Have you ever been a bully? Why?

[Sophiehoney]

This thread, if there's any interest, might get dark so this is just a trigger warning.

The recent thread about someone being contacted by her school bully was really long and I noticed a few people sympathising with the bully and at least one person admitting that they were bullies.

I suspect there probably were a few more people that bullied people but didn't admit it.

Name change if you must but I am just genuinely interested - if you were a bully, why did you do it?

Or if you're not a bully, feel free to give your reasons why you think they do it!

you weren’t really his friend were you.

I never bullied, but I was bullied. By girls in primary and boys in secondary.

@saltandvinegar

Thing is, you do get some sociopathic little cunts who ignore every sanction up to - and possibly including - violent retaliation. You’ve described how you enjoyed causing distress. Unlike the PPs who seem convinced that people who behave like this must be nursing some deep inner sadness, I believe not so much. I have met children who have no ostensible reason to be the way they are, but are wired to derive enjoyment from causing fear and distress. That is what makes them happy. Tangentially, I work with adult offenders and while there are those who have backstories that would make anyone feel there must be a link, there are many who do not.

Nowadays many kids do not fear the police, and are well able to play the school system. Arguably, they might well think twice after getting jumped one dark night, but not everyone has a handy local vigilante to re-assert dominance. And it doesn’t take a genius to figure out how that tactic could backfire, either.

You had the capacity to cause harm, as every human being does. You were capable of experiencing empathy, metacognition, and were (eventually) able to exercise self-control. Not everyone does, can, or will. So, what do you reckon we do about these people? How will you prevent your child from being bullied?

I remember a teacher on mumsnet saying sometimes kids bully who have a bully parent. They pick on kids who behave or a look a certain way that would lead to their parent bullying them if they behaved or looked that way.

Many years ago, I had a supervisor who freely admitted that he dealt with workplace stress by dumping it on people further down the food-chain. Needless to say, he wasn't very impressive as a manager and had we been bigger and less specialised, the state of our turnover would have damned him sooner than it did.

I don't know anything about his personal background. He was a well-qualified professional, young, not bad looking, plenty of reasons to count his blessings, but maybe there were things going on that I'd no idea about. All I knew is that it was a great day when I parted company from him.

As I said in my previous post, I dont think I had a sad life, but I was definitely raised in an environment where bullying was the norm, so I didn't see it as wrong, just a way of dealing out natural justice.

It is unpalatable, but I think there is a sizeable subsection of society where intra-family bullying is considered an acceptable way to raise kids, and those kids then go out and spread that behaviour to schools.

At home I was a target (because I use words like intra-family) and if my cousins thought I was being annoying or nerdy it was fair game for them to wind me up, or "send me to Coventry" i.e. pretend I didnt exist for weeks on end. It was seen as an acceptable way of getting people to behave. My parents and aunts and uncles would have compared it to letting puppies fight it out.

It was only by going to a school where that behaviour was not tolerated, and there were instant repercussions for bullying that snapped me out of it.

I experienced cruelty myself at the various schools I went to, mockery over how I spoke, dressed, looked etc.

...And I was definitely, at times, mean and nasty to people at school. Combination of adolescent insecurity, wanting to be seen as funny because I figured I'd make that my "thing", a misplaced notion of whose admiration was "worth it" and whose wasn't, not the most consistent home life (one DP passed away when I was a kid, ensuing school changes and long-distance relocations, surviving DP remarried and we got sent to boarding school).

Would I have been less mean at points had I had a different childhood? Not sure. These factors no doubt fanned the flames, but maybe there'd have been other, different factors that elicited the same sort of behaviour.

By the age of 16 I'd grown out of it. But I regret so very much how I was to certain people and it's something I work hard on with my kids.

I was a bully. On reflection, my reasons (not excuses) were - a shitty home life and I was jealous of others who had ‘normal’ families, my dad was a bully to my mum (and anyone else he didn’t like) so I wasn’t really brought up or encouraged to be ‘nice to others’ or consider feelings, and I was insecure about myself and an unhappy child.

My school was also pretty brutal - bully or be bullied mentality (and I was picked on too).

It still haunts to me to this day. All I can do now as an adult is everything in my power to make sure no one around me ever feels the way I made those kids feel.

I agree that some bullies later reflect and regret their behaviour, particularly when they have children themselves and the horrible thought dawns on them that their precious offspring might be bullied.

That’s all very well, but the terrible damage is done to the children they tormented and sometimes it has lifelong effects. I speak from personal experience.

That damage can’t easily be reversed. However the bully feels now, they have nevertheless destroyed another person’s self-esteem and self-image. They’ve tainted their childhood and youth with misery and those years won’t come back for a second chance.

And they didn’t have to do it. But they did it for fun. Their childhood and youth were fun as Saltandvinegar has bravely admitted.

Thank you!

@NormasArse I imagine what you did to that poor boy will haunt you. It’s made me feel very sad.

An incident from adult life has just come to mind. Years ago I trained as a Forest School leader and (after a year of study and practice )our assessment week was a residential, week-long event at an isolated outdoor centre. There were 6 of us being assessed by 2 tough, loud, no-nonsense women trainers.

I was pretty intimidated by them but I decided to just get on with it. But another lovely woman on the course was clearly a timid, gentle, sensitive character. Basically, they bullied her into the ground, which, considering that FS is all about build self-esteem and personal confidence, is somewhat ironic. Did I look at this person and think ‘God, she’s a pathetic specimen - I’m going to put the boot in!’ NO I BLOODY WELL DID NOT. I tried to support her but sadly there was a knock on my bedroom door on the 4th night (4 am) and she was there, all packed to go and in floods of tears. She was in pieces because of their constant mockery and belittling. I only made the mildest attempt to dissuade her from going because I knew it wouldn’t have ended well.

It’s not acceptable in any context to bullying someone because they’re weak, sensitive or timid and there’s never any excuse. I hate it when anyone tries to excuse bullying. Only 2 of the 7 adults present at that event came out as bullies - you can choose to do the right thing. They were just plain nasty women.

Sorry for typos in that - hope the main point comes across!

What I am getting from a lot of these posts is that children being bullies often just comes down to bad parenting, in one shape or another.

Salt&vinegar says her mum was loving and a good provider but it sounds as though her parenting was still lacking. S&V was spoilt, never taught any boundaries, and never taught how to treat people.

Others have said that their parents actively encouraged bullying.

It looks like, other than a few exceptions, it's a case of what we do with our kids at home. That's what prevents bullying

Adult bullying I am convinced just comes from those people that, as our American cousins say, "peaked in high school"

These people have truly just never grown up and it's really pathetic and embarrassing to see

I wouldn't say I was a systematic bully in the traditional sense, but I definitely regret how mean I was to a girl at secondary school after my boyfriend dumped me and started seeing her. I was heartbroken, and so I was horrible about her and I'm sure she would have felt bullied.
Never acted this way to anyone else but once is enough, I have regretted it for years.

I find it hard to understand both the bully and the people who went along with it because I didn't.

There was one boy in my class at secondary school. He was smelly, fat and a bit weird but nothing crazy. The whole class were horrible to him. They wouldn't go near him. If he brushed against someone or accidently touched someone people would shout "eeew. Disgusting". They would then go around the class touching other people shouting "hahah you have Henry(made up name) germs now". They then devised the Henry lock were you linked your fingers together and that meant someone couldn't pass Henry germs onto you.

I never joined in even when people tried to pull me into it. I actually would actively go and stand with him. Or not continue the chain when it started. And I remember being tempted to go along with it for an easy life but I didn't. Despite taunts of "omg do you fancy him" and so on.

Edited to say this went in for I'd say atleast 2 full school years.

So I find it hard to understand how someone bullies and how someone goes along with it.

This has made me think about how schools should deal with bullying. To say it’s a difficult problem is a massive understatement. William Golding wrote Lord of the Flies as a result of his time as a prep school teacher, after all.

Ideally the bully should be permanently excluded from school, but that’s never going to happen. They should be the ones who have to uproot themselves and start again, not the victims. But of course there are problems with this - what constitutes serious enough bullying to get you excluded, for a start? It would be a minefield.

I think they should be removed from the company of their victims and their classmates, though. Schools should have separate units for bullies where they are starved of their supply of sadistic enjoyment and the support of their enablers.

if there aren’t enough resources for this, then the bullies should be made to spend all breaks and lunchtimes in a separate, supervised space away from everyone else. If they want to make friends with other bullies - they can go ahead and do that.

They’d have to earn their freedom over a long period of time and would be on report so that the first indication they were reverting to bullying would mean even more serious consequences.

I do not care what impact this would have on the bullies’ happiness, self-esteem, educational progress or anything else. I only care that their bullying should stop and their victims should be able to enjoy their schooldays in peace.

Because you weren’t a coward like bullies and enablers always are.

Oh my, people like you literally ruin other people’s lives. Drive them to suicide. The ridiculing, humiliation and distress.

The word nasty doesn’t even begin to cover it.

I suspect you don’t care much, but I wonder what other people on this thread think when they replace that boy in their heads with their own son and imagine how it makes a child feel.

But hey, you put a sad emoji on your post, so all is well with the world.

People like are the not haunted. When you are that wrong in the head, you cannot change.

Where is the evidence that there is a higher prevalence of bullying from those with dysfunctional backgrounds. Bullying is extreme in privileged educational institutions and organisations. Bullying is not restricted to causal effects from certain backgrounds what so ever, but when it is done by someone from a poor background the background is suddenly given as the reason.
It makes everyone feel better, doesn't it.

Another consequence of poverty.

Well it's no more a reason than some rich family never setting boundaries, or absent workaholic parents, or early childhood trauma. There might be reasons why some children become bullies but being from a chaotic poor family life is no more or less a reason or excuse than any reason.
In my experience bullies are more likely to come from families that are better off and even privileged.
Why are we always trying to find reasons why people are nasty. There is no default position that people are kind and if not then something must have caused them to be nasty. Some people just are nasty, selfish and vindictive.

Some parents are shockers. One of the boys in my class would stand near the fence of the playground jeering and calling insults to the adults with learning difficulties who were being escorted to the community centre next door. When I spoke to him about it he told me his parents always did it. He was genuinely surprised to hear it wasn’t the way most people behaved.

@clareblue

Hallelujah! I agree with all you say here. We won’t make any impact on bullying until we call it by its name and stop making pathetic excuses for horrible children.

Bullying should be seen in the same category as racism in schools. Absolute zero tolerance and if so much as a sniff of it gets to the staff, the perpetrators should be left in no doubt that their future in the school is hanging in the balance.

Anyone who was a bully on this thread - vile individual and I hope karma has bitten you hard at some point.

There was an awful culture of bullying at my old workplace. I tried to stick up for the girl that was being bullied out and it ended with me being sidelined at work and I eventually left. (The girl had also left, following a suicide attempt). I consider myself quite a strong person but that place was awful. Ironically it sold itself as having a family atmosphere and a wholly female leadership team. I actually think that made it worse as once one decided something there was a sort of of pack mentality and the others agreed. A lot of jealousy and back biting. Terrible behaviour from adult women.