River: Bullying

[mdlbear]

Phoebe Prince, South Hadley High School's 'new girl,' driven to suicide by teenage cyber bullies Via a chain starting with Megan Kelley Hall, through seanan_mcguire to admnaismith.

The Daily News headline is misleading: there was physical bullying, too. And I don't like its tone. This one from Slate is better. There are too many to list, or even to look through. Some of the comments are harrowing.

Didn't we learn from Columbine? Evidently not. Most victims are like Phoebe -- they take it out on themselves.

I didn't get physically bullied, as far as I can remember. It was all verbal -- they called it "teasing". And luckily there were other geeks in my junior high and high school -- we called ourselves the Chess and Bridge Club and holed up in the Latin teacher's classroom before school started. Thank goodness, too, for tracking -- we mostly had our classes with the other geeks. Unlike some people whose stories I've seen, my parents never took the bullies' side, but they didn't have much advice for me, either.

The scars are still there, when I think to look for them. Mostly I never thought about them, which is probably the biggest scar of all. I still don't know where they all are.

Comments

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

I tried to look "normal"; I put my hair in curlers when I went to sleep, and bought clothes that I thought looked like the ones the other girls wore. They weren't, of course, and my carefully curled hair went limp and stringy by lunchtime, because that's the kind of hair I have. Of course, a big part of the problem was that I was two years younger than anyone else in my class; what looked right on a 14-year-old just looked pathetic on an underdeveloped 12-year-old. (I was also advised to try to "act normal", but I simply wasn't able to.)