Bullying in our own Backyard

A national crisis. An epidemic. Taking lives at an alarming rate. No, I'm not talking about some new virus going around. I'm talking about bullying.

Bullying has made headlines quite a bit lately with the release of the new documentary, Bully. The film follows the lives of several bullied teens throughout the course of an entire school year. While I have yet to see the film, my point is that it has brought a lot of media attention to the issue of bullying.

As a kid, I was a head taller than almost every classmate, and I was pretty bright. While I wasn't all that different from the other kids, being so tall and often the first to understand concepts in class made me just enough of an oddball to be a victim of bullying. In 1st grade, one little boy had a "clubhouse" at recess, and I was not invited to join. In 2nd grade, a girl pushed me around daily while everyone was hanging up their backpacks in the classroom. In 4th grade, a couple of boys called me "smart one". In 6th grade, I had some leather shoes that I liked to wear and was called "moo shoes". These are just a few examples, and they were not isolated incidences; they happened daily for several months if not the whole school year.

I'm not trying to start a pity party here. At 20 years of age, I have some great friends and, perhaps more importantly, the freedom to avoid people who are mean. But looking back at my childhood, I can see an obvious pattern of being the victim of bullying. We learned about bullying at school, but it never occurred to me until I was older that what happened to me was bullying.

Despite being a victim of bullying, I never realized that what was happening to me was bullying, because bullying is taught to kids as something that happens to other people. "Kids, we're learning about this so that if you ever see it happening, you'll know how to respond." Are you kidding me? I have yet to see a school, youth group, sports team, Girl Scout/Boy Scout troop… you name it, that is truly free of bullying.

Kids are mean sometimes. It's how they are, but that does not mean that bullying is "just part of being a kid". The actual content of what we teach kids about bullying is fine, but we must adapt a "when you see it happening" attitude when we teach kids how to respond to bullying.

Let's stop looking at this issue as something that happens in other groups, other schools. Teachers, coaches, child care workers, youth leaders, camp counselors, please don't ignore it when a kid is obviously being singled out. And, speaking of obvious, bullying is often far from it. It's the way kids stand in a circle talking and won't let another child join in the group. It's the stepping on another child's heels while walking in line when the adult is at the front. It's the absence of passing to one particular team member. The response cannot be, "now, now, little Jimmy, let's be nice please". It must be a firm conversation with the bully, involving the bully's parents if necessary, that lets everyone know that bullying will not be tolerated under your supervision.

Accept it. Bullying is happening in every community. Posting on Facebook about how we want to end the national bullying crisis is lovely, but until each person takes some responsibility for this issue, things are not going to change.