A personal story on experiencing bullying first-hand (Guest post by Lois)

In honor of BC Anti-Bullying Day, I am wearing a pink t-shirt today. I encourage you to do so as well. Moreover, I am sharing a story that Lois kindly volunteered to write about. Bullying is wrong, any way you want to slice it. Let’s work together to stop it. Thanks to Lois for opening up with her story.

In the last five years or so I’ve begun to see the public talking about the ways that girls bully and destroy each other. When Reena Virk was murdered in 1997 the media began to publicly question how it was that a bunch of girls could do that to another girl.

In 2003 Rachel Simmons released the book Odd Girl Out: The Secret Culture of Aggression in Girls which was made into a movie in 2005 (starring SpyKids’ Alexa Vega). Simmons’ book, based on interviews with hundreds of women, ranging in age from 8-50, explored the tendencies of girls to abuse each other, not as much physically as emotionally and verbally. Behaviour that used to be dismissed as “girls will be girls” or something to just “get over” because “they probably didn’t mean it” was finally being pulled into the open for what it truly was: bullying.

The book, along with other books, as well as TV talk shows, movies like Mean Girls, and recent studies have examined the ways in which girls bully each other. Most of them are sneaky, underhanded, and very painful for the victims. One of the most frequent is simply gossip. Most people gossip on a daily basis, but in middle school or high school a false rumour can be the end of someone’s reputation which is all you have. The whole point when girls bully each other is to keep themselves at the top of the food chain: to establish themselves as the queen bee. Most of the tactics used are intended to freeze out the victim – exclude them from the social circle.

The problem is, all of these books and movies point to this as being something that happens among the cool kids to maintain their social standing. The movies show that whichever girl had been bullied by the popular kids found a new group of friends who were completely inclusive and welcoming. And while that’s an image I wish were true, my experience tells me otherwise. Even the unpopular kids are cruel: after all, isn’t it better to be fourth from the bottom of the social totem pole than at the very bottom?

For me it all started when I was 10. My family moved back into the community I had grown up in after a year away, but my friends had moved on. They had built new social circles and there was no room for me in them. I was bullied by both the popular kids and the unpopular ones. The popular kids called every hairdresser in town to book appointments in my name, and when I missed the appointments the hairdressers all called my house trying to find out why. They broke into my locker at school and stole my things & when I got a new lock they wrote derogatory comments on the outside of it with permanent felt pen. They spread rumors about me having sex with boys in our class, but most of the time they just didn’t talk to me. Or only talked to me when they wanted something. The unpopular kids wanted nothing to do with me either – the girls made rules about how often I was allowed to be spoken to in a day, how far away I had to sit to eat my lunch, and which days I was allowed to talk to them at recess. They were my best friends and they hated me. Most of the bullying was done in silence – each look from a group of girls meant something. Each sound. These were things that teachers would never pick up on. Teachers who did observe what was happening did nothing to stop it. Instead they concluded that it was somehow my fault – that I needed a course in “how to make friends,” something that only proved to be yet another source of ridicule by my peers.

Things grew out of control – it got to a point where I could not walk through the halls of my high school without someone calling me names. Slut. Fatso. Goody-two shoes. Whore. Each name usually accompanid by a shove, sometimes by girls whose names I didn’t even know. My mother would come to the school at the time of each of my breaks & I would go sit in her car until the bell rang and then head to class late. I was picked up for lunch every day. And yet the girls still found opportunities (the girls locker room was the equivalent of hell). I tried hanging out with the boys, but the boys wanted to date the girls and the girls would use that to get the boys to say cruel things.

Things spiralled until one afternoon there were 25 girls (many of whom I didn’t know) surrounding me, telling me how they were going to gang beat me as soon as Jen (not her real name!) arrived. Luckily for me, she never showed up and the girls finally let me leave. I dropped out of Phys Ed and a few months later switched schools. Things weren’t perfect at the new school, but they were certainly better than what I had left.

It’s been about 10 years since I switched schools and got away from it all, and I like to think that has given me a bit of a greater perspective on what happened. The scary thing for me is seeing the way that women my age and older continue in these same back-stabbing practises. It has taken me years to not see every word as a potential attack, each unreturned phone call as a sign that I am unwanted, and to not over-analyze each look as a signal of whether or not I am still someone’s friend.

In the years since then I’ve been able to forgive these girls for the way they treated me. But I’ve never forgotten how it felt. One of my greatest hopes is that bullying among girls will continue to be recognized for what it is because that is the only way it will be stopped.

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