| Bullies |
[Oct. 30th, 2011|06:01 pm]
seripanther
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There is one kid in my Cub Scout troop who is a bully. His life is kind of in chaos right now, with which I can sympathize, and his parents and grandparents are all dear friends of mine. In my work with kids, I've learned that some of them are just a pain in the butt at some point in their lives and it doesn't last forever. However . . .
This kid is younger than my brother Teancum by a couple of years. They know one another through the cub scout troop, which Teancum assists with as den chief. A couple of weeks ago this kid started observing out loud that Teancum is a nerd, which is perfectly true and a source of great pride to both Teancum and myself. The kid is a nerd. He'd absurdly smart and soaks up science, mathematics, and language like a sponge. I assumed that when he saw that neither Bug nor I took this to be in any way insulting, he'd get bored with it. Not the case.
Today after church, in honor of it being a fifth Sunday, there were cookies. It's officially called 'Linger Longer,' but I like to call it 'eating cookies.' Teancum and I were sitting down with Mom and Dad, eating our cookies, when the Bully came up to us. And started messing with Teancum. In front of my parents. In front of me.
Teancum had a Halloween cup full of candy bars, a gift from his overly generous Sunday School teacher. This bully made a couple of grabs for it, and Teancum pulled the cup against himself to protect it--not afraid, not upset, just not wanting to 'share' at the behest of this kid's aggression. The bully also addressed him several times as 'Nerd' (he knows Teancum's name perfectly well) and talked over him to me ("Why does the nerd always have a pen?"). What really got me, though, was the looming. The bully got into Teancum's personal space, knees pushing on knees, and just stared him down. (He tried this with me, too, but apparently I'm not as much fun to stare down.)
Once or twice I gave him a fairly playful shove, telling him, "Hey . . . stay out of personal space." The fourth or fifth time he came back to loom over Teancum and grab for his candy, I . . . um . . . snapped. I grabbed this kid off of his feet, put him in a headlock, and hissed, "You keep messing with us and I swear I'll kill you."
Was this a little drastic? Yes, absurdly so. But I was startled by how angry I felt, all in a rush as I held onto that kid. Not just angry . . . furious. Livid. Incandescent with rage. He got off easy with a death threat. I was two heartbeats away from adding "So if you want to screw with my family, ****face, you'd better hope you're tough enough to handle the can of ***** I will open on your sorry *****. So you leave my family the **** alone, *****." All of these censored words are ones that I have never in my life actually said, or even typed--yet I was willing to lay them onto some ten-year-old kid. As it was, I just gave him one more solid shove in the direction of 'away,' and this time away was where he went.
I can remember very clearly every time in my life where I have responded to bullying with physical aggression. Five times. Once I pushed a girl's shoulder to try and make her stop looming, as this kid was doing to Teancum. Once I used a sweep I'd learned in martial arts class to knock onto his butt a kid that had been 'looming' at me as I tried to walk down the hall. Both of these happened in junior high. I feinted a punch at a co-counselor who was doing the same thing once, though I never touched him, and once I grabbed by the shirtfront and shook a fellow missionary who was screwing around in a boat to make the sisters scream. And now today. Each of these incidents has left me reeling with guilt, even though, let's face it, I've never actually hit another person in the entire course of my life. But it's been drilled into my head so firmly the same rigmarole we give all bullied kids: violence isn't the answer. Just ignore them and they'll stop. Try to make friends. Stand up to them and tell them clearly that you don't like that and want them to stop.
Do you know what happens to a bullied kid who tries to ignore his tormentor? He gets tormented more. Nothing's more tempting to a bully than a passive victim. And have you ever seen (in real life, not in a movie) a child stand up to their assessor and make them back off by sheer force of character? Me, neither. I've seen kids lash back effectively with humor, with the support of other kids (strength in numbers), with eloquence, or with the support of an authority figure such as a teacher. But 'I don't like that and I want you to stop' doesn't do anything but make the bullying more rewarding. Bullies KNOW that their victims don't like the treatment and want it to stop. That's what makes bullying fun.
These traditional coping mechanisms don't do squat. The unfortunate truth that I've learned is that responding physically to a bully is astonishingly effective. In all five of the incidents mentioned above, I never had another problem with the bully. They either stayed the freak away from me after that, or even (on one occasion) apologized and ended up as a friend. Responding violently to a bully is incredibly effective. But we are trained not to hit other kids. The good kids obey this rule because it's a rule (one that remains branded in my head all these years later), and the bad kids know every trick in the book for getting around this rule so that they can intimidate, humiliate, and dehumanize other people without ever laying a finger on them. This bullying was happening right in front of my mother, and I don't think she even recognized it--bullying is invisible unless you really know what to look for. Which I do. That's a lesson I learned very, very well.
So yeah . . . I threatened a ten-year-old with death today. I'm glad I did it . . . aggressively, fiercely glad, as I must be to smother the residual guilt I feel from breaking an ineffective rule. But I don't like bullies. And if you bully me, a member of my family, or one of my friends, you better believe I will shove you around. And if that doesn't work, I will beat the living snot out of you and I will enjoy it. Don't. Screw. With. Me. |
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melancholy