Lunch Time Poll on Bullying

[shadowkat]

This is a quick poll adjacent to my last post on bullying. Bullying in case there is confusion is defined as teasing, verbal or physical in nature, in which the victim is made to feel shame, fear, pain, insecure, or humiliation. It includes but is not limited to - being called names, having insects put in your food or textbooks, or other creatures, poked fun at, etc. (It is not just being hit or pummeled physically. Mental and emotional bullying is as bad as physical bullying, and leaves scars, they just aren't always quite so visible.) [ETC: Bullying includes teasing, excluding in a way that is obvious - ie four people in a class, three group together and whisper about the fourth while they are there, and it can be by siblings or teachers or fellow students or parents.]

(Sort of hope people will respond. I hate doing polls for this reason. It's not like a post - if no one responds, no big. But polls...sigh. )

[Poll #1631388]

Comments

[embers-log.livejournal.com]

Actually, after clicking on 'no I've never been bullied' I remembered at Girl Scout Camp when a bigger girl (I was always small for my age), a total stranger, came and shoved me out of line.... Of course (red head that I was) I immediately popped back up and shoved her back (I had a big brother, I know you can't just take that kind of thing)...
the girl who shoved me looked at me in surprise and said 'I didn't think you had it in you'
(which shows she doesn't know anything about red heads, size doesn't mean a thing to most of us! lol).

And I guess you could call my big brother someone who would tease and torment his siblings, he certainly knew how to get a rise out of our big sister and little brother, but I usually let it roll off my back.... partly because Robert (the aforementioned big brother) also read to me when I was little, and did a lot of stuff for me... I think I felt that the teasing wasn't a big deal considering how kind he could be.

I know I was lucky : my sister had had braces and glasses from WAY too early an age, and it didn't help that my parents spoke openly about how homely she was... she had no self esteem and was tormented in every way at school. Bullying can really cause a blight on someone's life.

On the internet: there was a woman at Fireflyfans.com who created a teen-age boy alter-ego (a second membership to the site) and would use it to attack people for no reason. She was obviously unhappy in her own life (in her original membership she would talk about stuff she was going through) but felt fine about tormenting other people.... So I loved to go there and expose her when ever she was being a bully (she finally got that second identity shut down and was under threat of being kicked out completely if she didn't cut it out).