Bully Tactics

          It’s been in the news a lot lately. Bullying. Young people committing suicide after being victimized by cyber-bullying. Adult bullies picking on a little girl who’s dying. A 55-year old disabled man sucker punched by a sociopath who ranted for 30 minutes before he knocked his victim out. In today’s newspaper, a mother wrote a letter to the editor about her daughter being bullied in elementary school.

            I’ve had a lot of first-hand experience with bullies because I was “the new kid” almost every year that I went to school. I was whispered about, laughed at, taunted, pushed, shoved, threatened, spit on, and punched. I’ve heard experts tell the parents of victims to encourage their children to be more confident, to work on not appearing weak. Maybe there’s a speck of truth in that, but I’m pretty sure that I don’t come across as a sniffling, awkward, doormat, so there’s got to be more to it than that.

            Why did they pick on me? The bullies always announced to everyone the reasons I should be persecuted. According to them, I was: wearing stupid clothes, black, oriental, had straight hair, thought I was so smart, stuck up, etc. The truth didn’t matter. The truth was that they would make up any random excuse to “get me.” It was a waste of time trying to figure out why.

Instead I focused on making it stop. When I told adults about the problem, they would tell me I must’ve done something to deserve it. What could I have possibly done to deserve being preyed on day in and day out? Or they’d tell me to tell the bullies to stop it. As if I hadn’t already done that. The other thing they’d tell me was not to fight because it takes two to fight. So basically, the message was be a good victim, shut up, and take it. Be noble, turn the other cheek, do nothing, live your life in fear. Between 11 and 17 million people were systematically killed by the Nazis during World War II using that strategy.

            While I appreciate the “It gets better” campaign, I think we need to do more to stop the bullying. We need to make it better now. Students shouldn't have to try to hang on in quiet desperation until they graduate.

            After studying bullies first hand, here’s what I found. They are cowards (especially the cyber-bullies because they like being anonymous). They always pick a smaller, weaker victim. They have enormous egos. That’s why they like having a crowd around to watch them humiliate someone. Cyber-bullies have taken that to a new level with a huge online audience.

Another myth is that bullies are misunderstood and that they’re crying for help. Bullying isn’t an accident. They know exactly what they’re doing. Bullies LIKE bullying. That’s why they smile and laugh when they’re doing it. It makes them feel superior.  They never feel sorry for the victim. The only sympathy they feel is for themselves. They can’t laugh at themselves or shrug things off. They have a heightened sensitivity to any perceived slight.

I never encountered a bully that was smarter than me. It’s interesting that they like to pick on “nerds,” equating intelligence with passivity, never making the connection that nerds are probably smart enough to outsmart them. Bullies overestimate their powers. They never expect the victim to fight back, so they rarely have anything to counter with. (The exception to this is that sometimes they’ll gather others or weapons to come after you later. That’s a very important threat to take seriously. That’s when you need to get authorities involved.) They also assume that everybody else agrees with them, or are confident that everybody else is so scared of being the next victim, they won’t do anything to rescue the current victim.

In school, students need to be able to report a bully to a teacher, counselor or principal, and trust that something will be done about it. Their allegations should be taken seriously and checked out to make sure they’re true. If they are, then the bully should be punished with detention, or suspension. It should also be made clear to the bully that if they retaliate, something even worse will happen to them. 

If there’s a fight, school officials need to find out who the instigator was, and who was defending himself. This current policy of a blanket suspension of both people is wrong. Why should the victim be punished twice? Once by the bully and then again by the authorities who are supposed to be protecting them. That’s just encouragement for the bully. It’s a win-win situation for him. It feeds into his ego. And the message to the victim is that they truly are helpless, nobody cares, and it’s a hopeless situation. If the schools won’t deal with the bullying, then get law enforcement involved.

With cyberbullying, if the social network won’t reveal who the source of the bullying is, ask the kids. They usually know. Offer a reward.   Report it to the school. Call the parents of the bullies. Call the police. If none of that works, as a parent, I’d move my child to another school.

Bullies need to know that their behavior won’t be tolerated. There will be unpleasant consequences for their actions. Other kids need to ostracize them. The key to ending bully behavior is for people to stand up against it. The more you back away from a confrontation with a bully, the more entitled he feels. It confirms his belief that he is superior, and that the victim deserves whatever cruelty he can unleash.

As for the bus situation, the bully was obviously mentally unstable. From what I saw in the news clip, he fit the bully profile. He stood ranting  directly into the camera, “I’ll do it on camera! I’ll beat your ass!” He needed an audience beyond the passengers trapped on the bus with him. What did the victim do wrong? the bully claimed that he looked at him funny. Was the victim bigger than the bully? Was he a threat? Of course not, he was a small Asian man, mentally disabled, and 55 years old. The bully was over 6 feet tall, stocky, and in his 20s. The victim couldn’t fight back, he was punched from behind.

I can’t blame the other passengers for being scared. But why didn’t one of them call or text the cops? Why not have a discreet “panic button” for the bus driver to push, calling the cops and GPS to tell them where the bus is?

            Although it wasn’t as serious as some of the incidents I’ve mentioned, here’s one of my bully experiences. By the time I reached junior high school, when I walked into a new school I was using certain tactics to anticipate bullies. I’d usually size up everybody I met. If they looked like a potential bully, I’d watch them closely to find out what their weakness was. That way, if they had something nasty to say to me, I could return the insult right where it hurt. That put most psychological bullies on notice. I would also find a group of friends to eat lunch with, and decide which teachers I could go to for help if I needed it. Lastly, no matter how mean a bully or clique was, I vowed to never let them see me cry. That’s what they wanted.

            Despite all that, I did have a bully problem in seventh grade. We moved from Panama to Hawaii. The public school I went to was rough. It was a mix of kids from a low income project, and kids like me from a nice middle class neighborhood. I befriended a Jewish girl whose father was a professor. The kids from the project were mostly Hawaiian and Samoan.

Robert Louis Stevenson Jr. High School, Honolulu, Hawaii.

My middle class Hawaiian presence rankled one Samoan girl. I was obviously Hawaiian. My last name proved that. But, I wasn’t from her neighborhood, and I didn’t speak pidgin; I sounded like a haole from the mainland. For months I ignored her goading comments about my not fitting into her racial sterotype, about being too smart for my own good, and other stupid insults. She couldn’t wait for me to do something that would entitle her to beat me up.

I gave her that opening one day after school. As we walked through campus, she was in front of me. She kept looking back at me, making nasty comments, which is why she lurched off the sidewalk, and almost fell. Always a sucker for physical humor, I made the mistake of giggling at her as her arms windmilled, while she tried to catch her balance. Embarrassed, she instantly, angrily accused me of pushing her, and started shoving me, ordering me to "Say you're sorry!" I surprised her when I shoved back and refused. We exchanged pushes back and forth until we got to a landing between two long, wide flights of stairs, where a crowd now surrounded us.

            At that time, I don’t think I weighed even 90 pounds, and stood just under 5 feet tall. She of course was much bigger. Bullies are always bigger, and they never pick on someone bigger or stronger than them. She kept yelling at me to apologize for pushing her off the sidewalk. I offered a compromise, “I’m sorry I laughed. But I didn’t push you.” She wouldn’t take what I offered. Bullies aren’t socially adept enough to handle compromise, plus she’d backed herself into a corner with the crowd watching. Now she had to beat me up.

The Japanese kids started quietly murmuring, “Just apologize. Just say 'Sorry.'” She kept pushing me around the circle, enjoying my humiliation, a cat toying with the mouse.

            And then I’d had enough. I snapped! I took a step toward her, looked her in the eye, and said, “Go ahead. You can kill me, but I will NEVER apologize! I didn’t push you off the sidewalk!”

            The crowd went silent. She was stunned for a second. I could tell she was thinking I’d gone insane, and that scared her. I took that second to reach up, grab the top of her shirt and pull. Buttons flew off, fabric ripped. She crossed her arms to cover her now exposed chest. The crowd gasped, then chuckled.

            I wish I could say that it was like a Rocky movie, that I pummeled her, and then danced triumphantly on the landing of those stairs, but in truth, I ran. I barreled down the last flight of stairs, jumped on the city bus, and managed with trembling hands to pay my bus fare. When I got home I cried and blubbered the whole story to my parents.

            I dreaded going to school the next day, but an interesting thing happened. The Japanese kids smiled at me, and told me they’d never seen anything like that before. The tough Hawaiian kids gave me nods of approval. One of them, a girl named Aloha with a homemade tattoo of “LOVE” across her knuckles put her arm around my shoulders, and told the bully, “You leave this Hawaiian girl alone. She’s smart. She’s not afraid of you. And she’s my friend.” I didn’t have anymore problems that year.

To see video of the “bus attack” go to www.q13fox.com. Laura Keolanui Stark can be reached at stark.laura.k@gmail.com.