Hey guys, this week (20-26) I am going to be blogging about discrimination and society.
I will list for you here all of the posts you can expect to see in the week:
20th – Bullying
21st – Racism & refugees
22nd – Hate
23rd – EU referendum
24th – Transphobia
25th – Homophobia
26th – Sexism
Those are the posts and the scheduled date for the whole rest of this week. This is kind of going to be a blog series about discrimination and I’m going to call it the Lets Talk Series. I know lots of people have blogs entitled lets talk… but that is what my series is going to be about.
Anyway, this post is going to be on bullying so let’s get into it.
Everyone has been victim to some form of bullying, even the bullies have probably been bullied. Bullying is a terrible thing that I believe to be mainly caused by miserable people trying to make others miserable so they will feel better, that may not be the truth but it’s what I tell myself.
I have been bullied before and thinking back to it now it was so petty and yet it upset me so much! Thinking back to it I was so much the better person and I never thought for a second that they were above me, but I still let them get to me, because ultimately you can’t help it. If someone is being horrible to you your natural instinct is to react to it.
Bullying is something that happens in all schools, colleges, universities, even jobs. Girls bully other girls, boys bully other boys, boys bully girls and girls bully boys. You can be bullied because of social class, race, gender, sex, ability and so many other things. The thing I hate most about bullying is when they can get away with it.
When I was in college, I was bullied by two people in my class and unfortunately for both me and them they didn’t have a great record and they didn’t have a very good family or social background. When the worst bullying happened I told a few teachers about it and they didn’t really take it all that seriously or do anything about it. One of the people’s excuses was that they didn’t know they were doing anything wrong until I left the room crying even though they were insulting my appearance and my interests. The week after that day I was called into the staff office because the bullies wanted to talk to me, to “apologise” and “get my side of the story” this was a load of rubbish because in fact what happened was the bullies continued to talk about how much they hated me, how I thought I was better than them because I didn’t go to school (which is possibly the most outrageous thing about home-education that I’ve ever heard!) and at one point one of them even said that they didn’t understand why they couldn’t tell me I was walking around looking like a twat and the teacher said nothing about this, even though she had just referred to me as a twat, in front of a teacher. The other bully couldn’t understand why they weren’t allowed to tell me the truth, that they had been brought up to always tell the truth and never lie, however, there is a very big difference between telling the truth when asked and outwardly insulting someone with your thoughts and opinions on them.
The worst thing about all of this wasn’t the bullying because ultimately I think anyone that bullies another person is an appalling, terrible person and they have no excuse no matter how bad their life is because they of all people should be able to recognise how horrible it is when you get treated badly. The worst thing was when my report form was due the biggest improvement written on my form was to “develop an understanding of other peoples family lives and background.”, this presumably brought on by my lack of understanding of where these bullies had come from and apparently their behaviour is acceptable because they have a life that is worse off than mine. That is not right, whatever is going on in their lives, no matter how hard – should never impact another person’s life and if it does something needs to be done about it. Having a worse life than the person you are bullying is a cowardly excuse for such behaviour in my opinion and it made me so angry that my teachers would suggest that instead of being upset and angry with these bullies if I just learnt about their family and social background then I would understand that they had done nothing wrong. I hated that college so much and all of it’s stupid ways and lack of communication skills and all the other bad things that went with it and unsurprisingly I decided not to do another college course with them.
The point of this whole story was that bullying isn’t taken seriously enough, people try and come up with excuses and explanations that will make it better but when you’ve been a victim of bullying there isn’t anything to be said that can make it better, they just need to accept that you’ve been bullied and take action to make sure it never happens again but that doesn’t happen and there are all these schools and organisations that claim they have zero tolerance to bullying but that’s not true and it takes something really very serious such as a suicide to really force change in such an organisation and that shouldn’t be the case, someone shouldn’t have to die to make change happen. The truth is that teachers and headmasters just can’t be bothered to deal with the trouble of sorting out bullies so they would much rather ignore the issue.
Bullying is becoming much more possible with all of the social media and networking things that are becoming popular and it’s becoming much easier to anonymously say horrible things to people and you see it all the time on twitter and other things where people have just said bad things to a person for no reason other than to be mean.
I think everyone needs to be more aware of bullying and really consider and think about things that they might be able to do to help prevent that bullying from happening. Maybe you witness someone being bullied by another student so you could tell a teacher or stick up for the person being bullied, maybe you witness a teacher bullying a pupil and you could tell a different teacher, maybe you bully people in which case you could just stop bullying people!
There was a post written by BeingOlive recently about bullying which I thought was really good so decided to share with you. Also, there is a poem/video which is honestly one of the best, most emotional things I have ever seen on the internet about bullying and is for anyone who has ever been bullied – To This Day By Shane Koyczan. I am actually doing a movement piece to this poem in a performance today and it’s the greatest, most impressive, most important thing I have ever done with my group.
That is it for this post, please read the post I linked to and watch the video I linked to and let me know what you thought of them! If you enjoyed this post please like, follow and comment! If you’re already following me then thank you so much! 🙂
Lastly, if you ever have any ideas on tags, challenges, series or posts you would like to see me do then please let me know in the comments, on twitter or e-mail your suggestions to me – aninspiredteen@gmail.com
That’s all for now!
Inspired Teen 🙂
lifeofaninspiredteen 