I am writing this letter to adults. If children or young people read it, that’s as may be, but I am hoping this letter will reach adult eyes, hopefully in many places around the world. This is a letter about bullies. And no, this is not a letter to the parents of children getting bullied, as I am sure we all know there are plenty such pleas on the Internet already. Pleas that pretty much universally say what needs to be said, far better than I am able to.
No, this is a letter to the parents of bullies.
I hold no illusions. I know many of you out there will not read past the first paragraph. Many will say “My children are not bullies” and leave it at that. I know some of you will even say “It’s not my problem”. I even know a few of you will say “If my children are bullies, it’s because the children they pick on are not strong enough to fend them off.”
I’m not going to get teary-eyed about this. I’m not going to make some impassioned statement that I’m a survivor of bullying, because in this context, whether I am or not is irrelevant. This is about facts. However, examples will be needed, and I will need to use my own experiences for that. So yes, I have been bullied, and very severely at that.
But bottom line, this is about parents loving their children.
I don’t doubt for a moment, that most parents love their children. And I don’t doubt that this goes for the parents of bullies as well. I’ve seen this. I’ve seen how the worst of bullies can come from good, stable homes, where their parents try to teach them good, solid values to take with them. But children can be both deceptive and incredible vicious. As they do not have the same filters with which to perceive the world, as adults with many more years of experience with cause-and-effect, they do not always fully comprehend the possible outcome of their actions.
And sadly, many parents wear blinders when it comes to their kids.
I am not saying that bullies are victims, because anyone who has been on the receiving end of years of put-downs and belittlements, will tell you that such talk is insulting and completely beside the point. This is about boundaries and limits, and simple, decent child-rearing.
“My children are not bullies”. And you know what? You may be right. Your kid may in fact be one of the great majority of children, who are not. But bullying takes a great many forms, and the old, idiotic axiom that “sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me”, was written by bullies. Not by their victims. Names hurt. In fact, names hurt a lot. They make a child feel different, unwelcome and outside the group at a time of age where “belonging” and membership of a community is of crucial importance. Have you ever heard your children speak ill of one of their classmates? Laugh at them for what clothes they wear? The colour of their skin or their hair? There are myriads of ways of making someone feel different, unwelcome and like an outsider. Have you heard your children speak ill of the “fat kid”, “the fag”, “the ugly kid”, “The Ginger” or any such thing? If you have, and you haven’t immediately stepped in to stop it, and stop it both firmly and with authority … chances are, you helped make a child’s life utterly miserable. Inactivity in the face of possible bullying is the same as silent complicity, and bullying destroys lives. It is difficult for someone who has not been the victim of bullying to understand how destructive it is, but during a time of life where we are meant to learn who we are, what the victims of bullying learn, is that they are worthless, useless and unlovable.
As an adult and as a parent, you are directly responsible for your child’s behaviour. This is a part of the responsibility you take upon yourself, when you become a parent. It means raising the child, and it means taking the good with the bad. All children misbehave at times, and all children have to be corrected. It’s part of learning, growing up, and becoming a whole person, and it is part of what made most of us the people we are. Being taught is what childhood is for, and humanity is unusual amongst animals, in that we have a very long learning period. There is ample time to teach these things to children, but while much of it can come from school and society as a whole, the most important part of child-rearing has to come from the parents. And child-rearing, amongst other things, means occasionally having to do something unpleasant.
Like telling your child that what he or she is doing is completely unacceptable, that you are aware of their aberrant behaviour, and that you will not accept it anymore. And that because of that behaviour, they will be sanctioned in some way.
Disavowing any knowledge of your child being a bully does not make the implications any less devastating for the victims, and more and more stories emerge of the horrible consequences of this. When I was a child, I attended a school where bullying did not exist. It did not exist because the headmaster staunchly, publicly and very vocally refused to acknowledge its existence. Kids suffered the most aggravating abuses from their peers in that school, because according to the headmaster, bullying did not exist in his school. If he acknowledged it, he would have had to take action against it. It was easier for him this way, and if kids suffered … well, according to him they didn’t, because after all, bullying didn’t exist.
He’s just one example from that day and age. In the 1980′s, bullying was still seen as taboo, and it was best to not talk about it … and in reality, it was probably the kid’s own fault. I had a terrible temper, and my parents kept telling me when I came home from school in tears, that if I only didn’t get angry, it wouldn’t be fun for the bullies to harass me. For years that was the line I was met with when I tried to seek some kind of comfort with my parents. In the end, I stopped telling them about it, because I already knew what they would say, and mind you … I know my parents were better than many. They actually did try a few times to get something done about the problem.
The difference-maker in my situation was a kid I used to play with as a child. One day, out of nowhere, without any warning whatsoever, he too turned on me and joined the bullies. Jeering, cajoling, laughing and pointing fingers. It felt like someone yanked the base of my world out from underneath me. I turned around and I hit him. It was a reaction born from panic and desperation and his only response was to look at me and sneer “It’s over!”
Amidst the laughter of the chorus of bullies, the demeaning shouts, the horrific taunts … I went home, completely dissolved in tears. I told my parents I was never going back to that school. I was in flat out panic. I shouted I wasn’t going back. Not ever.
I couldn’t.
This is why my parents were better than most. They finally acknowledged the depth of the problem, and had me moved to another school. I never sat foot in the classroom where that last scene had played out again. Not once, in the 24 years since that scene played out have I stepped foot inside that building again, but I have driven past it a couple of times since, and seeing that huge, red, brick-building rise in front of me, to this day, fills me with a deep-seated dread and an incredible sadness. This was a place where I should have felt safe, and instead, it was a place of daily torture.
The bullies who made my life difficult could have been your children. Not your neighbour’s, not your colleague’s … yours.
Some of the worst of them were the children of good families, with nice parents. Some of the nicest kids had the most ignorant and almost wilfully stupid parents. You can never tell. But the one thing that typified the bullies was that their parents refused to accept complicity. One of the worst of them, a kid I still detest to this day, lost his mother to cancer, and when the teacher told us all to be nice to him when he came back after the funeral, I distinctly remember thinking “Why should I? He’s never nice to me!”
That thought scares me today. That I was so full of hate that I couldn’t feel sorry for someone for losing his mother.
But I was lucky. I got out of there in time.
These days, bullying is no longer the same taboo as it was back then. These days, we hear stories of children driven to suicide or murder by their bullies, and we are outraged. How can anyone force a child to such extremes, we ask ourselves? How can anyone be so mean to a child?
We ask ourselves that, as adults. But some of us were bullies ourselves when we were children, and some of those who are outraged, are the parents of children who are guilty of these very things.
“But my children are not bullies”.
Face facts, and acknowledge that any child may be. Deal with it. Deal with it at home, when you suspect there is the least chance of it being the case. Deal with it in public. Deal with it with the school, with the children, with the victims.
No one should have to go home in the second grade, wondering if suicide isn’t better and less painful than going to school the next day. No one should have to think that a razorblade is their best friend, because at least when they cut themselves, they don’t feel numb anymore.
No one should cry themselves to sleep at night, hoping against hope that they won’t wake up the next morning to face another day in school.
Bullying, contrary to what my old headmaster thought, does exist. It is real, and it is terrifying. It marks lives, not for a few days or a few hours, or even a few months, but permanently. It leads to loneliness, pain and anguish. It leads to premature deaths.
We are human beings … capable of rational thought and higher reasoning. We are endowed with the capacity to feel deep emotions and to reflect on these emotions for many, many years. We are equipped with a memory unrivalled in nature, and daily fear, pain and loneliness is not simply forgotten, nor can its cause simply be dismissed as “the way children are”. Children can be awfully mean, even evil to one another. But they can also be incredibly nice and gentle.
It is up to their parents to make sure they are the latter, rather than the former.
Think about it: what kind of person do you want to be responsible for releasing into society?
All anti-bullying campaigns target the children themselves. Telling them how much it hurts. But they already know this, and they do it anyway, because they want to inflict that pain. They don’t see the consequences, and for a child, out of sight truly is out of mind. Some campaigns try to tell children that it isn’t cool to be a bully, but even when this message is delivered by kids themselves, it is still a campaign planned by adults, and since when did children listen to adults when it came to what is cool and what isn’t, in the first place?
If we want bullying to stop, it has to be stopped where it begins.
With the parents.
Because yes, it IS your responsibility.
Because the next time, we read about a child having taken his or her own life in the newspapers, it may be YOUR child who took part in driving the victim to that extreme.
Please don’t wear blinders. Please don’t close your eyes.
Please act.
You are the only one who can.
Respectfully,
Joan Høj Jacobsen