Published on 12, July, 2020
Were any of you bullied as children/teenagers? I was subjected to mild mocking/teasing at prep school, but that was nothing like the severe verbal bullying I was subjected to at public school. I was introverted,shy,badly coordinated and socially awkward/naive. In other . words, not like the usual brash and extremely self confident people that went there. Nearly 50 years later and I still struggle with the psychological effects of it. I've never been able to pursue further education in a bricks and mortar setting for fear of being bullied and mocked My 1st psych admission was at the start of my last term at public school, the A level term.Hence no A levels and no degree.
My self belief and sense of self worth is gossamer thin. Ditto my self confidence. If I do well at something my mind says 'everyone can'. If I do badly at something then I'm stupid.
Experiences of bullying like these clearly point to the fact that we need to massively and fundamentally rethink so many things about our society, crucially that bullying is a criminal act and must be dealt with via the criminal law - the police must always become involved with bullying cases and those who are bullying must be tried in a criminal court - we don’t allow rape or murder so why do we fail to take the same hardline approach against bullying - the parents of child bullies must face criminal prosecution and bullies must have serious mental health interventions while in jail, while child bullies must be sent to residential child psychiatric facilities to root out their bullying behaviour, the bullying parents attitudes must be robustly challenged and rooted out via the criminal justice system - too often, we see situations where victims and targets of bullying are in effect punished for being bullied and this is clearly a situation that must stop, same applies to the effective silencing of victims and targets of bullying - we pretend to be and call ourselves a “caring” and “civilised” society but with so much bullying, both documented and otherwise, this alone is proof of how deeply hypocritical our society is in actuality and in reality - it is only morally right and proper that targets and victims of bullying get the correct type of supports, along with their families, preferably within thier communities, but it is both scandalous, an outrage and totally disgraceful that the current reality is that targets of bullying are punished for being bullied, in many cases left with lifelong psychological scars that in many cases will never heal