To ask, if you were a bully at school, why did you do it?

[Zippyzoppy]

When I was at school I was bullied, which was awful at the time. Now, as an adult, I often think back and wonder what was going on in the bullies’ lives to make them behave as they did, and whether they regret it now.

I think some people are bullies, but some people just behave badly because they’re still growing up and don’t know how to deal with things. School forces children together and it doesn’t always work.

I remember a boy accusing me of bullying him at secondary. I hated him, absolutely hated him. I was really consumed by how horrible he was. It was never bullying as far as I knew it. But that’s how it felt to him.

The teacher who sorted it told my parents it was 6 of one, half a dozen of the other but still

I remember at primary school one girl insulting my hair so I decided to be mean to her every time I saw her, I feel bad but it was just emotional immaturity on my part. She hurt me and I responded irrationally. I was full of anger at that time for some reason.

I am ashamed today that my friends and I bullied a girl. She was in our clique and we made her the butt of all our jokes and deliberately left her out.bwewere mean and cruel. She changed schools.

Why? I honestly don’t know. She was tall and eager to please and she carried on hanging round with us even when we were horrible. She was only at our school for one term, so she was a “new girl”. It was pure pack mentality. All of us individually were nice, and we never treated anyone else like that. It was never physical, more teasing that got out of hand. It is the thing in my life I am most ashamed of.

I saw her about 5 years ago at a school reunion and apologised to her. She was way more gracious than she needed to be. She seemed like a lovely woman and has a full and happy life now.

I've often wondered things like this. I was teased horribly by girls in primary school who still, even now, will sneer at me in the street. Bullied horribly by a girl when i was fifteen. I often wonder why she was such a nasty piece of work and what she would think if someone did that to one of her kids now.

Lots of grown ups are bullies too. Perhaps they never realise and never grow out of it

@JackieTheBackie that's brilliant. Good for you! I was bullied by a group of boys in my teens and when I bumped into one of them 10 years later he apologized and admitted he acted like a total dick. I made peace with it after that.
I think it's just down to immaturity in teens, they're overloaded with hormones and life changing decisions. With adults I think some people are just plain nasty.

I bullied a girl in our friendship group in primary school I cannot remember why
I was bullied by another girl in primary school
and secondary school

My primary school headteacher encouraged us to look down on the couple of children in the class who were from deprived backgrounds. We went along with it, I think, because of a need each of us had to show we were "nice girls" and not "one of them". Then, of course, it becomes self-fulfilling - everyone is ignoring them, so there "must" be something wrong with them.

We didn't actively bully, we merely excluded them. But exclusion can have life changing effects.

I think OP, you're making the mistake of assuming that a child is necessarily a bully or a victim. The reality is that many children are both at points in their school life. I was chronically bullied. But I was also capable of bullying - often because I was scared of being bullied (when you are the regular victim it's a big relief when someone else takes your place). But sometimes just... well, just because.

Some people seem oblivious to the fact they were bullies. My 'friends' were bullies, and were even cruel to me at times for standing up for what I believed in. They now have children, and 'support' anti-bullying campaigns online. They don't seem to understand that they were once those bullies, teasing children just like their own. They still make fun of people on social media, and they don't see how they are still negatively affecting others.

Just to make it clear I'm not 'friends' with them on social media, I just have a friend (who knows them through a friend) who likes to rely this information to me .

i was bullied by a boy in my class at senior school for the whole six years i was there he made my life hell at the time i couldnt work out why he had singled me out, but as an adult i can see why.
his nickname was fatty fields and he realised on day one of school if he didnt assert himself as stronger than tiny little skinny me he would have been the target of the bullying himself, so he got away with it because he was craftier than me,

I agree with pp. We are all capable of being nasty at times. I don't think I was a bully but it's highly likely that I made some unkind remarks that stayed with people - equally the people that bullied me probably don't consider that they did.

Children's emotional maturity develops at different times, and empathy is often one of the last things to develop.

Kids are sometimes just trying to survive.

Adults have no such excuse and are just nasty.

There were a few bullies among my year group at school, and my two best friends were bullied, however I wasn't. No idea why they left me alone.

About 30 years after leaving, one BF met one of the nastiest of them at a night out, and this woman asked BF if she would please accept her apology for being so horrible at school. She went on to say that she now had a teenager daughter and would be horrified to think that her DD might meet someone like she used to be. She turned out to be a really nice person, said that she had no idea why she'd behaved as she had done, and often used to cry herself to sleep as she was so ashamed of herself. But the next day she'd go out and be a bully again and never understood what drove her to do it.

Her aim now was to apologise to everyone she possibly could, and hope that they forgave her, and I've since met a couple of other old schoolfriends who've said the same. And they can't get over how nice she really is! So I guess there is hope for every bully.

I was bullied and maybe a bit of a bully too.

I can think of two boys who I said mean things to even though I knew what it felt like to be in that position. I don’t really know why I did it and I feel ashamed when I look back now.

There was also a girl who used to hang around with me and my friends. We didn’t bully her exactly but we did exclude her a bit. This was a couple of years after I had moved schools after being bullied and excluded.

Through Facebook I have also come into contact with people I remember not being very nice at school, who seem perfectly nice people now. And then there is one who was the ringleader at the school I left, and I’m not friends with her on Facebook but we have friends in common, and she seems every bit as vile now as she was then.

Ultimately I think there are a small number of people who are just genuinely a nasty piece of work - always were and always will be. And at the other end of the spectrum there are people who simply don’t have it in them to bully someone, either because they are always the victim or because they are one of those rare people who doesn’t have a mean bone in their body.

And then there is everyone else.

Everyone else is just trying to fit into the social pecking order and avoid being the one who gets bullied. Sometimes that means picking on or excluding someone else because you don’t want people higher up the pecking order to turn on you, or because someone is so far down the pecking order that being friends with them would be tantamount to social suicide.

Most people are mean to others at some point at school. But most people grow out of it, and once they’re adults they can choose who to be friends with, who to date, how much to interact with their colleagues, and so forth. And when you’re in an office every day, there will always be cliques and people who are closer to each other than others, but the range of ages and roles in any workplace (and the fact that you’re just there to earn money and can quit if you want) means that it’s not really necessary to be part of a social group. Never saying much beyond small talk to your colleagues and eating lunch alone at your desk every day doesn’t mark you out as a loner in the office the way it would at school.

School is basically just a massive, hormonal herding pen for hundreds of kids just desperately trying to fit in, and that’s why many of them do nasty things they wouldn’t dream of doing as adults.

The ones who still do it as adults are just arseholes, unfortunately.

I bullied a girl. There were lots of reasons. I was avoiding being a target, I was insecure about the way i looked and was battling an eating disorder, I have separation and anxiety around people liking me and leaving/never coming back, I was depressed, I was self harming, I needed an outlet that wasn't going to kill me. I genuinely believe now that without an "outlet" I'd have killed myself.

I feel desperately sorry for the way I treated her, I couldn't see past my own problems and it was all shades of wrong to put someone through that.

I was bullied by a girl in my year, no idea why apart from maybe I was a quiet person and therefore an easy target.

Anyway I found out that she would constantly have to be at her grandmas house (lived on same street as my mums friend) because of how bad her home life was.

I’m assuming she was probably miserable and it brought her happiness to hurt me.

Alligator
I doubt it brought her happiness
There is the old story
Man comes home, shouts at the wife
Wife shouts at the kids
Kids kick the cat

My bully at primary school was the teacher I had for the last three years. I wasn't a badly behaved child, she just seemed to want to pick on me for her own twisted enjoyment. My confidence was so low when I started senior school (even after passing my 11+) that I couldn't find anyone in the class to be friends with, so felt completely excluded, was ill a lot ( in hindsight it was anxiety) failed my first year, and got chucked out. Back then, even decent parents believed the teachers.

Now I have a granddaughter who is similar in her behaviour, well read and precocious academically (although she is cleverer than I was) and she is well thought of in her school, and her self confidence is good. The whole culture in schools would preclude a teacher from that sort of behaviour these days. Thankfully.

"School is basically just a massive, hormonal herding pen for hundreds of kids just desperately trying to fit in"

Yep, fair description.

At school I was probably a classic 'inbetweener', not cool enough to be part of the 'in crowd', not quite sad enough to be one the nerds. In fits and starts I probably spent a decent amount amount of time as both bully and victim. Other than in extreme cases I mostly think it's fairly normal and character forming.

Kids can be little shits, for sure. In particular I'm ashamed, looking back to my secondary school days at the turn of the 80s/90s, of standing by whilst racist bullying was aimed at some of the few non white kids... And as far homophobic bullying, being honest,I did a little bit of it myself. Hundreds of other kids did the same or worse. We didn't really know much better.

I was a bully, I bullied my (now) best friend for a good 4 years. She was an easy target because she was bigger than the other girls and desperate to please and fit in whereas I was a bit of a leader of the pack.

I was desperately unhappy at home, and think subconsciously I wanted someone else to have as much of a shit time as I was. I came across as very confident but had very little self esteem.

As an adult I have now actively dealt with my own issues, apologised to those I hurt and examine my own motives before I do things. I hope when i have kids I can teach them from my own mistakes.

I never bullied anyone but was bullied quite regularly bw the ages of 19 and 12. I can remember the sweet relief when the bullies picked on X, the only girl less popular than myself in the year. And I stood by and let it happen, even though I knew it was wrong and even though I actually quite liked her. Am still deeply ashamed that I didn't stand up to them.

This is a really interesting thread. I was thinking about this kind of thing earlier, except about workplace bullies. Why the woman who made my life so difficult did it; why did the others in the team go along with it, probably sub-consciously? I guess she's always been that way and just never grown out of it. She destroyed my professional confidence, but she also made herself pretty unpopular with the people who saw through it.

I had my moments of saying mean things at school and had things said to me, but nothing ever really escalated.

My behaviour at one point during school crossed into bullying territory.

I was being abused at home and bullied on the way to school, at school and the way home from school. I was also being sexually harassed at school by 2 different boys. No one helped me despite some people knowing what was going on. I believe that all contributed towards my behaviour, but of course in no way excuses my behaviour.

At the time I genuinely didn't know it was bullying. I thought me and this girl was just arguing and it was normal to have arguments. But I look back now and recognise it wasn't just 2 girls arguing and my behaviour was a problem. I feel thoroughly ashamed by the way I acted. I knew how it felt to have someone make me feel crap about myself, yet I still chose to do that to someone else

I had a pretty shit time at secondary school - not exactly bullied but one of the unpopular "weird" kids. Then I went to college and inexplicably became quite cool, and I'm ashamed that I gave a wide berth to anyone I perceived as being uncool and likely to tarnish my new (relative) social success. I was really scared of being on the outside and being sneered at again. It probably took til I was well into my twenties before I got past that.

Other than in extreme cases I mostly think it's fairly normal and character forming.

No. Actual, real, bullying is not character forming. It's stressful, damaging and a nightmare to live through, whether it's by exclusion, verbal abuse or physical violence.