do one thing for others this Anti Bullying week...

This is the first year for a long time that I have not been directly involved in a range of activities across my local area to arm young people with ideas and support in beating off bullies.  Opening the minds of the bullies to how they make people feel with their throw away comments or dedicated systematic use of put downs and mis-treatment of their chosen targets.  I have always felt passionately that whilst bullies are dangerous, spiteful and hurtful in their pursuit of power, they are nearly always weak and lacking in self confidence inside or victims themselves at the hands of some other more powerful person.  It is not likely that a person will be born with an innate nature to upset and hurt others.  It is of course likely that we are all born with a sense of survival however and when challenged by someone especially a bully we will find our own way of dealing with it.  For some that is hiding and avoidance, for others head on collision and for a lot of young people dealing with bullying includes absorbing the harmful comments and accepting the taunts as true and feeling they are aspects about them that must be changed in order for the person to fit in in their society.

That final issue of fitting in in society is so important to young people in and around their peers and friends that the words of bullies have been known to bring about haircuts, changes of glasses, the wearing of contact lenses, avoidance of special needs support and of course a full range of changes in the wardrobe and footwear departments not to mention the sudden and inexplicable dumping of best friends at the request or demand of a bully as a ticket to join their group.  My early experience of these fitting in strategies and of bullying were of course in my own secondary school.  We didn't have much in the way of bullying in my infants and junior schools mostly due to none of us having much at all to compare and us all living in the same village meant all our parents knew each other well as did our big brother and sisters who would step up in defence at the drop of an unkind remark.  I do recall being about seven and a new lad in the village teasing my big brother for having NHS glasses on.  My brother would not retaliate so I set about this new lad in sibling defence.  He never bullied my brother again, although my brother was none too happy with his little tomboy sister fighting on his behalf and my dad grounded me for a month.  Not too bad it was winter so not ideal rollerskating terrain anyway.

Yes my secondary school days were smattered with bullying and the thing that surprised me most was that it could be for absolutely any reason and some of the girls just didn't care how hurtful the reason or how much out of the control of the individual it was, it was a reason to bully in their eyes. In fact lets just call it a difference, after all thats what it was.  I went to an all girls grammar school 25 miles from my home village, trust me it was the nearest one!  The admission policy was passing the 11-plus exam, but there was a graduated approach to what constituted passing.  If you lived near the school you needed to achieve 75% to gain entry, if you lived 5 to 20 miles away 90% was your pass mark and outside of 20 miles radius you needed 95%.  So my 97% was my ticket to ride 3 buses and a train every day twice a day for most of my formative years.  But this meant I arrived with difference written all over me.  I was an out of towner.  I was often late thanks to the 7am train being the least reliable on the Fenchurch street line.  I lived surrounded by fields and owned horses, now some people might have seen this as a positive, however my peers related my ownership of the four legged beasts more to a pikie lifestyle than the polo playing aristocracy.  It was odd that some things didn't seem to rise high on their list of noticeable difference, for example the fact that I had a boys haircut and was junior school conker champion for 3 years on the trot, which I boasted about on day one whilst holding a string of shiny horse chestnuts on an old bootlace.  Yes these girls were certainly fickle in their selection of difference, or maybe these tomboy tones were as invisible as I was inside the classrooms.

In lessons those of us that came from out of town were pretty much non existent.  We were of course used as an opportunity for some staff to ridicule publicly at times, I recall an English teacher asking one of my out of town friends if there was a library in her village.  All said in a tone of condolence until she replied that there was a mobile one that parked right outside her door as if she had a personal service from the penguin publishing house.  It was always a 'them and us' battle.  In French class during the 2nd year topic of 'travail' we were taught the phrases used to explain the jobs of our mothers and fathers... then we had to choose from the list of professions on the board, which of course included doctor, bank manager, headmaster, nurse, dentist, shop-owner, works in a big office in the city... you get the idea. Of course the problem here was my dad worked in a cement factory, one of my friends had lost her dad when she was 3 and another one had two mums both working as secretaries.  So when it came to our turn we each chose our defence mechanism.  The friend without a dad would just make up that he was a bank manager, I would fight head on and demand the french words for cement factory engineer were added to the list on the board if I could be heard over the laughter of the entire class and my other mate would pretend a sudden bout of illness and leave the room among cries of "gonna be sick".  That was our early practical experience of hide and run, change to fit in or fight it head on and take the consequences.  Of course in the classroom this was met with "come on now girls quieten down and leave those girls alone".  Yes that's what they wanted, us left alone and not to mix with their upper crust notions of themselves.

Not all the girls bought into this ideal by any means, in fact some of them liked the idea that we had different interesting lives and often quizzed us in a friendly way in the playground.  Questions like, "what time do you have to get up to get here?", "is it dark when you get home?", "does your dad smell of cement?" and "why are you sick so many times every day?".  Basically we made friends and we found our ways to fit in and as we moved into the middle and upper years I became the defender of all things bullying to do with the 'Out of Towners' when new ones arrived from far flung parts of the Essex countryside.  One or two of them even travelled further than me to get to this traditional seat of learning.  So I suppose my passion for equality and fairness were established as a young person from first hand experience.  I welcomed the difference of my peers, was always intrigued to win their trust and learn more about their home lives that like me they kept closely guarded, only seeping out small details at a time, more to ensure the other girls could cope with the information and not become panicked and begin an outcry when grabbing the wrong end of the stick.  I was especially drawn to the friend with two mums and they were great characters too.  Really warm friendly people with an outspoken honesty I hadn't come across before. I loved bumping into them when they came to watch hockey matches, although they never held hands or revealed their relationship in public, that was the way it was in those days.

So what of the girls who did not appreciate difference in their midst?  Well they fell into two camps, one lot kept their noses deep into thick hard covered text books during break and lunchtimes, learning, learning always learning yet never actually noticing anything of the world around them.  I swear some of them knew more about Einstein than they did of their own family.  Then there were the bullies, the other camp.  These girls did not care about hurt, or upset.  I truly don't think they stopped for a single moment to consider the emotions they caused with their words, looks, barging and blatant public humiliations.  They were your typical old school bullies, always in small groups of 3 or 4.  Never found alone inside the school walls.  Rude and uninformed and above all else suffering some inferiority complex of their own for which their solution was to bully others to make themselves feel better.  One of the little 'gangs' had decided their target would be my mate without a dad.  Clearly this was something completely out of her control, deeply upsetting and not possible to change.  None of this mattered to the bullies.  They would call her names, I would tell her to ignore it.  They would barge her in the corridor, I would walk between her and them as some kind of shield.  They would push her over in the playground and kick her bag across the floor spilling out it's contents.  She pushed me out of the way and went hell for leather fists flying and arms flailing until they were either fallen or running.  I was stunned.  She had taken as much as she could and this time would take no more.  The bullying had been going on most of the school year and not a single teacher had dealt with an incident, we always sorted out playground trouble ourselves.  This was a girl who like me had been singled out as being different in class, and it wasn't just French class.  She had been tipped over the edge and lost her temper.  Yes she needed to be disciplined for her actions but for the bullies to walk away almost as victims themselves, and for her to be arranged a move to a comprehensive school nearer to her home was just plain wrong.  I tried to explain to teachers, but only my form tutor would listen.  She listened, didn't act but listened.  So one less out of towner and one set of even more powerful bullies.

For the remainder of my years at the school I was playing a lot of sport and was well known for being able to bench press more than the PE teacher in our shiny new multi gym installed in the far end of the big changing rooms.  This meant no one troubled me, I was able to keep an eye on younger kids who were being bullied and put a stop to things pretty quickly but it wasn't until I left and bumped into a school friend through Facebook some years later that I found out it was due to my 'air of mystique' that I didn't even know I had.  Apparently being strong, fit enough to play sport every day, living in the country which kids just didn't understand how I managed life without a high street and still having a boys haircut, albeit by then a rockers quiff and flat top made me not only un-bully-able but also presented such an air of confidence that the bullies would not mess with me, so when I said leave it, they left it.

I didn't fit in at all, but I found my way through the school society and it's traditional standards and what would now be called institutional bigotry, and they found a way to get me a few O'Levels, a couple of A'Levels and a passage to teacher training college mostly off the back of my sporting resume rather than any beacon I had lit for learning and teaching along the way.  I managed to survive seven years in that place without the mention of the existence of gay, lesbian and bisexual members of society, definitely no comment of transgender life, and the only reference to black and ethnic minorities came in history on the page titled "Zulu Kings".  To say it was narrow in its community and aspirations for it's girls would be a gross understatement.  In fact most of the staff managed to mention boys in the guise of an alien form and when the local council insisted the sixth form be forced to admit boys as well several of the senior team almost keeled over from apoplexy. The claims made at the open day were that this was a place of traditional values and high standards, where young girls would grow into women and be ready for their place in society.  Don't even start me with what that all meant in real terms.!

So I survived and went into a fabulous career in teaching in some pretty tough and complex inner London communities.  During this career I have been a passionate advocate of anti-bullying, launching new campaigns in each school as I arrive and in recent years working across a local authority with lots of like minded adults and young people to support others in dealing with the challenges of bullying from every angle.  I have worked with young people who bully and want to stop, some who are desperate and turning the feelings inward on themselves.  I have known several young people who have attempted to take their own lives and one who succeeded, all as a result of the cruel harmful spiteful bullying behaviours.  Each year I have presented assemblies and run workshops with some of the most amazing people and listened to some of those tell their story, so this year I have told mine and I hope others will be able to go on and tell theirs.  Remember we all have a role to play in supporting others in stopping bullying, what better time to be involved than next week during National anti bullying week.

Click the images for links to sites supporting anti bullying...