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Davey1965 Last Activity 11 years ago 536 views 8 comments Post Comment

Contrary to what is often portrayed in the media, there is no such thing as a single school bully. There is usually a pack of them, or in my experience, an entire school. I was the usual skinny boy with thick glasses and the misfortune of living emotionally close to the surface. After years of casual taunts and jibes in primary and intermediate school, from girls and boys alike, the bullying really kicked into high gear during my third and fourth form years at college. What followed was not so much bullying as an attempt to eradicate someone's life. Every day I would run the gauntlet of jabs, punches, jeers, jibes and abuse. It was non-stop, without a break. Teachers would often join in, and when my parents got involved they were informed that bullying was part of the curriculum at my school and if they didn't like it, they were free to withdraw me, which they eventually did. As you may imagine, this instilled within me a nice, healthy, life-long respect for authority. The bullying eventually peaked in an incident in my final year where a student I thought of as a friend set me up by leading me to the top of a fire escape. I didn't know that he had already gone around telling everyone and anyone that I was going to kill myself. He had arranged for half the school to turn up and shout "jump, jump JUMP!" This went on for about an hour until I managed to push my way through the crowd and call my parents to get home. As mentioned before, I eventually left for another school where things improved somewhat, at least as far as the bullying went. Academically it didn't, and eventually I got expelled in my seventh form year for continuously not turning up to classes. But that was all me. I guess I can't blame everything on the bullying. My high school years were a mixture of betrayal, abuse, disappointment, failure and neglect. My grades suffered. I developed life-long problems with anxiety and remain on medication to this day. But here's the thing. Success is the best form of recovery. It will silence them all, I promise. In my late 20s everything shaped up. I went to university, got an honours degree, and pursued my musical ambitions, and continue to do so. Despite my day-to-day problems, I have a loving wife and a great career in an education environment. I am also a talented musician, have a life-long interest in weight training and the martial arts (go figure!), and I eventually even managed to get contact lenses. I get through all the negatives of my childhood by accepting that certain things happened, and also by accepting that occasionally I still have to deal with them. To all bullied children all I can say is one day it will stop. You will reclaim all your lost confidence and self-belief, but you will need some help along the way. To the bullies, you know who you are. Eat my dust. View all contributions - © Fairfax NZ News My story has much in common with others: I was ostracised by my peers for no reason that I could figure at the time - children seem to attack anyone who is different in some way. I remember other kids at school who became the butt of jokes because they were in some way either handicapped or behaved oddly. The ability to survive this kind of treatment seems to depend on a child's ability to absorb or deflect the taunts and stick up for themselves in both physical and emotional ways. By the time I reached high school I'd had years of torment from other children. For some reason I was overly sensitive to the opinions of other kids with whom I used to associate. Being bad at sports did not help the situation. My parents, who did everything they could to help, took me to the doctors and I was put on medication for depression. The drugs were quite strong back then and whilst it made the constant battle that I had trying to find my place somewhat bearable, it also dulled my brain, so my academic performance suffered. By the time fifth form came around, things were bad. I had withdrawn into myself and though I had people I related to, I was always worried about rejection. I was shipped off to boarding school. Dealing with this pressure during school hours was hard enough. Living with it 24/7 was hell. I was not the only one who was tormented in this place. Once again if someone was different in some way or unable or unwilling to defend themselves, the others were going to take advantage of it. I failed academically and scared my house-master by trying to kill myself. Finally, I simply refused to go back. The memories of those who bullied me are there to this day and the feeling of rejection by my peers has stayed with me as an adult. It has affected every area of my life, and I have given up. As I look back on it I feel sure that if I had given as good as I got, stood up for myself, absorbed a few beatings, I may have earned grudging respect. Telling the teachers and staff made the situation worse. It seems to me that children have no sense of community, it's a dog eat dog world in school. As a child in school I was keenly aware of a hierarchy that existed amongst my peers, just as it exists in any community, but in a far more brutal and perhaps honest fashion. This, at a time when children are being shaped into the kind of adults they will eventually become. My experience at the bottom of this heap was one of rejection and ridicule for reasons I could not understand. Like all the others I was in the learning phase of my development, it's a delicate and dangerous time for many. Despite all the hand-wringing and attempts to stop, it persists and I think this is because if we remove the thin veneer that is our civilisation, it is still survival of the fittest. My name is Kane Pohio and during my secondary schooling at St Paul's Collegiate in Hamilton, I suffered bullying. I was the target of physical and mental abuse during my time as a boarder. I had a tumour on my pituitary gland removed when I was three, it was about the size of a golf ball when they operated. They had to remove my pituitary gland during the operation. I have to take medication for the rest of my life. I had a growth hormone to get me to my height of 179cm and testosterone injections. As a result of having my operation, I could not play contact sports like rugby. Not being able to play the sport that the majority of the school played made me an outcast right from the start. My energy levels were no where near a normal human being without a medical condition. I found it difficult in compulsory running or any exercise for that matter. I played sports like tennis, badminton, and squash, which were considered sissy sports. The sorts of bullying I would receive included being called names and general verbal abuse, usually started by one boy and then the whole dorm would join in. I was punched or hit. I had the contents of my locker regularly thrown everywhere. I had the gears of my bike destroyed. After watching the movie Full Metal Jacket my whole dormitory thought it would be fun to punish me for my snoring. They held a sheet over me while I was in bed after the lights went out so I couldn't escape. They had blocks of soap in their pillow cases and proceeded to beat me with them until they felt satisfied that I had been beaten enough. The height of my physical bullying was one morning when we were having a shower in a large communal shower, I was pushed from behind by the perpetrator of my bullying. My feet slipped on the concrete floor and I fell flat on my back, hitting my head on the hard floor. I was knocked out for five minutes and when I came to all the guys were standing around as if nothing had happened. I was probably in the sick bay more than any boy there. The verbal bullying was the worst and had the greatest effect on me, and because I didn't retaliate, I was an easy target. I tried to put on a brave face and make out it wasn't having an effect on me, but deep down I was being tormented. When the bullies could see they were not having an effect on me with their words, they would sometimes resort to physical abuse. I would regularly come home with bruises but I never let on to my parents the extent of what was going on. You simply can't get away from it when you are in a boarding house. You learn right from the start at that if you nark, it only gets worse. The effects that bullying has had on me include mood swings; I would take my anger, frustration and fury out on my family for sending me to that school. I left at the end of sixth form with no desire to continue being a Christian, after all, it's an Anglican school. As far as I was concerned, God had failed me with the abuse I had received there. I went through a dark period in my life after leaving the school where I would listen to heavy metal music which added fuel to my already burning anger and fury. I never went to any of the school balls with our sister school. My self esteem was zero and I simply didn't have the confidence to ask a girl there to go with me. It's a big part of a boy's development into becoming a man to be able to communicate and relate with girls. I missed out on that because of bullying. I guess that is a reason why I am single at the age of 40. The other effect is that once I left school it took me 10 years of my life to work out what I wanted to do for a career. I jumped from job to job with no direction in my life. For 20-plus years I have had the effects of bullying hanging around my neck. In 2012 I received counselling and was able to forgive the people responsible, so that I could move on with my life. The effects of bullying don't end when you leave the school gate at the end of the day, they continue well on into your life. Now when I read stories about bullying it gets the fury up in me because some young boy or girl is being bullied. It could be your son or daughter. Think of the effect on their lives it's going to have. The students responsible for bullying and their parents need to be punished by the school in such a way that they never bully anyone in their life again, because the parents are just as much to blame as the kids are. The schools need to have a policy with zero acceptance of bullying, where students are expelled if they are found responsible of bullying. It's not good enough for schools to turn a blind eye to it anymore, take some serious action to stomp out bullying.