“Hey, fatty. Get off this trampoline, fatty. It only holds so much weight.”
“Fatty, fatty, fatty,” the girls taunted, their words keeping rhythm as they continued to bounce up and down.
Tanya slowly dropped to hands and knees and crawled away, keeping her head down, trying, no doubt, to make herself as small as possible. She slid to the ground and disappeared into the evening, the girl’s taunting words ringing in her ears.
She wished the earth would open up and swallow her. She wished a truck would suddenly swerve out and hit her.
Mostly, she wished she were dead.
“I remember her,” recalled Jamie, now married and the mother of two. “She was in my class at school and she was overweight so she was a natural target for teasing.”
“Was I a bully?”
The young mother’s eyes fill with tears as she flips back over time to her own high school years.
“I didn’t think I was a bully at the time,” she said. “But I was confident and I had lots of friends and sometimes I said things and my friends said things that were cruel and mean.”
For Jamie, high school was fun, lots of fun. There were dates with good looking guys, cool friends to hang out with and parties to go to. High school offered a chance to flirt with being all grown up, knowing full well mom and dad were there should she decide to go back to being a kid again.
Jamie wore her confidence as easily as her school jacket and her boyfriend’s class ring.
In spite of it all, Jamie remembers a few moments she would just as soon forget.
“I had my head stuck in the toilet one time,” she said. “Yes, I definitely had a few times like that. I remember these boys in my class making fun of me and me being all embarrassed because I had these warts on my hands. I remember they even drew pictures on the blackboard of these hands covered in warts and put my name under it.”
Jamie shook her head and smiled wryly at the memory.
“I was confident, though, and those boys, they never had any power over me. I guess they knew that. For some reason they knew that.”
Now a counsellor, Jamie deals regularly with bullying issues and feels she has an understanding of the issue, not only from the perspective of the person being bullied, but from the bully’s as well.
“Bullying gives you a sense of power. And I don’t think a bully has an understanding of how devastating their words or actions can be to someone else. Bullies look at people as objects, not someone with feelings whom they can kill with their words or actions.”
Bullying can take many forms, Jamie said. “Laughing at people’s expense, teasing that goes a little too far, making fun of someone, even sarcasm.”
Adults need to teach their children about the devastating effects of bullying and they also need to be careful about what they say in front of their children.
“They shouldn’t have adult conversations in front of their kids,” Jamie said.
Parents who fear their children are being bullied need to let them know the bullies do not have power over them.
“Help them not to identify themselves as victims. Be there for them and love them and get in their face if you need to. Let them know they are not alone.”
“According to questionnaires distributed at events held during National Victims of Crime Awareness Week, bullying is a very real concern in Rimbey.
Janet Porter, Rimbey Victim Services co-ordinator, said about 89 per cent of the people who responded to the questionnaires said bullying is a problem here and 71 per cent said their children had been bullied.
According to Wikipedia, bullying is the use of force or coercion to abuse or intimidate others. The behavior can be habitual and involve an imbalance of social or physical power.
It can include verbal harassment or threat, physical assault or coercion and may be directed repeatedly towards particular victims, perhaps on grounds of race, religion, gender, sexuality or ability.
If bullying is done by a group, it is called mobbing.
The victim of bullying is sometimes referred to as a target.
Bullying consists of emotional, verbal and physical abuse and ranges from simple one-on-one bullying to more complex bullying in which the bullying in which others help the bully in his or her activities.
Bullying in school and the workplace is also referred to as peer abuse. Students who are experiencing bullying need to talk to a trusted adult such as their teacher, their parents or the family/school liaison worker. Adults may contact Neighborhood Place at 403-843-4304 or Victim Services at the RCMP office at 403-843-2224.