressed.
The schools should have a better system of protecting the weak and vulnerable and expel the bullies as a last resort that may prevent them from going to other schools. If a crime is committed then it should be reported to the authorities for disciplinary actions.
A lot of aggressive behavior in students comes from their racial viewpoints that originate from their parents or the community where they live so racism in any form in school or outside should not be tolerated. The ethnic minorities, people of color and new immigrants who have a different religion and accent are often subject to bullying so the school should make an effort to better integrate them and by educating the racists with education and information about others who are different.
There was a Sikh girl in the United States who had facial hair which is caused by a genetic disorder so she was constantly bullied in school but she was a sweet girl who explained to everybody that it was not her fault that she had facial hair. She was able to win her detractors by explaining and educating them about her religion.
A lot of problems related to the aggressive nature of some people who resort to bullying others to feel superior to others can be avoided on campus.
One way is not to join any fraternity or sorority that practices ragging and beatings as the initiation rite. Such practices should be banned outright by the school and such students should be expelled so that they cannot transfer to another college somewhere and continue.
I had expressly warned our two kids about the perils of joining the fraternities and sororities when they started their university life so they stayed away because they listened to me. If students live on campus and away from their homes like many do, they come under intense pressure from the recruiters who entice them to join them with the promise of lifelong support for each other and help with jobs later on. It is known that many people who are prominent now were once frat members themselves and will do something to help a frat member who now seeks his attention.
The campus brawls between the various fraternities are common so they create problems for the students who may get hurt. Often it starts over a female student but it can be something else due to strong rivalry among the fraternities and sororities to get new recruits.
A bully boy beats up a boy who does not fight back
Bullying starts early in schools and communities. Many young boys and girls are faced with bullies in the school years that traumatize them to the extent that they decide to find another school but bullying in schools is more widespread than you can imagine. In American schools, bullying is done by boys who enjoy tormenting new students just because they are of different skin color or of another ethnic background who may be very smart and consistently get high grades from their teachers.
Bullying is a curse that does not spare even a new teacher until the teacher fights back and expels the bully from his or her class. This sort of behavior is often the subject of many movies or U tube that really makes me think why it happens and why the school authorities do not take strict actions against such people. Do they offer counseling to such boys and girls or try to reform them by other means.
In the movie Forrest Gump, the boys tormented the young Forrest who had polio and could not walk or run so the young boy started to run away from the bad boys and strengthened his legs.
There was a bully in our college in India who thought that he could bully anyone anytime without any consequence so one day he got a big dead insect and tried to put it in my shirt pocket. He was very surprised when I put the big insect back in his pocket in return. He said that he did not know that I was in the second year so underestimated me. He never bothered me again. It made me think that most bullies are cowards and back off if someone challenges them.
I also think that a bully does not act alone because he is always seen in the company other bad boys who enjoy his bullying because to them it is just entertainment. They often drop out of high school or expelled by the principal, so they are seen selling hot dogs or cleaning tables in some eateries while the bullied boy or the girl graduates with honor, goes to college and excels there as well to become a doctor or engineer or a scientist in the future.
Students who do not show respect to their teachers in the classrooms or on campus may come from broken families where the parents fail to teach them good values and moral lessons, so the kid starts to keep the company of bad boys of similar background. In Asia, the teacher is highly respected by his students and in the community where he or she lives but there are also cases of bullying by other students in some colleges.
It is also known that some girls bully new female students out of jealousy because the new student is very smart, dresses well, is polite to the teachers and always respectful. She does her homework well and spends her time in the library instead of gossiping with other girls. She soaks up knowledge from books and in her classroom like a sponge and is a wide reader on all subjects. She also excels in learning musical instruments and participates in many games like volleyball or badminton where she wins trophies and medals in competition with other schools.
Such students are remembered by their teachers long after they have graduated and moved on to some prestigious colleges on scholarship while the bad bully boys and girls make no progress in their life.
I often see young kids throwing tantrum in a restaurant disturbing everybody while the mother smiles but does not control the kid. I had to call a stewardess in a flight to ask the woman to control her kid who was making a lot of noise and throwing tantrum. Finally, the indifferent mother told the kid to behave and not disturb other passengers. Several people on that flight thanked me for confronting the situation. Such a kid who is not taught good manners and never reprimanded becomes a bully later on in his school and reaps its consequences when he is expelled. Some schools have strict rules and implement them.
There were a Muslim boy and a girl in our college who teamed up to make trouble on campus by calling a strike on some issues that very few understood including myself, so the classes stopped and some kids threw stones on the majestic glass window of the library. After some time, the classes started again but the two miscreants were summarily expelled from the college who could never get a clean transfer certificate, so their studies came to an end. I do not know what happened to them.
The anger, the jealousy and the sense of entitlement in them helps create in them the aggressive attitude they show toward anyone that leads to bullying. I was told by a friend that in his college, there was a bully who tormented others so tired of his bad behavior, some students lured him into a forested area just off campus, where they all beat the devil out of him, so he never bullied anyone again. Perhaps such measures were drastic, but some kids need to learn their lessons in a hard way while other efforts failed. Physical punishment often has desired results. In African villages, the punishment of a kid who is misbehaving becomes a communal responsibility so by and large the rural kids are well behaved.
In some countries where the physical punishment is not allowed, the kids tend to be more aggressive towards others as adult and behave that way to any newcomer later on. You will see it repeated in the cowboy movies that leads to violence and even death. These movies are based on real events played out in hundreds of saloons everywhere.
A man killed a pregnant woman over a parking slot dispute here in the Philippines that led to his arrest and long jail time while the woman and her unborn child died so needlessly over a parking slot dispute. Where does such dangerous aggressiveness come from? Was he a bully growing up and had behaved badly over silly matters in the past?
In some countries the inherent suspicion shown when they meet a stranger in a public place like a bar or a shopping area often leads to unpleasant situations that can quickly escalate to something no one wants. This suspicion comes from their isolationist attitude because they do not meet new people and their poor knowledge of the outside world where people grow up practicing different faiths, culture, food and social manners. Their poor education, isolation and lack of knowledge about the world makes them aggressive and suspicious. If you want to learn how such people grew up under what situations, you will find the answer. Their behavior is a learned behavior from their parents and other people who live in their communities.
When the time comes for a boy or girl to go to a college, they find out that the bad boys and girls form their fraternities and sororities and constantly seek new recruits. They put pressure on new students to join them, but it ends badly if then join. There are fights between different fraternities over silly issues that have resulted in physical harms and other consequences. The bad girls also gang up on other sororities to prove their dominance over them because it makes them feel good.
I strongly condemn all forms of bullying, ragging and human degradation through aggressive behavior and appreciate those who take a strong stand against it and do something about it if it is within their power to do so. I appreciate schools and colleges where such behavior is not tolerated and where such students are required to take counseling to improve their behavior.
But finally it all starts at home. If you raise a monster, he will be out of control and will become a bully. He will not only hurt others, he will hurt himself because sooner or later he will suffer the consequences.
So, start raising your kids with love and compassion so that one day they will become responsible adults with empathy for all.