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July 13, 2004 This is a story about the awful right-of- passage all kids must go through sometime or other during childhood. I was surprised at the awful power of these memories and the pain they brought back to me while I was writing this article. You know the scene in the movie “Jaws” where the characters played by Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfus, and Robert Shaw, are sitting on Quint’s boat waiting for the shark to appear? To pass the time, they start comparing the scars on their bodies. It was comic relief in a macabre sort of way, especially when Quint describes a scar with horrific clarity and is able to describe exactly when and how he got it. The camera pans in on him and he relives the hellish experience as if it had happened just yesterday and not years ago. My husband and I were doing something along the same order one warm Spring night, sitting out on our deck. It was the kind of silly, intimate thing couples do, a sort of show and tell of our respective childhood histories. Most of his were from playing sports, a scar on his hand from a metal fence that got in the way of his jumping up to catch a fly-ball during a baseball game, a deep cut on the leg that left its mark during a hockey match, a cut elbow sliding into third. He was proud of them all, even the small scar on his nose from trying to run up a playground slide during some forgotten game when he was ten years old. Not to be outdone I happily showed him mine. See this one on my hand? That’s where my dog bit me. I was eight years old and tried to take a chicken bone away from him so he wouldn’t choke. That one there on my elbow? Tennis camp when I was thirteen. The one on my chin? I flopped when I should have flipped in a cheering competition. And this tiny one here, near my lip? Ice-skating lessons. Then there were my knees. He was surprised at the amount of scarring on my knees. I looked at them and sighed. Some of the scars, I told him, were from falling on a newly graveled street when I was learning to ride my bike. “Boy you must’ve fallen off your bike a lot.” He looked so concerned as he gently touched one long scar. “How long did it take you to learn to ride a bike?” “That one isn’t from falling, at least not off my bike. I was pushed off the steps in the schoolyard by some kids.” I said it off-handedly but he looked surprised. “Kids pushed you off the steps?” He shook his head at the cruelty of children. “Those damn bullies,” he said as he bent to kiss the scar. “Bullies?” I looked at him a little surprised. “Why do you say bullies? They were just nasty kids,” I told him. “Well, nasty kids who hurt other kids are bullies, honey.” “You think all kids who are mean to other kids are bullies? I mean, do they even know what they’re doing when they’re hurting another kid? Aren’t they just being kids?” “I do think they’re bullies. They pretty much know what they’re doing when they deliberately hurt someone else. If they think causing pain to someone is funny or if they do it just to humiliate someone, then they definitely fall into that category. It isn’t true that they’re “just being kids,” they’re being cruel and that makes them bullies.” His remark made me think about the definition of the word bully. He was right of course. I couldn’t help think about all the cruel things kids do to each other. It’s in the news a lot these days. Kids, usually in groups, picking on other children unable or too afraid to defend themselves. Whether actual physical abuse or the harassment of name-calling, the stories of these “bullies” seems to be a weekly news item in the papers and on TV. That night we talked about bullying and how, today, the authorities in education seem to feel it is an epidemic and “indicative of the violent times in which we live.” They make it sound as if bullying is some new by-product of the twenty- first century. It isn’t. The more we talked about the subject, the more we tended to disagree that it should be blamed on “modern times.” Bullying has been around as long as the human race. It has always been. Anyone who is truthful about their childhood remembers instances of bullying in one of two ways. They were either the victims of violence themselves or they had been witnesses to a bullying incident. The fact is, bullying has been an unfortunate fact of life for too many generations of children. It is universal and not relegated only to certain socio-economic places. My husband Alan and I, who had grown up in totally different areas, had both been victims to the violence of bullying. I thought back to my own childhood. There was a particularly bad incident when I was in sixth grade. I was, literally, the new student on the block: brand new house, new upscale town, new school. Most of the kids were nice to me even if slightly disinterested. After all the school year had just begun and they were involved in their own lives. As for me, I was content to make friends slowly because I had always been a shy child, a dreamer with glasses who loved to live in books. No one bothered me until one morning during the second week of school. I was going into the bathroom before the first bell. A girl in the eighth grade, who was a lot bigger than I, came up to me with her two friends close behind her. She looked me up and down, gave me a shove and said: “I don’t like your face. You better watch it whenever you go into the girls’ room. I catch you in there, I’ll fix your ugly face You got it, four-eyes?” One of the other girls flipped the books out of my arms and they walked away laughing. I “got it.” I was terrified. Suffice it to say that I learned to have strict control over my bladder that year. I ate my lunch dry and did not ever get a drink of water at recess. I “held it in” from 8:30 am to 2:50pm, running all the way home after the dismissal bell and making it to the downstairs bathroom in my house just in time. My parents both worked so my secret was safe. I didn’t tell them because, in my eleven-year-old mind, that would have made things worse. They would’ve wanted to come to my school. I figured the older girls would be angry if I told and really come after me. I decided the discomfort of a full bladder was worth the price of not having my face rearranged. My sixth grade memories are all colored by this girl and her friends. The name calling, the fear of going to the bathroom, the scars on my knees, all of them part of the reign of terror that group of girls visited upon me. Both winter and spring breaks were miserable because my fears of those girls were intensified by imagining what would happen to me when we returned to school. I dreaded going back. ,br> Relief finally came to me when they graduated eighth grade and went to the local high school. I knew I wasn’t going to their school because my parents wanted me to go to the private academy my step-mom had attended. Even so, during the summer months after those girls had graduated, I stayed away from places where I thought they might be. I established safe havens for myself, sitting in my back yard devouring books at a dizzying rate and spending a lot of time in the library, because I knew it was a place they never visited. I never went to the town pool even though I loved to swim. I couldn’t. It was their domain. No one stood up for me during my year of misery, no other kids came forward to tell them to stop because, I suppose, they feared becoming targets themselves. My husband, however, had a different story to tell about his bullying incident. He had a hero who came to his defense, a boy who told a bully to stop. Alan was a skinny, fair-haired little boy of seven who, because of his slight build, was an easy target to the toughs in the inner-city neighborhood where he lived until he was ten. His older tormentor was an angry boy who lay in wait for him every day either before or after school. My husband never knew what time of the day he was going to be jumped, dragged into an alley, and punched in the stomach. The bully’s friends stood on guard for any adults and ignored Alan’s cries. Alan was afraid to tell his family, the same as I was, because he feared worse treatment at the hands of his tormentor. This went on for months. One day another boy, who had witnessed the pummeling several times as he walked home from school, decided to take action. He was a big boy and he pushed his way through the group, grabbed the bully, shoved him against a building and told him to stop. He also told him, in no uncertain terms, that if he ever grabbed “that little kid again” he would be the one getting beaten up. Then he turned to my husband, took him by the hand and walked him home. He did this every day of the school year, scowling at the bully whenever they passed him. My husband was never bothered by anyone at the school again. “I don’t know why he defended me, I didn’t even know him. I just know that I was so grateful to him. Besides saving me he also taught me how to play baseball. I looked up to him. He was, literally, my hero.” You might wonder where the teachers were when bullying instances took place in years past and, why, if they knew about it, they never stepped in to stop it. Unfortunately, and unbelievably, educators chose to ignore these problems under the heading of “it is all a part of growing up.” There were even some parents and other adults who felt the same way; it was just something that all children had to go through as a part of life. It is a startling fact, but this attitude still prevails in a few adults today. In the past ten years, schools and after school programs, have begun themes and discussions on stopping the harassment of children by other children. They role-play bullying in school assemblies and teach tactics for defusing situations. They try to get to the kids at an early age stressing respect for everyone. Educators say that it is working, but is it really? There are too many instances that say it is not. The boys who were “hazed” at football camp certainly were bullied in the most horrific way, both physically and emotionally. A video of a little boy being beaten by several older children on a school bus while others, including the bus driver, chose to look the other way, is a horror we’ve seen on newscasts. The girl who was the first to play on her college football team was bullied, too, by the adult coach and by several players. With cruel intent, these people bullied, harassed, and cowed their victims. But times are no different today than they have ever been. Boys on sports teams always bullied younger team-mates, younger children have been subject to cruelty on school busses by bigger kids, and girls have always been harassed if they dared to “trod” on male turf. This is what I mean when I say that bullying has always been around. We need some radical changes. The scars on my knees are pretty faded and most of the time I see only the ones that were caused by falling off my bike. I like to imagine that there were no painful incidents in my childhood. This way of thinking is probably easier for me. I make my living as a writer and using my imagination is part of my craft. I do feel, though, that it was cathartic for my husband and for me to talk about our childhoods. We needed to put those old memories back in the past where they belong. The present is for creating new memories, hopefully good. As for bullies, I have my own thoughts on how they should be dealt with. I’d like to see bullies under the age of eighteen punished by the same laws as adults. Any physical violence, any threats should be dealt with swiftly and hard. They should be made to understand that society cannot and will not tolerate their actions. No child should have to fear going to school or away to camp. Do not coddle these bullies under the guise that they are still children themselves. They are acting in a cruel manner, deliberately inflicting physical and emotional pain. They need to be made aware of the seriousness of their behavior. Bullies are, at heart, cowards, who only torment those whom they feel cannot fight back. Let these cowards tangle with law enforcement and judges. Make them as scared as they made their victims. Let there be no more childhood scars, visible or emotional. ------------ About the author Kristen Houghton: Working on a book of short stories, I write a column, "The Writer's Block" on observations of everyday life and a column for educators called iTeach! Email: Krisnalan@aol.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ |
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