The Victim
You may remember your highschool and elementary school days, where little mattered apart from what your mom packed for lunch in your lunchbox or what game you would play with your friends during recess. Another part of this past that you might remember are the seminars focusing on bullying and why it is bad, leading to eyerolls from nearly all students. From your perspective, it might be that you have never even recognized that you were being bullied yourself, because schools have been notoriously bad at teaching and reacting to bullying behaviours in both boys and girls. This can be easily simply explained by how both genders go about dealing with these kinds of things very differently. For boys, the behaviour tends to be more on the physical side, where one boy or a group of boys will target a student that reacts to menacing behaviour with perceived weakness. It is interesting to note that boys rarely discriminate based on gender when finding targets to bully.
If you were bullied, it may be that you did not fit into what other boys were taught was the social expectation for young men, be it because you were not very athletic, strong, tall, showing assertiveness, etc. You cannot blame yourself for not standing up for yourself, not getting help or even for not realizing that you were the target of bullying in the first place. After all, research shows us that boys are more likely than their female counterparts to tolerate bullying behaviours, and might even stay friends with their bully, as they might just see it as boys being boys and the like.
The Bully
Some of you may remember instances in which you were the bully. Maybe you didn’t realize it at first, or maybe at the time you really did believe that hurting others was an acceptable way of making yourself happy. Heck, you could even be doing that right now without noticing it, especially if you were in high school. We all know that physically hurting someone repeatedly for no reason other than fun is considered bullying, but if you engage in gossip or teasing other people, that can quickly become bullying. If you are the type of person that frequently engages in those types of banter you might want to consider how the person you’re picking on feels first. If they are okay with it and find it amusing too, then that’s fine. But if they don’t, well, it’s no longer just teasing, it’s bullying, especially when the person you’re picking on is someone that isn’t in your friend circle, and the only time you ever talk to them is to tease and insult them. It’s not rocket science, you shouldn’t bully people. Some kids might consider it “cool” or rebellious to go against the lesson that adults have been trying to cram into their heads since they were born that bullying is never a good thing. Yes, some people that get bullied can learn things from a situation where they’re being bullied, and the same goes for the one doing the bullying. However, bullying can cause permanent emotional scars on people. Right now, it seems like bullying is a rite of passage. We can try and try to reduce the amount of bullying present in schools, but the truth is that some of it will always go under the radar due to those who won’t speak up about being victims.
If you do the things that were previously described as bullying, you should stop. Chances are, you do not care for the feelings of the one who you’re bullying, so if that’s the case, the whole “you’re hurting someone else” speech isn’t going to work on you, so we’ll have you know instead that you’ll most probably end up regretting the pain you inflicted on others once you become more mature, and that feeling of guilt could be just as bad if not worse than the pain you’re currently inflicting on whoever you’re picking on.
This week is a special case when it comes to asking you to come talk to us about your problems. Bullying can be the cause of many of the other topics that we’ve discussed already. So, if you need any advice on how you should handle certain bullying situations, feel free to ask for our help by leaving a comment on our blog, or contacting us on Instagram or Facebook.
Sources:
Gordon, Sherri. “How Gender Influences Bullying.” Verywell Family, Verywell Family, 14 June 2021, https://www.verywellfamily.com/do-girls-and-boys-bully-differently-460494.
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