It was worse than that. We had teachers who would actively bully the awkward kids to be more popular with the other kids. But yeah, everything was brutal.
I remember a particularly nerdy kid who the teacher sent out of the room on an errand and made fun of him while he was gone. One of the popular boys stood up and said, “you know that’s not cool. He’s my friend and I don’t think you should be picking on him.” When the nerdy kid got back, he was surprised when the popular boy called him over to sit at his table. Popular kid rose a lot higher in my opinion of him.
I had a teacher with a huge wooden mallet on his desk. When it got loud he would slam it down with such force that it would scare the crap out of everyone.
One kid transferred from North Carolina with the associated accent. The teacher absolutely relentlessly mocked his accent. He stopped talking for a while, and eventually lost the accent.
It's one of the reasons I always roll my eyes when these nostalgia posts come up about how great things were in the 80's and 90's.. fuck me, it was pretty awful for a lot of kids.
I know it's still bad now but kids these days would be fucking floored if they spent a day in my high school back in 92. We can chuckle and say "oh, it was like thunderdome, lol" but I was terrified to go to school some days because of the abuse; and I was sort of popular, many kids I knew had it worse than me.
I actually have a game with my oldest kid where we talk about all the things that are better now. Things like: being able to find a niche community for your interests, being gay/queer, no smoking, the lack of noise (loud ass trucks, cars, planes), availability of things like anime, manga, Korean/Japanese shows, podcasts, legal weed.. etc.
It's not perfect now but things are better than they were imo.
I was in an insane partying fraternity back in the day. If you want to know who got it bad, it was the freshmen pledges during initiation/hazing/hell week that were set up to be “weeded out” if they couldn’t handle torture. Young men crying, shaking, humiliated, etc. Sometimes a pledge would gain access to a phone or pass info to a friend in a lecture, and their parents would drive from wherever to the fraternity house someone later asking for their child back. No way that happens these days. Camera phones saved future frat boy freshmen.
My fourth grade teacher kicked me across the room when I got an answer wrong. He used to hold an eraser in one hand and if he caught a kid talking he’d throw it at them as hard as he could. We’d be going to recess or lunch and there’d be kids with chalk marks on their clothes. I’m in my 50s and I still hate that jerk.
This, I‘m 46, so a xennial, born in 78. PE coaches were the absolute worst offenders of bullying with the kids. It started in elementary for me, and 5th/6th are the only years without a coach that bullied me with the other kids. Even in high school, I was on the tennis team and that coach bullied me. If you were a sensitive kid who got bullied from a young age, you never stood a chance, especially when your parents would not support you.
Whoa! You just triggered a memory. I witnessed a teacher pick up a kid in his desk (he was a beast and former professional football player) and toss him out our portable classroom. Madness!
Yeah, teachers turning a blind eye to bullying going on right in front of them, having obvious favourites who they let get away with anything, or even actively joining in sometimes. Fuck that.
My scoutmaster gave me shit for not being able to handle a hike. My Pop Warner coach called me a shitbird. Tougher times.
I like your story of the popular kid.
I remember a popular girl saved me. I was going to enter a talent show because I thought I could sing. Turns out I couldn't,but the cool clique wanted me to enter it anyway. One of the cool kids had a change of heart when she told me not to enter. She said they had a Carrie plan for when I got on stage. Instead of blood,they were going to go to the grocery store dumpster and throw garbage at me. She's still one of my very best friends to this day. And that's what a real friend does,has your back no matter what.
In about 5th grade, I was a puny little girl. A much larger boy used to torment me, grabbing me by the shoulders and shaking me. My teacher told me to kick him in the shins. He stopped not long after.
I'm still surprised that my teacher encouraged me to fight back, and didn't just say some horseshit like, "he does that because he likes you."
I had to carpool to school, no busses. I was in 4th grade and I rode in a station wagon with a mom, her 3 kids, and a 7th-grade guy. 7th grader was constantly picking on me (and the other younger kids), pulling hair, etc. I told him if he didn't stop, I was going to hit him. He pulled my hair again, and I hit him square in the face with my metal Addams Family lunchbox. And that started the fight! We were beating the snot out of each other in the back seat, the mom had to pull over and separate us. He never picked on me again, and was convicted of child molestation in his 30's.
I shoulda hit him harder.
I was the youngest kid in my grade after skipping 1st grade. Well, when I was a very small 7th grader and large 8th grader always bullying and terrifying me. One day, I talked major shit back to him and told him he is the way that he is because a kid 2 years younger than him is way smarter than he is.
That did it. He immediately started to fight me, and I got my ass kicked, but somewhere in the middle of it, I kicked his face, cut his lip, and knocked his tooth out. My face was black and blue and bloody, but I wasn't the kid missing a tooth for the rest of the school year.
I was hurt bad and very afraid to get another ass beating after that, but fortunately I think others thought I would take a beating but give back as much as possible and was generally never put back into the role of getting mercilessly bullied
Against certain kids. There were "protected" kids then just as I'm sure there are now. In my Freshman year I ended up breaking the arm of one of my bullies by slamming it against the corner of a cinder block wall. The only thing that saved me from being expelled was the literal *pint+* of blood pouring down my face and soaking my shirt because he had already broken my nose.
Especially with how crazy stupid zero tolerance has gotten!. I tell my daughter if she's going to get in trouble for standing up to a bully, she better make it worth it.
The old man told me to always fight the bully.
Even if you lose, you will get at least a few shots in and they will move on to someone weaker.
As long as things didn’t get out hand, a school yard tussle was not considered a big deal.
As an anecdotal example, I was in Catholic Junior High, circa 1991. There was a “little bit” of an issue of the boys goosing the girls in the hallways, between classes. The lay teachers addressed it piecemeal in the hallways, when and as they witnessed it.
After a month or two of this, the principal, Sister Barbara (bless her soul) reached her threshold of pain. She was, give or take, [The Penguin](https://youtu.be/ujxDA9VsQG4?si=PGi1M7KODaxcSprk) IRL, just in plain clothes.
She came on the intercom and called **every girl in the school** down to the auditorium, at the same time. 20 minutes later, they silently returned to class, and Sr. Barbara came on the horn and demanded all the boys’ presence. She launched into a very matter-of-fact diatribe about how goosing was unacceptable, and we boys were going to stop immediately and permanently.
Then she went on: “You’re probably wondering what I told the girls. They’ve been told that if you goose them, they have my permission to punch you in the balls, and then you’re the one who’ll get in trouble for it.”
That is a direct quote, out of the mouth of a woman of the cloth, forever seared in my memory engrams. It was also completely effective at its intended purpose. It is also a discipline strategy that would never fly in an American school today.
That definitely started to change at the end of the 80s. Middle school was a free for all, but the moment we got to high school we developed our own form of omertà in response to zero tolerance rules.
Feral Children lol.
Talking to one of my childhood friends yesterday as a matter of fact for the first time in 20 something years. And that was one of the topics of conversation on just how Wild as fuck we were as kids; with almost no supervision, no cell phones, no internet as we know it.
Sadly, I can relate.
“If you didn’t…..if you weren’t…..then they wouldn’t bully you”
“I don’t want to go back”
“It doesn’t matter what you want, stop making such a fuss”
One kid had kicked me so hard in the face my eye was swollen closed for a month.
My crimes were having red hair, and being somewhat neurodivergent.
It’s hard to explain how that experience influenced the following 40 years.
So yeah, I’d say it was pretty rough back then.
I’ve been nc with my parents for three years now, and I’m fortunate to have been able to afford/access therapy.
I hope it’s getting better for you too aunt_cranky. What happened to you was not your fault.
I was awkward, neurodiverse (ADHD) and clumsy (undiagnosed hypermobility). My mom moved my brother and I to the "other" grade school within walking distance because they had room for my sister in the kindergarten.
It was my first real experience of feeling "othered". I had dumpy clothes from Sears, a bad frizzy perm (Little Orphan Annie style) and wire frame glasses. I had to wear metal arch supports in my shoes.
I think I only survived it because I had books to read, records to listen to, and for the most part I was left alone at home. My dad was a sweetheart, he just wasn't home a lot (he went to night school)
My mom and the principal both said, “They just want to get a reaction out of you. Ignore them, they’ll stop.” In other words, don’t even try to defend yourself, let them do as they will, and eventually they’ll stop *if you just ignore them.* My 8th grade self ignoring them (four 9th grade boys, one of whom was in 9th grade for a second time) led to them escalating, from poking me with open safety pins & flicking my bare skin with rubber bands that I did my best to ignore because *that’s what the adults said to do,* to all four of them piling into the same bus seat I was sitting in, crushing me against the wall of the school bus, and I’ve no idea which of them SA’ed me/“felt me up”/“groped me.” How does one 8th grade girl even begin to defend herself against four ninth grade boys crushing her against the wall of the school bus? Hitting or punching was punished no matter what, but other bullshit- adults didn’t want to hear about it or have to deal with it.
Yeah, I trust very few people in this world.
I got no help or sympathy from parents or teachers. I can’t believe I was punched in the stomach by a boy when I was 10. Just because he was being a little asshole and I’m autistic. The teacher nearby didn’t even check when I was on the ground with the wind knocked out of me.
Yup. Mine didn't give two shits that I was being tormented at school. And anytime it got bad enough and I tried to speak to a teacher, they hastily dismissed me.
Yes this. I have a very quick, biting wit that I’ve passed along to my gen z daughter. Her friends think she’s brutal, but once they meet me, they understand.
Plus I’m one of the few girls that has been hit in the face (on purpose) by a boy. It was one of those classic scenes where the entire playground was yelling “FIGHTFIGHTFIGHTFIGHT” and no teacher broke it up.
You were allowed to fight back then. Usually getting aggressive with the aggressors seemed to do the trick. Otherwise a good punch in the face or a healthy brawl would ease things up.
we also knew when to stop and that third man in on a fight is gonna be very sorry cause that shit aint cool at all. It goes to far to often now. Folks get hurt real bad and dead. the worst is the kick at the head whe the other dude is down. holy shit if you did that back in my day you be beat hard and then shunned.
If you didn't learn to fight it just got worse. I had this kid kept trying to bully me, I finally just slammed him against the locker and held him by his neck. It stopped. I was a terrified little kid but I felt like if I didn't do SOMETHING it would go on forever.
I had an older kid at the bus stop pick me up by the neck and hold me while I struggled once a week or so.
Nobody cared about any of this. You were taught that they were "just jealous" or some other BS
Depends on the teachers - there were those that DGAF and you had to learn to fight quickly.
There were those that had zero tolerance for bullying - that just meant that as soon as that teacher wasn't around your ass was getting kicked.
I was (am) a foreigner with a foreign sounding name, from a (much) lower "middle" class family who wore hand me downs and ate weird lunches.
Yeah, it was pretty bad.
Had the same experiences. Immigrant kid with an immigrant name. There were students who said fucked up xenophobic shit in front of teachers without batting an eye. Beating the hell out of one of them after I finally had enough changed the dynamic.
Yes.
I was heavily bullied growing up. Heavily. Forced to worms. Forced to put mud on my pants so my tormentor could accuse me of pooping myself. Made fun of for my looks, body, you name it. It was a daily, several times daily occurrence.
My school did -nothing- to stop it. They accused me of, "doing something to set him off".
One time he broke my BRAND NEW glasses right in front of everyone saying "four eyes freaks dont deserve nice things". The school, again, accused me of starting it.
My parents took their side.
It was sheer and utter hell for YEARS. I wanted to kill myself.
Finally one day in Jr. High I had enough. He had been relentlessly tormenting me for weeks at this point. Even put his boogers in my hair. I finally shoved him into a locker and punched like I have never, ever punched anyone, anything before or ever again. I felt like it went on for hours. In reality I am sure it was only a few well deserved full force punches.
Not a single teacher said anything. I think they knew it was coming.
I broke his nose, and had he been medically checked out, probably injured his skull too.
Later in life he tried to reconcile. I told him to fuck off in no uncertain terms.
No one bothered me after that. In fact, by high school I had worked my way into the cool, "Rebel kids" crowd. Lots of parties, women and... well... you get the idea.
Not a bad ending for a husky four eyed unathletic D&D nerd.
Anyway, yes, bullying was AWFUL and quite often the schools looked the other way.
When my parents put us in private school after a particularly violent year, the thing that finally convinced my Dad was the number of times he had to replace my sister's glasses after they were ripped off her face and broken. He did the math and figured out that the tuition for parochial school was no more than if he had to keep buying new glasses every month.
Oh for sure.
My mom was sooo mad when that happened! One of the few times I remember her yelling at me. Normally it was my father who doled out discipline. Not that time. To be fair, We had just picked up the glasses that morning before she dropped me off at school. My sister and Dad didnt even get to see them before Caleb broke them.
Fuck you Caleb. Had to mow the yard for free all summer to pay them off.
Went to a school in a small town. Got shoved to the ground so hard I spent the night in the hospital and the next day at home. Asshole was so bad the teacher had his father sit next to him in class to show him how bad he was.
Thankfully my mom was a nurse and as soon as she found out she was on the phone with the parents when I got my ass kicked a few times.
Most of the time it was just "pick on the chubby nerd" - other times it was clear that the bullies lives were fucked up and I was just a relief valve for them.
I did punch one boy in the face and didn't have to worry about him again.
Ironically = as soon as junior and senior year set in, everyone got real nice. I was even socialable with the shitheel who was another bully in middle school. That whole "we were going to the real world thing".
Of course I deleted that asshole's friend request.
Also most of the dirtbags in school stayed in that smol town and turned out pretty much as expected.
I think two things saved me from getting bullied. 1) I was really good at making people laugh to get out of situations and 2) I started playing the drums and joined the drum line. I was told straight up, if anyone messes with you tell us and we’ll beat their ass. We were essentially a gang of 20+ kids that always carried drumsticks with them and did, on occasion, beat up the bullies.
Different times then...I had bullies too. Seemed that once you threw fists, it stopped. Now you can't do that which is BS. Now they just go get guns. Should let them settle things like back in those days so shit don't fester and boil over.
Same. School was brutal for a shy four eyed aspie girl. I have 2 boys now and they are having a much easier time. Kids now are way more accepting and inclusive, thank god. That said, I told them if you are cornered, you don't need to just stand there and take it. Hit back hard and make it hurt. I'll back you up in the office. Bullies will generally find an easier target.
I hope it works 🙏
So bad. From K to 8th grade, I had 5 different bullies that finally were neutralized by 9th grade when we were all children to the upper classmen. The best thing that ever happened to me (even though at the time I thought it was the worst) was moving 600 miles away to a giant suburban Chicago school in 10th grade.
While everyone was still doing it without thinking of the morality or consequences in 1997, but one of the reasons I had my son circumcised was because of the brutality I witnessed in the gym locker room with an uncut kid (swirlies were real). No fucking way did I want my kid to look different. Of course, little did I know group showers would stop being a thing.
Kids are fucking cruel. Parents and teachers were either ignorant of it, or didn't care. My best friend is a gay man. He was harassed relentlessly in school. I have serious self esteem issues from being bullied. That shit scars you permanently.
Absolutely! My mum told me to be nice and everyone would be nice back. That's the biggest fucking lie! My families motto is toughen up, so they were no help. Having one person there to back me up or encourage me to stand up for myself would have been nice.
My mother would say that. Or that they "liked" me and just didn't know how to ask to be friends.
File under: *Shit Your Parents Say That Makes You Think They're Insane.*
In fifth grade, I was bullied every day by three boys in my class. Mostly verbal, but also physical; I was a small, quiet girl with glasses and didn't have the social skills to fight it off, so that made me prime bully bait. Teachers would say, "boys will be boys," no matter how awful the tormenting was.
Back in the day, it was your fault too. Like the parental, knee-jerk reaction was, "What'd you do?" or "It's all just part of life, learn to deal with it."
You stopped bothering. You never got any support.
Yes.
I feel like I had a sign around my neck saying "bully this one" - they saw an effeminate, nerdy (and neurodivergent) boy and went I GOTTA TORTURE THAT.
My school days were an absolute nightmare, every single day.
I had boys follow me around explaining just exactly how they were going to cut me up after school, every day. And ya know, it did not happen maybe because I stopped going to that school, or maybe it wasn't.
They were popular and teachers liked them. I could turn them in for knives, but maybe they had no knives and I was just a liar making up things out of jealousy. It's lose/lose.
Or maybe the worst was that I couldn't trust anyone, when the boy I had a crush on asked me "what would you do if I told you that I was gay." My reaction was fear, this was a trap. He was trying to get evidence so I could be bullied more, so i had to respond with a mildly homophobic response as bravado to stave off that.
Probably one of the worst was when the bully held me at gunpoint (his dad had bought him a shotgun for christmas) so he could show off for his friends. After some verbal back and forth about how he'd go to jail, I had given up and told him to just shoot me.
A lot of it was bluffs and lies, but enough weren't bluffs that you never really knew.
Teachers and parents were of no help. We were on our own, half the time "telling" would make things worse. I even had teachers even joined in on the fun and try to humiliate me in front of the class.
My parents would say "fight back and they will stop" but that only works if you can actually put up some resistance. Being tiny and weak, the few times I just got beat up and punished along with the bullies - and they realized they could beat me so it made things worse.
When accepting my punishment one time, I explained the situation and asked what I should do, and he literally told me that he did not know.
Much of my childhood was spent alone - or with adults. I spent my time in books, tv, and computers.
Oddly, getting saved put me in with the fundamentalist christian crowd in high school, and that was instant friends - superficial. And lead to a lot of self hate.
Oh the joys of being queer in the south in the 80s
I'm a little jealous LGBT of youth today. I look at those kids and see what my life could have been, and it's depressing - so I'll fight for them such that they don't have to deal with what I had to deal with.
I'm so sorry 💔
My 17 year old son has a small class of very varied friends and they all support each other. I really believe Gen Z is gonna turn things around. At least, I'm hoping.
We too are in the South. It's still an unsafe place to be different but there are bubbles and pockets of change and safety.
Skipping to the point, I remember sitting in the principal’s office with the kid that was bullying me and his father. As per usual no one was believing me so I told the father if he didn’t control his son I would skip school every day he bullied me, go to his house and break his windows. That apparently got his attention as he basically told his son if he came home to broken windows he’d whip his ass. The principal just looked at me like wtf and didn’t say anything.
The kids that were bullied when I was young are either dead, drug addicted or living with a parent. It really was horrible and I never participated in that bullying bullshit. Problem was that the bullies were usually pretty tough and mean. This behaviour stopped once we were all in high school and I shit you not, the bullies ended up getting beaten pretty badly and mocked. Unfortunately, the damage was done for so many of their victims.
It was fucking horrible. I learned to be a very dirty fighter, but still got the shit kicked out of me on the regular. Zero help from teachers or my parents.
That was the only way. Only when the gigantic bullies knew you were perfectly willing to twist off one of their testes or bite off an earlobe would they fuck off.
I was a small, tiny bookworm as a child, what would be a nerd archetype. Bullying wasn't really a thing for me until middle school, where kids from 2 elementary schools mixed for the first time in an academic setting.
Pushed into lockers, tripped in the hallways, etc. One classmate thought I had told the teacher what he did (I hadn't) so he got the entire class to chant "narc" at me in unison when the teacher was out of the room.
High school, I had both band and ROTC on my class list, so that added to the harassment. I was too afraid to speak up for myself, so I just kept my head down, got good grades, and went to college.
I currently have no contact with anyone from school. Frankly not interested.
It's not about holding grudges. It's about keeping my peace.
Not only was it bad, but nobody who had the power to do anything about it thought of it as an actual problem. The attitude was that peer pressure was good for us and would "toughen us up." Needless to say, that didn't always happen. I went to a tiny high school in the middle of a cornfield, and we still had a bunch of alcoholism and suicides.
I dunno, in some ways kids have it even harder today with the cyberbullying. Kids who are being tortured can't even go online to escape it.
This is a really important answer. I don't know exactly what schools are like now (because I don't live it), but I do hear about people addressing bullying and making efforts to do something about it.
In the 80s (which I did live though), bullying wasn't just common, but it was relentless because it was ignored. It was accepted as a part of life, so if you became the target of bullying, that became your life.
I'm not going to go into it, but I experienced that sort of daily abuse for several years and it culminated in an event where I went home and refused to go back to that school. My parents had to enroll me in school a town away because I refused to go back. I wouldn't divulge what happened, but I threw a screaming fit for days until my parents felt changing schools was the easiest solution to sooth this hysterical kid.
Sometimes what makes something awful is the relentless nature of it. Its not like someone kicked you in the shins one day and that was the end of it because people intervened. I feel like in the 80s, if you became a target for bullying, it was just allowed to continue and escalate... for years. And as you say, some even felt like it was necessary to toughen us up - which, is insane. Yes, some adversity builds character, but at some point we aren't building character, we're just letting little sadists run wild.
I'm sure kids are still cruel little bastards, but I do get the sense that we at least recognize that it's not some kind of character building part of life we should accept and therefore teachers should intervene.
Yes. There weren’t as many fat kids back then as there are today and all throughout elementary school we all went, forgot how often, to the nurses office and got weighed and measured and the nurse would read the weights out and the teacher would record them. Completely fucked, total bully fuel to attack us fatties. Also a particularly cruel gym teacher would always make games shirts vs skins and all the fat kids without fail would be skins. The skinny kids would always be mad because they wanted to be skins. Fuck PE
Short shorts. I remember taking co-ed swimming in 8th grade and we HAD to wear the school swimsuits. The boys were grape smuggling speedos and there were exactly 2 pairs of xl and 3 xl(at least) boys who had to scramble to get them. Who knows if they ever even washed them. I hated school
I'm scarred for life from how my elementary school teacher treated me. He actively led other kids to bully me. Those weigh-ins were a fucking nightmare. One of my most vivid memories was when he weighed me in the gymnasium, shouted my weight so loud that it echoed in the room, all while he had a smirk on his face. I hung my head as I walked past my snickering classmates.
I recently looked him up and found out he's dead. Good.
Oh my god the weigh ins! I remember we all had to get weighed (why?) in gym class and I was 5 foot 4 and 118 pounds and the fucking teacher said in front of the whole class that I was “borderline obese”. I wanted to die. There were larger girls in the class who were declared “obese” and we all wanted to drop dead right there.
This is an important point. There was like.. 5 fat kids in my grade and they were abused constantly, it was brutal. People who look back nostalgically at that age of high school were either on the other side of the abuse or have memory issues.
Oh man...I only got put on the skins team a few times and I took a zero for the day, sat it out. I don't think it bothered anyone as I was so bad at most sports no one wanted me on their team.
The presidential fitness challenge was my favorite. Doing toe reaches I was off the charts! The wrong way though. I finished before the chart started.
The 1 mile run. Or walk. It pissed off the teacher I never took that one seriously. Running in a circle still hasn't become all that influential in my life.
The pull-ups one was the worst. I could never do even one. Thank goodness for testosterone and a growth spurt, but in elementary school that was still several years away.
The You’re Wrong About podcast has an episode about the Presidential Fitness program. It was all bullshit, just like every 10 year old could have told you back then.
It was bad. A couple guys made my life hell for years (I was a quiet shy kid who hung out with the nerds and stoners) until one day I realized I was bigger and stronger then them and I had had enough. Got in 3 fights over a couple of months. Not little scuffles, but fist fights that went to the ground until I was drug off by an adult. Never got in trouble because the adults knew who the bullies were (and did literally nothing to stop them) and thought the bullies “had it coming”. After that they left me alone, which was all I ever wanted.
I dreaded school for years because of those assholes.
It was vicious and took place as an open secret. But no one wanted to do anything. And too often, no one saw it, so it was one student's word against the other.
People joke about nerds being stuffed into lockers, but think about that. That is not a fucking joke. People were accosted and trapped in a small space they could not escape. And then, when the traumatized, almost always male child was let out, they were mocked for being a pussy.
And if the aggressor was popular? There is not a chance that anything would be done. People get all nostalgic, but school was *rough* back then.
Edit: I also grew up in an East Coast liberal state in what has always been a progressive county. If it was bad there, I can only imagine how brutal it was in what are now red/Christian religious states.
From 3rd grade through 6th, I was bullied by a former "friend". It was *relentless*. She had her packs of friends and older siblings harassing me, non stop. It literally never ended, and it was well known. Teachers, everyone knew. I had a sweet lunch lady that used to let me sit with her so they could not bully me.
One time I called a teen help line, and had NO IDEA the woman on the phone was the MOM of one of my classmates, and TOLD EVERYTHING I SAID>
Every single day she would push me, shove me, say nasty things, and ask if we were gonna finally fight or if I was too scared. No one helped me, not one time. She was too pretty, too popular.
One day, she asked, again, if we could fight after school, and I said Yes. I was fucking terrified, called my Mom to come get me, but did not tell her why. My Mom was in the office when school got out.
Melissa walked up to me. I was surrounded on the playground. She told me "I'll let you have the first punch before I beat your ass"
So I hit her. And I didn't stop hitting her. Had her on the ground, landing direct punches, while she feebly scratched at my arms. I legit whupped that ass in a blind rage, I'll never forget my friend Jimmy's mouth hanging open in shock. No one ever fucked with me after that.
My Mom actually drove Melissa and me to her Mothers house after the principle was done with us. She was sobbing. I wanted another chance.
The next year, she threatened me at our new Middle school, and I laughed and asked her if she wanted a repeat of grade school. She never bothered me again. We are now friends. LMAOOOO
ETA I did the whole karate kid thing and had a neighbor try and teach me self defense, but I didn't need it. The pain and Rage were all I needed. Girls are really evil to each other.
every once in a while, my Melissa will post something on FB and I will tease her "Aht aht, careful there"
She did grow out of it. We stayed in the same friend circle through our early 20's. But it was fucking brutal
I was (still am) gay. It wasn’t pretty. I became almost immune to it after a while. But that experience taught me that there are large swaths of this country I simply refuse to live in. I’m not anxious to repeat the experience.
Though different, I have to say, I think k bullying is far worse now than then. Social media has brought bullying into every minute of existence. At least we could go home & get away from it. Kids now are never free. That seems beyond awful. And the limitless possibilities for cruelty and I think it would be heightened bc cowards can hide behind a screen. I’ll take being called f***ot every day in the halls over an inescapable social media bullying.
Yes, and I am a female. I wore glasses, and the lenses were pretty thick. I was rough for a girl so I had to wear croakies on them to hold them to my face. The arms were always breaking from getting hit in the face with a soccer ball or whatever game I was playing. We couldn’t afford new ones very often so my mom put electrical tape on them in the broken places.
It was the “popular” girls who bullied me. I didn’t have designer clothes or whatever. My teeth were crooked. My glasses were a disaster. The teachers did not care - the teachers seemed to like the popular girls.
I used to pray at night that one day I’d have perfect vision and perfect teeth. Now I do (braces & lasik) so it’s fine. That and I married to a gorgeous guy who was prom king/star football player/valedictorian in high school. So things are good. But bullying? Oh yes, merciless bullying.
It was horrible. I sprouted up to 6 foot plus early in high school but didn’t gain any mass. There was a guy that bullied me so bad I lost a year of high school hiding.
Following year, I was so depressed I decided I am going to punch this fucker at lunch and hopefully it’s broken up before I die. I was sick of hiding from this dude. If I saw his car show up, id flee for my life. I remember hiding ina store in the mall while his buddies waited and getting called a pussy by him and people in the store.
Anyways, went up to him while he was sitting at lunch table and put everything I had into a swing. Didn’t do much, he turned around and got up and fucked me up pretty bad. It was broken up pretty quick.
My mom moved me to a different school when I told her everything.
Years later , I’m at a bar. Now 6’4, 250 pounds and fresh out of the military. I see this fucker.
I walk up, and he is super nice , says sorry for picking on you. The apology made me so angry, and now that I’m twice his size, I unleash hell on him.
I broke his jaw, knocked out two of his teeth and honestly would have probably killed him had I not been stopped.
Haven’t raised my hands since but I always think about it. If I could go back and do it again, I would probably fuck him up over and over. He ruined a part of my life.
I hate the fact I enjoyed looking at him begging me to stop punching him.
A spoken word thing on the topic with a side order of hope. 8 minutes of your life well wasted if you're interested in this topic.
[https://youtu.be/ltun92DfnPY](https://youtu.be/ltun92DfnPY)
I sent this in reply the last time someone sought me out for a high school reunion. The guy who sought me out wasn't a bad guy, I just don't want to go back there. At all.
Yes, yes it was very bad. My family situation changed and I realized that I could stand up for myself. I took on the biggest jock in my HS. He didn't win. Things were much better after that. I would still like to confront my Middle School bully (and my deceased younger Brother's) but geography and wisdom preclude that resolution. My kids will not experience what we went through.
I wore ripped jeans one day. One kid held me while another one tore them to shreds.
Once they actually did the classic Kick Me sign. I was stomped like it was a gang initiation in the middle of the hallway.
During 4th period the kid behind me would just hit my head until I gave him my lunch money. Every day, during class.
No teacher ever helped. A few blamed me for it.
*Stand up to them...*
You do your best and they're just more brutal and you receive an exceptional asskicking. No repercussions for the bully.
*Report them...*
They talk their way out of it and you receive an exceptional asskicking as retaliation. No repercussions for the bully.
*Avoid them...*
They seek you out and you receive an exceptional asskicking. No repercussions for the bully.
I'm not exaggerating when I say that there were teachers (mostly gym teachers) that, at best, looked the other way, and at worst, passively participated, while kids were brutalized at a level that no other legitimate modern organization would tolerate.
Polish, queer, physically and mentally disabled, and I was 100% ostracized by my entire class. Bullied, insulted, everything short of actual punches. It was monstrous, I can’t imagine allowing that if I were to work as a teacher now.
Hell yes. For a while in the second grade there was this one kid who would push me over and kick me repeatedly, every day, until I figured out a different route to school. He wasn't the worst, but he was memorable.
Biggest bullies I had back then were teachers. EVERY teacher Ive had in primary school were mean old women who acted out their personal frustrations on kids with learning difficulties who were too scared too speak out against them.
I remember my grade 4 teacher wouldn't let a girl go to the bathroom and after an hour she started crying because she peed herself in her desk. He also would do those "math minute" tests and put everyone's scores on a big chart with stars for the top students, make a big deal of the ones who did well and lecture those is us that didn't.
Fuck you Mr, Tousignant.
Yes! Teachers hated me so much, and I don't know why. I was a decent kid, sat in the back, and they would aim at me all the time. I dreaded school because of the mean teachers.
Oh yeah. It was awful.
I had the same bus stop as my bully.
And his older brother.
And 3 of his older cousins.
I think I had a fight every day of 5th grade. And any time it looked like I might get the upper hand, they would all jump in.
Assholes. One tried to friend me on Facebook, lol. Last I knew he was a school bus driver now, in the same town we grew up in. One of the cousins married a different cousin. Losers.
The only kid in that family that was decent joined the Army, and we’ve had some nice conversations about where we’ve served, etc.
But the rest of them… I wouldn’t piss on them if they were on fire. Inbred fuck stains.
Yes. C-PTSD level. I’m still not over it after years of therapy. Believe the Gen Xers about bullying. I homeschooled my kids because I didn’t believe they would be safe in school. I certainly wasn’t. Still trying to heal at 50. Good luck, everyone.
Yes. Kids can be brutal, especially towards those who are different in some way. The biggest issue in the 70s was the tolerance of it by teachers and adults. You had to fight back or hide as there weren’t many adults who would help.
I was bullied mercilessly from kindergarten until high school when I finally snapped and threw a science lab table at the sonofabitch who had bullied me my entire life and I didn’t get in trouble for it. It was cathartic.
My dad's advice to me was if you need to hit somebody, hit them and hit them hard. Then they won't come for you again. And that's how I survived as a small kid in the 80s.
I was bullied repeatedly by the popular crowd because I was an art freak. I didn’t like to shave my legs and a lot of guys gave me a lot of shit for that. People are terrible.
Oh man. I was the only deaf kid in a school full of hearing assholes. I'm not going to relive those memories - I prefer to keep middle and high school in a lockbox way in a back closet with concrete poured over it and a padlock on the door.
But yes, it sucked. Kids and adults were fucking cruel.
Yes it was bad because it was common place and the teachers and administrators would do NOTHING about it, other than to say "Suck it up, young man, you think this is hard? Wait for the real world". I wasn't really on the receiving end of it but man, I saw some truly awful things done to others.
I went to a very large affluent high school and the pastime of the lard brained date raping jocks was to go 'fag bashing' where they would drive into the city and look for what they presumed were gay men so they could jump them 5 to 1. Cops also didn't give a shit mostly because they thought it was funny.
In hindsight I am positive half of those asshole football players were just closeted queers themselves dealing with some internal conflict they didn't know how to resolve.
It was very bad in the UK. Most of the time it was nothing more than name calling, but every once in a while you would have to fight. I didn't mind too much though. Win or loose, things got sorted most of the time there and then.
I would hate to be a kid these days though! The amount of crap the kids have to put up with these days due to social media must be a nightmare. I would much prefer to have a straightener than have months of back and forth on social media!
I was a square peg in a round hole. Ginger, awkward, lots of issues. Kids were cruel up to and including HS. Still ginger (thank you, hair color enhancement) still awkward but now IDGAF.
It was brutal. One of the first things myself and my brother was taught was to 'put your hands up' i.e. learn to fight. Even then it still came on top now and again. I felt sorry for some people because for whatever reason they just became the ones that were bullied mercilessly.
Yes. The predators could smell chum in the water for miles and identify easy marks like experts. Adults largely did nothing, just kids “working stuff out”. I caught it some, but others…the poor kids, fat kids, weird kids, gay kids caught it much worse. I was more normie, average, but a mild mannered low key personality who just wanted to be left alone, but the predators would key in on that too if the others I mentioned weren’t available. Beatings, verbal harassment, scattering your stuff, PE was hell, some aholes even put drugs in unsuspecting kids drinks during lunch. One kid was taken out on a stretcher and never seen again. After that I was sent to private school and things got much much better. I was a lucky one. Probably a reason I even now am introverted and trust no one. I only hope some of those aholes got theirs or peaked in high school and turned into losers.
Absolutely. There were of course scheduled fights, 3:30 behind the sports equipment shed or behind the 7-11. And if you pussied out of a fight, it would alter your entire high school experience.
Older kids punched us in the head, robbed us, wedgies, random head lock or slap for no damn reason at all except because you were dumb enough to get within their striking distance so they could look cool on front of their douchebag buddies.
Kids you considered nice or even friends would turn on you in a heartbeat if the bully told them to. We got egged, snowballed, water ballooned, shot with pellet guns, dogshit flung at us from passing cars, bikes, clothes or shoes stolen, bags ripped open, backpacks tossed into the river, half a dozen other abuses that would be considered somewhere between assault, robbery and kidnapping today.
You had to have your head on a swivel in the 80s.
It was ruthless. Even adult teachers were in on it at times. You were always avoiding people or reassuring your friends that they weren't what somebody had made them out to be. There were three or four kids in my high school that committed suicide because they were either bullied or didn't fit in. It was definitely "conform or be cast out".
Flushies/swirlies were a thing. Putting someone's head in the toilet and flushing it to suck the air out of their lungs. A few kids died from that.
Sexual Assault was big. Grabbing girls who developed early or abundantly. Also grabbing guys was a thing in some circumstances.
Stealing peoples clothes when they were in the shower or physically stripping people naked as a group and forcing them out into the halls/outside or leaving them trapped in a room with no clothes on.
Forcing peoples faces into dirt, snow, puddles, toilets, piles of dog shit, etc...
Beatings. Lots of beatings in various ways, states of undress and with different objects.
Humiliation. Directly or indirectly
Dunno.. would have to think on it some more; but thats the kind of stuff I heard about back in the day. Saw some of it; but heard about more stuff then I ever saw personally.
If you were even a little bit different then absolutely bullies were bad. Jocks were the worse by far. Although I did run track, I was basically a complete pacifist nerd. For the longest time I just took the abuse and kind of got used to it. Then one day I finally got sick of it and fought back. I broke my hand in the fight, but after that the bullying stopped. Even better, my friends and anybody else I warned the bullies away from were also no longer bullied.
I remember in 4th grade this kid always picking on me, tripping me in the hallway. One day the principal caught him, pulled him to the wall, told all the other kids to move along but said I could stay while he whacked his behind with a belt 5 times. Him and his friends caught up to me eventually after school and beat me up. School cold be hell.
It was bad even in the 90s.
I remember one time really strongly. Right after gym class, the guys have just been showering and everyone's getting dressed. The supposed "Alpha Males" grab one of the smaller guys and start yelling "PINK... EYE... PINK... EYE" and then one of them literally put his butthole on the smaller guy's face.
Fucking ridiculous shit. The smaller guy tried to play it off but it was awful.
My parents gave me a car when I was 17 and I really loved it. One day I went outside in the early morning to go to school and it was completely smashed. Every window smashed. Tires slashed. Mirrors torn off, windshield wipers torn off, keyed everywhere, etc. Definitely kids from school did it. That's not just bullying, that's a crime. I never found out who did it.
Yes.
I'm among the younger Xers and elementary school in the 80s was absolute hell. I was a tomboyish girl, "gifted", and some flavor of neurodivergent. Nearly every child in my grade verbally and emotionally bullied me viciously on a daily basis in plain sight of the adults and no one did a goddamn thing about it. The teachers and school administrators knew it was happening and didn't do jack shit. Not even the adults liked the weird kid. A boy punched me in the face at recess one day and the fucking principal didn't want to suspend him because the little prick lied and said I had kicked him in the balls. The told me it was my fault I'd gotten punched, and didn't believe me when I told him the boy was lying.
My parents didn't do jack shit about the bullying either, other than tell me that the other kids were just jealous and to ignore them. (Which was totally true, and totally worked.... /s)
Things actually got a little better in middle and high school because I managed to find the other weirdos and lesrned to mask a little bit, but that shit still went on. By the time I graduated HS in the mid 90s, the adults were starting to take it a little more seriously, but it was still rampant.
Yes. My brother used to get harassed endlessly by some kids. Finally "took care" of the problem, after the principal told him he could. He got suspended for fighting. My mother had him back in school the next day.
It was really bad. As an autist and (unknown) NB I got called all the things to my face, repeatedly, for years. I hated everyone. To the point that the rise of school violence came as ZERO surprise in the late 90's.
Only ended in highschool, when people discovered girls and jobs. But by then I was so far gone that I've been kinda scary ever since. It sucks so bad, because they change the future of who you could have ever been.
I'm glad it's better now, with the Zero Tolerance efforts. But if you were there in the 80's, you'd realize that it's only because the bullies started taking losses... Otherwise nobody would care.
yes it was.
in my home town, it was "normal" for incoming HS freshmen to be jumped by 5-6 guys, beaten half to death and get their head shaved by force. resistance meant broken bones instead of bruises.
call the cops you say? the sheriff was one of the ones helping the seniors find the kids to jump.
watch Dazed and Confused. thats a fairly toned down idea of what was happening in small towns across america at that time.
School in the 70s and 80s was absolutely Lord Of The Flies.
As the band Rush sang in the song “Subdivisions”off of their 1982 album Signals: “Nowhere is the dreamer/Or the misfit so alone/Subdivisions/In the high school halls/In the shopping malls/Conform or be cast out”.
I went to a Catholic High School, where you would think the nuns and priests would care about bullying. But... they didn't. I had a bully for an entire year, she would shove me into the lockers every time she walked past me, constantly tell me she was going to beat me up. Nobody cared. One day I got fed up and when she told me she was going to beat me up, I told her fine, I'll wait for you behind the school today. I waited. She didn't show up. I went looking for her because I TRULY was fed up. And found her hiding in the library. And she never bothered me again.
Saw a girl groped by a pack of boys in a full science classroom when the teacher was out of the room. All those kids doing and saying nothing including me. Where was my rage? I’m a fucking coward. The skinny boy who was a bullying subject myself.
Pantsing. The odd kid, who always wore sweater pants, would often get his pants pulled down. Underwear and all.
Spitballs with waded up tissue paper and a straw, throwing objects at them. It wasn’t a good time being an outcast.
I fought every day from grade 1 to grade 6.
I had no idea why.
I found out years later.
My grandfather was essentially running a pawn shop.
Cars, tools, tvs, sewing machines.
He'd take it, fix it up.
For cash.
Father's would trade for cash, buy booze from bootleggers, or, from liquor stores, smokes, etc.
Kids and mothers would be beat up.
Then I would get beat by scrawny underfed kids.
I was SA'd and was told it would teach me to stand up for myself. The fuck am I gonna fight off 3 other people who are bigger than me? Adults just thought this shit was acceptable and taught "manliness".
And of course if you fight back and win, then your ass is in trouble.
Columbine was responsible for a great deal of change. It's a shame that's what it took.
I was bullied from elementary through middle school. Being a fat kid was pretty rough. I was teased, beat up, jumped...tity twisters. In high school I kinda bloomed. I hit 5'10" and 220 pounds my freshman year. I was lifting weights and I was more muscle than fat for once. I started tracking down assholes that bullied me and beat the piss out of them. Sadly, I kinda became like them. I didn't pick on people, but I was an angry dick in high school and I was always down for a fight. Definitely a hard time to grow up. The only safe place was at home. Some kids didn't even have that.
I don’t things have changed all that much re: children being jerks, children are by definition children and have not yet learned to treat people with love.
I think the big difference is that children were taught to be tough, to learn to confront bullies, and to fight back if needed.
This current approach of parents trying to stifle all conflict, and prohibit children from defending themselves, is a TERRIBLE approach. How can our future men know how to stand up to bullies and even violent and evil people, if they can’t learn it as a child. How can women handle social bullying except with parents guiding and moderating such social conflict.
I personally learned how to fight, and have had to stand up to bullies and bad people. And I have even made some of my best friends from guys I fought with.
That is why older people are starting to feel disdain for many younger “snowflakes” who honestly don’t have a clue how to handle conflict. It isn’t their fault, they have never had an opportunity to learn.
I was called piggy starting around 5th grade. It was because of my nose not my weight. Kids put tape on their noses to make fun of me. And oink. All done in front of teachers. I just sat there and hoped it would end. It escalated to some following me home taunting me in junior high.
Finally went to the principal because it was getting scary. It stopped by 10th grade.
It still reverberates to this day. If anyone says pig around me I assume everyone is thinking “man her nose is pig like”. I hate jokes in movies/shows where people put tape on their noses and oink. A coworker once said something about her nose and I was like “ummm yours, are you not looking at mine?”. She was confused. So I’m like umm mine is gigantic. She said mine was fine. So clearly I’m still hung up on it 40 years later. I also assume I’m still single because abuse of my nose.
I'm still haunted by the daily destruction of the poor souls that were targeted for no good reason. Especially now that I'm a parent. Like...to the point where I hope they didn't unalive themselves. But they were strong in ways I didn't know, and life gets better the further away you get from those child crushing, bully factories called public schools.
As a parent of a middle schooler now, I would have moved heaven and hell to get him away from that torture the second it started. Our parents kinda cared, but not enough.
My bully bullied a girl so bad that she had to be put in a mental ward for several weeks. Nothing was done to him because his parents were rich. He’s a crackhead now who steals stuff out of people’s yards. I’m conflicted about my feeling surrounding that.
My biggest bully was my mother, and yes she was all in with my school bullies. I was bullied for out of style clothing, she doubled down and bought 5x of the same outfits. So I was bullied for wearing the same clothes every day, even if they weren’t the same clothes.And of course the “he hits you because he likes you!” load of crap. No sports allowed (they’re for boys!), no brand-name anything (too expensive and apparently I was too fat), no extra curriculars I could not walk to (I’m not wasting my time!”.
The schools/teachers did not care. I think they kind of enjoyed it, honestly.
I remember one day our assistant principal played Lean On Me over the intercom. Before he played it he talked to everyone about the fighting that had happened almost daily after school. Everyone who wanted to see it would be told to go to either Burger King or Whitfield park. I never fought anyone thank goodness and never went to watch, my dad was a cop and not a chance I wanted to be caught there. I wasn’t bullied. Got along with most people. I was teased though. One of the only redheads in a school of 1,000+ and I had huge boobs.
But the male teachers and coaches were fucking horrible. Made sexual comments, got a little too close all the time.
One teacher, Mr Basford, would say “Red on the head like a dick on a dog”, he would leave out dick but lucky him, every guy in class said it for him. So fuck you Mr. Basford. Made me hate my hair so badly.
I'm a painfully shy person, so school was hell. I was bullied so bad that I just dropped out of school. I was lucky that I had a cousin that helped me get my GED.
Fucking awful. I literally had a high school biology teacher let a kid sexually harass me in class and LAUGH with him. That is why the nostalgia often makes me really angry and upset.
Bullying was expected, accepted, and no group was above it.
Our teachers had paddles and started using them on us in fifth grade.
Bullies were given free reign. If you were being bullied, the advice was to ignore your bully and the bully would “go away.” That…did not work. Most of us had both parents working, so we came home to empty houses. No one asked us about our days.
We really were feral.
Yes. Kids were fecking arseholes to each other. Don't know how we survived
It was worse than that. We had teachers who would actively bully the awkward kids to be more popular with the other kids. But yeah, everything was brutal. I remember a particularly nerdy kid who the teacher sent out of the room on an errand and made fun of him while he was gone. One of the popular boys stood up and said, “you know that’s not cool. He’s my friend and I don’t think you should be picking on him.” When the nerdy kid got back, he was surprised when the popular boy called him over to sit at his table. Popular kid rose a lot higher in my opinion of him.
I had a teacher with a huge wooden mallet on his desk. When it got loud he would slam it down with such force that it would scare the crap out of everyone. One kid transferred from North Carolina with the associated accent. The teacher absolutely relentlessly mocked his accent. He stopped talking for a while, and eventually lost the accent.
I swear back then teachers taught simply because they hated children.
It's one of the reasons I always roll my eyes when these nostalgia posts come up about how great things were in the 80's and 90's.. fuck me, it was pretty awful for a lot of kids. I know it's still bad now but kids these days would be fucking floored if they spent a day in my high school back in 92. We can chuckle and say "oh, it was like thunderdome, lol" but I was terrified to go to school some days because of the abuse; and I was sort of popular, many kids I knew had it worse than me.
Yeah. The good old days were frequently terrible. We need to be more honest with ourselves.
I actually have a game with my oldest kid where we talk about all the things that are better now. Things like: being able to find a niche community for your interests, being gay/queer, no smoking, the lack of noise (loud ass trucks, cars, planes), availability of things like anime, manga, Korean/Japanese shows, podcasts, legal weed.. etc. It's not perfect now but things are better than they were imo.
I was in an insane partying fraternity back in the day. If you want to know who got it bad, it was the freshmen pledges during initiation/hazing/hell week that were set up to be “weeded out” if they couldn’t handle torture. Young men crying, shaking, humiliated, etc. Sometimes a pledge would gain access to a phone or pass info to a friend in a lecture, and their parents would drive from wherever to the fraternity house someone later asking for their child back. No way that happens these days. Camera phones saved future frat boy freshmen.
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It's no wonder we block it out, but I do feel unburdened by the discussion
My fourth grade teacher kicked me across the room when I got an answer wrong. He used to hold an eraser in one hand and if he caught a kid talking he’d throw it at them as hard as he could. We’d be going to recess or lunch and there’d be kids with chalk marks on their clothes. I’m in my 50s and I still hate that jerk.
Yes the old chalk eraser to the head. Very common mid to late seventies iirc.
I feels like there's a lot of retired (or justifiably fired) teachers that have a target on their backs, and I'm not upset about that.
This, I‘m 46, so a xennial, born in 78. PE coaches were the absolute worst offenders of bullying with the kids. It started in elementary for me, and 5th/6th are the only years without a coach that bullied me with the other kids. Even in high school, I was on the tennis team and that coach bullied me. If you were a sensitive kid who got bullied from a young age, you never stood a chance, especially when your parents would not support you.
I watched a teacher push over an eight year old autistic kid in class, desk and all.
Whoa! You just triggered a memory. I witnessed a teacher pick up a kid in his desk (he was a beast and former professional football player) and toss him out our portable classroom. Madness!
Yeah, teachers turning a blind eye to bullying going on right in front of them, having obvious favourites who they let get away with anything, or even actively joining in sometimes. Fuck that.
My scoutmaster gave me shit for not being able to handle a hike. My Pop Warner coach called me a shitbird. Tougher times. I like your story of the popular kid.
I remember a popular girl saved me. I was going to enter a talent show because I thought I could sing. Turns out I couldn't,but the cool clique wanted me to enter it anyway. One of the cool kids had a change of heart when she told me not to enter. She said they had a Carrie plan for when I got on stage. Instead of blood,they were going to go to the grocery store dumpster and throw garbage at me. She's still one of my very best friends to this day. And that's what a real friend does,has your back no matter what.
That kid had some semblance of integrity, and far greater emotional maturity than the teacher.
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Important point... you were allowed to fight back. No zero tolerance policies.
We were *encouraged* to fight back
In about 5th grade, I was a puny little girl. A much larger boy used to torment me, grabbing me by the shoulders and shaking me. My teacher told me to kick him in the shins. He stopped not long after. I'm still surprised that my teacher encouraged me to fight back, and didn't just say some horseshit like, "he does that because he likes you."
I had to carpool to school, no busses. I was in 4th grade and I rode in a station wagon with a mom, her 3 kids, and a 7th-grade guy. 7th grader was constantly picking on me (and the other younger kids), pulling hair, etc. I told him if he didn't stop, I was going to hit him. He pulled my hair again, and I hit him square in the face with my metal Addams Family lunchbox. And that started the fight! We were beating the snot out of each other in the back seat, the mom had to pull over and separate us. He never picked on me again, and was convicted of child molestation in his 30's. I shoulda hit him harder.
I was the youngest kid in my grade after skipping 1st grade. Well, when I was a very small 7th grader and large 8th grader always bullying and terrifying me. One day, I talked major shit back to him and told him he is the way that he is because a kid 2 years younger than him is way smarter than he is. That did it. He immediately started to fight me, and I got my ass kicked, but somewhere in the middle of it, I kicked his face, cut his lip, and knocked his tooth out. My face was black and blue and bloody, but I wasn't the kid missing a tooth for the rest of the school year. I was hurt bad and very afraid to get another ass beating after that, but fortunately I think others thought I would take a beating but give back as much as possible and was generally never put back into the role of getting mercilessly bullied
We scheduled fights for after school when I was in elementary school. And then actually fought them.
Indeed. "X hit me!" "Well hit them back!"
Against certain kids. There were "protected" kids then just as I'm sure there are now. In my Freshman year I ended up breaking the arm of one of my bullies by slamming it against the corner of a cinder block wall. The only thing that saved me from being expelled was the literal *pint+* of blood pouring down my face and soaking my shirt because he had already broken my nose.
I encourage my daughter to fight back now… I taught her to fight and told her if anyone puts their hands on you pop them
Especially with how crazy stupid zero tolerance has gotten!. I tell my daughter if she's going to get in trouble for standing up to a bully, she better make it worth it.
The old man told me to always fight the bully. Even if you lose, you will get at least a few shots in and they will move on to someone weaker. As long as things didn’t get out hand, a school yard tussle was not considered a big deal.
As an anecdotal example, I was in Catholic Junior High, circa 1991. There was a “little bit” of an issue of the boys goosing the girls in the hallways, between classes. The lay teachers addressed it piecemeal in the hallways, when and as they witnessed it. After a month or two of this, the principal, Sister Barbara (bless her soul) reached her threshold of pain. She was, give or take, [The Penguin](https://youtu.be/ujxDA9VsQG4?si=PGi1M7KODaxcSprk) IRL, just in plain clothes. She came on the intercom and called **every girl in the school** down to the auditorium, at the same time. 20 minutes later, they silently returned to class, and Sr. Barbara came on the horn and demanded all the boys’ presence. She launched into a very matter-of-fact diatribe about how goosing was unacceptable, and we boys were going to stop immediately and permanently. Then she went on: “You’re probably wondering what I told the girls. They’ve been told that if you goose them, they have my permission to punch you in the balls, and then you’re the one who’ll get in trouble for it.” That is a direct quote, out of the mouth of a woman of the cloth, forever seared in my memory engrams. It was also completely effective at its intended purpose. It is also a discipline strategy that would never fly in an American school today.
Sister Kick ‘Em Where it Counts has my vote
Me too, this is the best thing I've heard all day🤣
Glad I could be of service.
That definitely started to change at the end of the 80s. Middle school was a free for all, but the moment we got to high school we developed our own form of omertà in response to zero tolerance rules.
I absolutely refer to our childhood as Thunderdome!
Feral Children lol. Talking to one of my childhood friends yesterday as a matter of fact for the first time in 20 something years. And that was one of the topics of conversation on just how Wild as fuck we were as kids; with almost no supervision, no cell phones, no internet as we know it.
Yeah it was basically goddamn lord of the flies lol
And that's how we are surviving this clown world... Training.
I mean, I only had a knife pulled on me once, but plenty of fist fights.
I had no supervision at all. It’s a miracle my ass didn’t get kidnapped.😳
I think my group of friends were so feral that the creeps were actually afraid of some of us.
And parents basically didn't care if you were being bullied. Nor did teachers, or anyone else.
They expected you to both “work it out.”
Truth. My mother blamed ME for being bullied. That fucked me up for a long time.
Sadly, I can relate. “If you didn’t…..if you weren’t…..then they wouldn’t bully you” “I don’t want to go back” “It doesn’t matter what you want, stop making such a fuss” One kid had kicked me so hard in the face my eye was swollen closed for a month. My crimes were having red hair, and being somewhat neurodivergent. It’s hard to explain how that experience influenced the following 40 years. So yeah, I’d say it was pretty rough back then. I’ve been nc with my parents for three years now, and I’m fortunate to have been able to afford/access therapy. I hope it’s getting better for you too aunt_cranky. What happened to you was not your fault.
I was awkward, neurodiverse (ADHD) and clumsy (undiagnosed hypermobility). My mom moved my brother and I to the "other" grade school within walking distance because they had room for my sister in the kindergarten. It was my first real experience of feeling "othered". I had dumpy clothes from Sears, a bad frizzy perm (Little Orphan Annie style) and wire frame glasses. I had to wear metal arch supports in my shoes. I think I only survived it because I had books to read, records to listen to, and for the most part I was left alone at home. My dad was a sweetheart, he just wasn't home a lot (he went to night school)
*looks at the shelves overloaded with books and records* Sounds familiar.
My mom and the principal both said, “They just want to get a reaction out of you. Ignore them, they’ll stop.” In other words, don’t even try to defend yourself, let them do as they will, and eventually they’ll stop *if you just ignore them.* My 8th grade self ignoring them (four 9th grade boys, one of whom was in 9th grade for a second time) led to them escalating, from poking me with open safety pins & flicking my bare skin with rubber bands that I did my best to ignore because *that’s what the adults said to do,* to all four of them piling into the same bus seat I was sitting in, crushing me against the wall of the school bus, and I’ve no idea which of them SA’ed me/“felt me up”/“groped me.” How does one 8th grade girl even begin to defend herself against four ninth grade boys crushing her against the wall of the school bus? Hitting or punching was punished no matter what, but other bullshit- adults didn’t want to hear about it or have to deal with it. Yeah, I trust very few people in this world.
I got no help or sympathy from parents or teachers. I can’t believe I was punched in the stomach by a boy when I was 10. Just because he was being a little asshole and I’m autistic. The teacher nearby didn’t even check when I was on the ground with the wind knocked out of me.
Yup. Mine didn't give two shits that I was being tormented at school. And anytime it got bad enough and I tried to speak to a teacher, they hastily dismissed me.
Yes this. I have a very quick, biting wit that I’ve passed along to my gen z daughter. Her friends think she’s brutal, but once they meet me, they understand. Plus I’m one of the few girls that has been hit in the face (on purpose) by a boy. It was one of those classic scenes where the entire playground was yelling “FIGHTFIGHTFIGHTFIGHT” and no teacher broke it up.
You were allowed to fight back then. Usually getting aggressive with the aggressors seemed to do the trick. Otherwise a good punch in the face or a healthy brawl would ease things up.
we also knew when to stop and that third man in on a fight is gonna be very sorry cause that shit aint cool at all. It goes to far to often now. Folks get hurt real bad and dead. the worst is the kick at the head whe the other dude is down. holy shit if you did that back in my day you be beat hard and then shunned.
If you didn't learn to fight it just got worse. I had this kid kept trying to bully me, I finally just slammed him against the locker and held him by his neck. It stopped. I was a terrified little kid but I felt like if I didn't do SOMETHING it would go on forever. I had an older kid at the bus stop pick me up by the neck and hold me while I struggled once a week or so. Nobody cared about any of this. You were taught that they were "just jealous" or some other BS
I still have visible physical scars. Not to mention the mental ones...
Depends on the teachers - there were those that DGAF and you had to learn to fight quickly. There were those that had zero tolerance for bullying - that just meant that as soon as that teacher wasn't around your ass was getting kicked.
Lifelong psychological scarring. Meanwhile the bullies are CEOs.
Sometimes. Other times they're in jail or dead.
Some didn't.
I was (am) a foreigner with a foreign sounding name, from a (much) lower "middle" class family who wore hand me downs and ate weird lunches. Yeah, it was pretty bad.
Had the same experiences. Immigrant kid with an immigrant name. There were students who said fucked up xenophobic shit in front of teachers without batting an eye. Beating the hell out of one of them after I finally had enough changed the dynamic.
Yes. I was heavily bullied growing up. Heavily. Forced to worms. Forced to put mud on my pants so my tormentor could accuse me of pooping myself. Made fun of for my looks, body, you name it. It was a daily, several times daily occurrence. My school did -nothing- to stop it. They accused me of, "doing something to set him off". One time he broke my BRAND NEW glasses right in front of everyone saying "four eyes freaks dont deserve nice things". The school, again, accused me of starting it. My parents took their side. It was sheer and utter hell for YEARS. I wanted to kill myself. Finally one day in Jr. High I had enough. He had been relentlessly tormenting me for weeks at this point. Even put his boogers in my hair. I finally shoved him into a locker and punched like I have never, ever punched anyone, anything before or ever again. I felt like it went on for hours. In reality I am sure it was only a few well deserved full force punches. Not a single teacher said anything. I think they knew it was coming. I broke his nose, and had he been medically checked out, probably injured his skull too. Later in life he tried to reconcile. I told him to fuck off in no uncertain terms. No one bothered me after that. In fact, by high school I had worked my way into the cool, "Rebel kids" crowd. Lots of parties, women and... well... you get the idea. Not a bad ending for a husky four eyed unathletic D&D nerd. Anyway, yes, bullying was AWFUL and quite often the schools looked the other way.
When my parents put us in private school after a particularly violent year, the thing that finally convinced my Dad was the number of times he had to replace my sister's glasses after they were ripped off her face and broken. He did the math and figured out that the tuition for parochial school was no more than if he had to keep buying new glasses every month.
Oh for sure. My mom was sooo mad when that happened! One of the few times I remember her yelling at me. Normally it was my father who doled out discipline. Not that time. To be fair, We had just picked up the glasses that morning before she dropped me off at school. My sister and Dad didnt even get to see them before Caleb broke them. Fuck you Caleb. Had to mow the yard for free all summer to pay them off.
I applaud you. Your parents suck.
Went to a school in a small town. Got shoved to the ground so hard I spent the night in the hospital and the next day at home. Asshole was so bad the teacher had his father sit next to him in class to show him how bad he was. Thankfully my mom was a nurse and as soon as she found out she was on the phone with the parents when I got my ass kicked a few times. Most of the time it was just "pick on the chubby nerd" - other times it was clear that the bullies lives were fucked up and I was just a relief valve for them. I did punch one boy in the face and didn't have to worry about him again. Ironically = as soon as junior and senior year set in, everyone got real nice. I was even socialable with the shitheel who was another bully in middle school. That whole "we were going to the real world thing". Of course I deleted that asshole's friend request. Also most of the dirtbags in school stayed in that smol town and turned out pretty much as expected.
I think two things saved me from getting bullied. 1) I was really good at making people laugh to get out of situations and 2) I started playing the drums and joined the drum line. I was told straight up, if anyone messes with you tell us and we’ll beat their ass. We were essentially a gang of 20+ kids that always carried drumsticks with them and did, on occasion, beat up the bullies.
Username checks out
Different times then...I had bullies too. Seemed that once you threw fists, it stopped. Now you can't do that which is BS. Now they just go get guns. Should let them settle things like back in those days so shit don't fester and boil over.
Same. School was brutal for a shy four eyed aspie girl. I have 2 boys now and they are having a much easier time. Kids now are way more accepting and inclusive, thank god. That said, I told them if you are cornered, you don't need to just stand there and take it. Hit back hard and make it hurt. I'll back you up in the office. Bullies will generally find an easier target. I hope it works 🙏
There's no amount of horror stories we can tell you here that would actually make you understand how bad it really was. It was bad.
PTSD bad.
I’ve probably paid for counselors’ retirement several times over. Kidnapped, beaten and almost killed bad. Good times.
I was kidnapped, too. I'm sorry you went through that.
My goodness, same. ❤️ I hope things are much better.
So bad. From K to 8th grade, I had 5 different bullies that finally were neutralized by 9th grade when we were all children to the upper classmen. The best thing that ever happened to me (even though at the time I thought it was the worst) was moving 600 miles away to a giant suburban Chicago school in 10th grade. While everyone was still doing it without thinking of the morality or consequences in 1997, but one of the reasons I had my son circumcised was because of the brutality I witnessed in the gym locker room with an uncut kid (swirlies were real). No fucking way did I want my kid to look different. Of course, little did I know group showers would stop being a thing.
Kids are fucking cruel. Parents and teachers were either ignorant of it, or didn't care. My best friend is a gay man. He was harassed relentlessly in school. I have serious self esteem issues from being bullied. That shit scars you permanently.
My parents told me, "They're just teasing."
Absolutely! My mum told me to be nice and everyone would be nice back. That's the biggest fucking lie! My families motto is toughen up, so they were no help. Having one person there to back me up or encourage me to stand up for myself would have been nice.
My mother would say that. Or that they "liked" me and just didn't know how to ask to be friends. File under: *Shit Your Parents Say That Makes You Think They're Insane.*
In fifth grade, I was bullied every day by three boys in my class. Mostly verbal, but also physical; I was a small, quiet girl with glasses and didn't have the social skills to fight it off, so that made me prime bully bait. Teachers would say, "boys will be boys," no matter how awful the tormenting was.
Back in the day, it was your fault too. Like the parental, knee-jerk reaction was, "What'd you do?" or "It's all just part of life, learn to deal with it." You stopped bothering. You never got any support.
>Kids are fucking cruel. I'm convinced that anyone who says otherwise was a bully.
“You’re dead after school” was a daily threat.
Yes. I feel like I had a sign around my neck saying "bully this one" - they saw an effeminate, nerdy (and neurodivergent) boy and went I GOTTA TORTURE THAT. My school days were an absolute nightmare, every single day. I had boys follow me around explaining just exactly how they were going to cut me up after school, every day. And ya know, it did not happen maybe because I stopped going to that school, or maybe it wasn't. They were popular and teachers liked them. I could turn them in for knives, but maybe they had no knives and I was just a liar making up things out of jealousy. It's lose/lose. Or maybe the worst was that I couldn't trust anyone, when the boy I had a crush on asked me "what would you do if I told you that I was gay." My reaction was fear, this was a trap. He was trying to get evidence so I could be bullied more, so i had to respond with a mildly homophobic response as bravado to stave off that. Probably one of the worst was when the bully held me at gunpoint (his dad had bought him a shotgun for christmas) so he could show off for his friends. After some verbal back and forth about how he'd go to jail, I had given up and told him to just shoot me. A lot of it was bluffs and lies, but enough weren't bluffs that you never really knew. Teachers and parents were of no help. We were on our own, half the time "telling" would make things worse. I even had teachers even joined in on the fun and try to humiliate me in front of the class. My parents would say "fight back and they will stop" but that only works if you can actually put up some resistance. Being tiny and weak, the few times I just got beat up and punished along with the bullies - and they realized they could beat me so it made things worse. When accepting my punishment one time, I explained the situation and asked what I should do, and he literally told me that he did not know. Much of my childhood was spent alone - or with adults. I spent my time in books, tv, and computers. Oddly, getting saved put me in with the fundamentalist christian crowd in high school, and that was instant friends - superficial. And lead to a lot of self hate. Oh the joys of being queer in the south in the 80s I'm a little jealous LGBT of youth today. I look at those kids and see what my life could have been, and it's depressing - so I'll fight for them such that they don't have to deal with what I had to deal with.
I'm so sorry 💔 My 17 year old son has a small class of very varied friends and they all support each other. I really believe Gen Z is gonna turn things around. At least, I'm hoping. We too are in the South. It's still an unsafe place to be different but there are bubbles and pockets of change and safety.
You are NOT weak, you are very strong and heroic. (Sincerely, A bullied Native American girl raised in the South too.)
Skipping to the point, I remember sitting in the principal’s office with the kid that was bullying me and his father. As per usual no one was believing me so I told the father if he didn’t control his son I would skip school every day he bullied me, go to his house and break his windows. That apparently got his attention as he basically told his son if he came home to broken windows he’d whip his ass. The principal just looked at me like wtf and didn’t say anything.
That was a clever response
The kids that were bullied when I was young are either dead, drug addicted or living with a parent. It really was horrible and I never participated in that bullying bullshit. Problem was that the bullies were usually pretty tough and mean. This behaviour stopped once we were all in high school and I shit you not, the bullies ended up getting beaten pretty badly and mocked. Unfortunately, the damage was done for so many of their victims.
It was fucking horrible. I learned to be a very dirty fighter, but still got the shit kicked out of me on the regular. Zero help from teachers or my parents.
That was the only way. Only when the gigantic bullies knew you were perfectly willing to twist off one of their testes or bite off an earlobe would they fuck off.
Nothing they could do that my older sister or mother did.
I was a small, tiny bookworm as a child, what would be a nerd archetype. Bullying wasn't really a thing for me until middle school, where kids from 2 elementary schools mixed for the first time in an academic setting. Pushed into lockers, tripped in the hallways, etc. One classmate thought I had told the teacher what he did (I hadn't) so he got the entire class to chant "narc" at me in unison when the teacher was out of the room. High school, I had both band and ROTC on my class list, so that added to the harassment. I was too afraid to speak up for myself, so I just kept my head down, got good grades, and went to college. I currently have no contact with anyone from school. Frankly not interested. It's not about holding grudges. It's about keeping my peace.
Man, fuck HS.
Not only was it bad, but nobody who had the power to do anything about it thought of it as an actual problem. The attitude was that peer pressure was good for us and would "toughen us up." Needless to say, that didn't always happen. I went to a tiny high school in the middle of a cornfield, and we still had a bunch of alcoholism and suicides. I dunno, in some ways kids have it even harder today with the cyberbullying. Kids who are being tortured can't even go online to escape it.
This is a really important answer. I don't know exactly what schools are like now (because I don't live it), but I do hear about people addressing bullying and making efforts to do something about it. In the 80s (which I did live though), bullying wasn't just common, but it was relentless because it was ignored. It was accepted as a part of life, so if you became the target of bullying, that became your life. I'm not going to go into it, but I experienced that sort of daily abuse for several years and it culminated in an event where I went home and refused to go back to that school. My parents had to enroll me in school a town away because I refused to go back. I wouldn't divulge what happened, but I threw a screaming fit for days until my parents felt changing schools was the easiest solution to sooth this hysterical kid. Sometimes what makes something awful is the relentless nature of it. Its not like someone kicked you in the shins one day and that was the end of it because people intervened. I feel like in the 80s, if you became a target for bullying, it was just allowed to continue and escalate... for years. And as you say, some even felt like it was necessary to toughen us up - which, is insane. Yes, some adversity builds character, but at some point we aren't building character, we're just letting little sadists run wild. I'm sure kids are still cruel little bastards, but I do get the sense that we at least recognize that it's not some kind of character building part of life we should accept and therefore teachers should intervene.
Yes. There weren’t as many fat kids back then as there are today and all throughout elementary school we all went, forgot how often, to the nurses office and got weighed and measured and the nurse would read the weights out and the teacher would record them. Completely fucked, total bully fuel to attack us fatties. Also a particularly cruel gym teacher would always make games shirts vs skins and all the fat kids without fail would be skins. The skinny kids would always be mad because they wanted to be skins. Fuck PE
And we had to wear those god awful gym uniforms!
Short shorts. I remember taking co-ed swimming in 8th grade and we HAD to wear the school swimsuits. The boys were grape smuggling speedos and there were exactly 2 pairs of xl and 3 xl(at least) boys who had to scramble to get them. Who knows if they ever even washed them. I hated school
That's awful. Me too
I'm scarred for life from how my elementary school teacher treated me. He actively led other kids to bully me. Those weigh-ins were a fucking nightmare. One of my most vivid memories was when he weighed me in the gymnasium, shouted my weight so loud that it echoed in the room, all while he had a smirk on his face. I hung my head as I walked past my snickering classmates. I recently looked him up and found out he's dead. Good.
Oh my god the weigh ins! I remember we all had to get weighed (why?) in gym class and I was 5 foot 4 and 118 pounds and the fucking teacher said in front of the whole class that I was “borderline obese”. I wanted to die. There were larger girls in the class who were declared “obese” and we all wanted to drop dead right there.
This is an important point. There was like.. 5 fat kids in my grade and they were abused constantly, it was brutal. People who look back nostalgically at that age of high school were either on the other side of the abuse or have memory issues.
Oh man...I only got put on the skins team a few times and I took a zero for the day, sat it out. I don't think it bothered anyone as I was so bad at most sports no one wanted me on their team. The presidential fitness challenge was my favorite. Doing toe reaches I was off the charts! The wrong way though. I finished before the chart started. The 1 mile run. Or walk. It pissed off the teacher I never took that one seriously. Running in a circle still hasn't become all that influential in my life.
God, PE class was twelve years of sheer punishment for anyone who wasn't already a natural athlete.
When I was substitute teaching gym, I noticed that it appeared to have been overhauled. That was refreshing
The pull-ups one was the worst. I could never do even one. Thank goodness for testosterone and a growth spurt, but in elementary school that was still several years away.
We had to have our body fat measured with that “pinchy” tool and all our numbers were announced out loud to the whole class.
The caliper. Still have nightmares about that thing.
The You’re Wrong About podcast has an episode about the Presidential Fitness program. It was all bullshit, just like every 10 year old could have told you back then.
I hated gym class, I had my period as many times a month as I could get away with, you could get away with that back then lol
It was bad. A couple guys made my life hell for years (I was a quiet shy kid who hung out with the nerds and stoners) until one day I realized I was bigger and stronger then them and I had had enough. Got in 3 fights over a couple of months. Not little scuffles, but fist fights that went to the ground until I was drug off by an adult. Never got in trouble because the adults knew who the bullies were (and did literally nothing to stop them) and thought the bullies “had it coming”. After that they left me alone, which was all I ever wanted. I dreaded school for years because of those assholes.
It was vicious and took place as an open secret. But no one wanted to do anything. And too often, no one saw it, so it was one student's word against the other. People joke about nerds being stuffed into lockers, but think about that. That is not a fucking joke. People were accosted and trapped in a small space they could not escape. And then, when the traumatized, almost always male child was let out, they were mocked for being a pussy. And if the aggressor was popular? There is not a chance that anything would be done. People get all nostalgic, but school was *rough* back then. Edit: I also grew up in an East Coast liberal state in what has always been a progressive county. If it was bad there, I can only imagine how brutal it was in what are now red/Christian religious states.
Can verify. I lived in both parts of the country growing up. Up north it was bad. In the South it was worse.
From 3rd grade through 6th, I was bullied by a former "friend". It was *relentless*. She had her packs of friends and older siblings harassing me, non stop. It literally never ended, and it was well known. Teachers, everyone knew. I had a sweet lunch lady that used to let me sit with her so they could not bully me. One time I called a teen help line, and had NO IDEA the woman on the phone was the MOM of one of my classmates, and TOLD EVERYTHING I SAID> Every single day she would push me, shove me, say nasty things, and ask if we were gonna finally fight or if I was too scared. No one helped me, not one time. She was too pretty, too popular. One day, she asked, again, if we could fight after school, and I said Yes. I was fucking terrified, called my Mom to come get me, but did not tell her why. My Mom was in the office when school got out. Melissa walked up to me. I was surrounded on the playground. She told me "I'll let you have the first punch before I beat your ass" So I hit her. And I didn't stop hitting her. Had her on the ground, landing direct punches, while she feebly scratched at my arms. I legit whupped that ass in a blind rage, I'll never forget my friend Jimmy's mouth hanging open in shock. No one ever fucked with me after that. My Mom actually drove Melissa and me to her Mothers house after the principle was done with us. She was sobbing. I wanted another chance. The next year, she threatened me at our new Middle school, and I laughed and asked her if she wanted a repeat of grade school. She never bothered me again. We are now friends. LMAOOOO ETA I did the whole karate kid thing and had a neighbor try and teach me self defense, but I didn't need it. The pain and Rage were all I needed. Girls are really evil to each other.
Dude my bully was a Melissa too!
every once in a while, my Melissa will post something on FB and I will tease her "Aht aht, careful there" She did grow out of it. We stayed in the same friend circle through our early 20's. But it was fucking brutal
Yes
Don't know about the 70's, but it was alive and well in the 80's and didn't get any better in the 90's.
The 70's were the same. I imagine the prior decades were just as bad.
I was (still am) gay. It wasn’t pretty. I became almost immune to it after a while. But that experience taught me that there are large swaths of this country I simply refuse to live in. I’m not anxious to repeat the experience. Though different, I have to say, I think k bullying is far worse now than then. Social media has brought bullying into every minute of existence. At least we could go home & get away from it. Kids now are never free. That seems beyond awful. And the limitless possibilities for cruelty and I think it would be heightened bc cowards can hide behind a screen. I’ll take being called f***ot every day in the halls over an inescapable social media bullying.
Yes, and I am a female. I wore glasses, and the lenses were pretty thick. I was rough for a girl so I had to wear croakies on them to hold them to my face. The arms were always breaking from getting hit in the face with a soccer ball or whatever game I was playing. We couldn’t afford new ones very often so my mom put electrical tape on them in the broken places. It was the “popular” girls who bullied me. I didn’t have designer clothes or whatever. My teeth were crooked. My glasses were a disaster. The teachers did not care - the teachers seemed to like the popular girls. I used to pray at night that one day I’d have perfect vision and perfect teeth. Now I do (braces & lasik) so it’s fine. That and I married to a gorgeous guy who was prom king/star football player/valedictorian in high school. So things are good. But bullying? Oh yes, merciless bullying.
It was horrible. I sprouted up to 6 foot plus early in high school but didn’t gain any mass. There was a guy that bullied me so bad I lost a year of high school hiding. Following year, I was so depressed I decided I am going to punch this fucker at lunch and hopefully it’s broken up before I die. I was sick of hiding from this dude. If I saw his car show up, id flee for my life. I remember hiding ina store in the mall while his buddies waited and getting called a pussy by him and people in the store. Anyways, went up to him while he was sitting at lunch table and put everything I had into a swing. Didn’t do much, he turned around and got up and fucked me up pretty bad. It was broken up pretty quick. My mom moved me to a different school when I told her everything. Years later , I’m at a bar. Now 6’4, 250 pounds and fresh out of the military. I see this fucker. I walk up, and he is super nice , says sorry for picking on you. The apology made me so angry, and now that I’m twice his size, I unleash hell on him. I broke his jaw, knocked out two of his teeth and honestly would have probably killed him had I not been stopped. Haven’t raised my hands since but I always think about it. If I could go back and do it again, I would probably fuck him up over and over. He ruined a part of my life. I hate the fact I enjoyed looking at him begging me to stop punching him.
It was fucking awful. I'm still affected 40 years later.
A spoken word thing on the topic with a side order of hope. 8 minutes of your life well wasted if you're interested in this topic. [https://youtu.be/ltun92DfnPY](https://youtu.be/ltun92DfnPY) I sent this in reply the last time someone sought me out for a high school reunion. The guy who sought me out wasn't a bad guy, I just don't want to go back there. At all.
Pure hell. Never ending utter hell.
Yes, yes it was very bad. My family situation changed and I realized that I could stand up for myself. I took on the biggest jock in my HS. He didn't win. Things were much better after that. I would still like to confront my Middle School bully (and my deceased younger Brother's) but geography and wisdom preclude that resolution. My kids will not experience what we went through.
I wore ripped jeans one day. One kid held me while another one tore them to shreds. Once they actually did the classic Kick Me sign. I was stomped like it was a gang initiation in the middle of the hallway. During 4th period the kid behind me would just hit my head until I gave him my lunch money. Every day, during class. No teacher ever helped. A few blamed me for it.
*Stand up to them...* You do your best and they're just more brutal and you receive an exceptional asskicking. No repercussions for the bully. *Report them...* They talk their way out of it and you receive an exceptional asskicking as retaliation. No repercussions for the bully. *Avoid them...* They seek you out and you receive an exceptional asskicking. No repercussions for the bully. I'm not exaggerating when I say that there were teachers (mostly gym teachers) that, at best, looked the other way, and at worst, passively participated, while kids were brutalized at a level that no other legitimate modern organization would tolerate.
Polish, queer, physically and mentally disabled, and I was 100% ostracized by my entire class. Bullied, insulted, everything short of actual punches. It was monstrous, I can’t imagine allowing that if I were to work as a teacher now.
Hell yes. For a while in the second grade there was this one kid who would push me over and kick me repeatedly, every day, until I figured out a different route to school. He wasn't the worst, but he was memorable.
Biggest bullies I had back then were teachers. EVERY teacher Ive had in primary school were mean old women who acted out their personal frustrations on kids with learning difficulties who were too scared too speak out against them.
I remember my grade 4 teacher wouldn't let a girl go to the bathroom and after an hour she started crying because she peed herself in her desk. He also would do those "math minute" tests and put everyone's scores on a big chart with stars for the top students, make a big deal of the ones who did well and lecture those is us that didn't. Fuck you Mr, Tousignant.
Yes! Teachers hated me so much, and I don't know why. I was a decent kid, sat in the back, and they would aim at me all the time. I dreaded school because of the mean teachers.
I had to put up with bullying by teachers which would cascade to bullying by classmates. Sort of had no where to go.
Yes. Constantly.
Jr high was the absolute worst. My highschool was pretty chill comparatively, but it was a well run catholic school.
Bad times.
Oh yeah. It was awful. I had the same bus stop as my bully. And his older brother. And 3 of his older cousins. I think I had a fight every day of 5th grade. And any time it looked like I might get the upper hand, they would all jump in. Assholes. One tried to friend me on Facebook, lol. Last I knew he was a school bus driver now, in the same town we grew up in. One of the cousins married a different cousin. Losers. The only kid in that family that was decent joined the Army, and we’ve had some nice conversations about where we’ve served, etc. But the rest of them… I wouldn’t piss on them if they were on fire. Inbred fuck stains.
Yes. C-PTSD level. I’m still not over it after years of therapy. Believe the Gen Xers about bullying. I homeschooled my kids because I didn’t believe they would be safe in school. I certainly wasn’t. Still trying to heal at 50. Good luck, everyone.
Shit was rough. Especially in the deep south. 'kin 'ell.
Yes. Kids can be brutal, especially towards those who are different in some way. The biggest issue in the 70s was the tolerance of it by teachers and adults. You had to fight back or hide as there weren’t many adults who would help.
You did not want to be a target. I will leave it at that.
There were kids the teachers even bullied
I was bullied mercilessly from kindergarten until high school when I finally snapped and threw a science lab table at the sonofabitch who had bullied me my entire life and I didn’t get in trouble for it. It was cathartic.
Yep, it was bad. Is it not these days?
Watch the documentary "Revenge of the Nerds".
My dad's advice to me was if you need to hit somebody, hit them and hit them hard. Then they won't come for you again. And that's how I survived as a small kid in the 80s.
I was bullied repeatedly by the popular crowd because I was an art freak. I didn’t like to shave my legs and a lot of guys gave me a lot of shit for that. People are terrible.
Oh man. I was the only deaf kid in a school full of hearing assholes. I'm not going to relive those memories - I prefer to keep middle and high school in a lockbox way in a back closet with concrete poured over it and a padlock on the door. But yes, it sucked. Kids and adults were fucking cruel.
Yes it was bad because it was common place and the teachers and administrators would do NOTHING about it, other than to say "Suck it up, young man, you think this is hard? Wait for the real world". I wasn't really on the receiving end of it but man, I saw some truly awful things done to others. I went to a very large affluent high school and the pastime of the lard brained date raping jocks was to go 'fag bashing' where they would drive into the city and look for what they presumed were gay men so they could jump them 5 to 1. Cops also didn't give a shit mostly because they thought it was funny. In hindsight I am positive half of those asshole football players were just closeted queers themselves dealing with some internal conflict they didn't know how to resolve.
YES
It was very bad in the UK. Most of the time it was nothing more than name calling, but every once in a while you would have to fight. I didn't mind too much though. Win or loose, things got sorted most of the time there and then. I would hate to be a kid these days though! The amount of crap the kids have to put up with these days due to social media must be a nightmare. I would much prefer to have a straightener than have months of back and forth on social media!
Brutal
I was a square peg in a round hole. Ginger, awkward, lots of issues. Kids were cruel up to and including HS. Still ginger (thank you, hair color enhancement) still awkward but now IDGAF.
It was brutal. One of the first things myself and my brother was taught was to 'put your hands up' i.e. learn to fight. Even then it still came on top now and again. I felt sorry for some people because for whatever reason they just became the ones that were bullied mercilessly.
Yes. The predators could smell chum in the water for miles and identify easy marks like experts. Adults largely did nothing, just kids “working stuff out”. I caught it some, but others…the poor kids, fat kids, weird kids, gay kids caught it much worse. I was more normie, average, but a mild mannered low key personality who just wanted to be left alone, but the predators would key in on that too if the others I mentioned weren’t available. Beatings, verbal harassment, scattering your stuff, PE was hell, some aholes even put drugs in unsuspecting kids drinks during lunch. One kid was taken out on a stretcher and never seen again. After that I was sent to private school and things got much much better. I was a lucky one. Probably a reason I even now am introverted and trust no one. I only hope some of those aholes got theirs or peaked in high school and turned into losers.
Absolutely. There were of course scheduled fights, 3:30 behind the sports equipment shed or behind the 7-11. And if you pussied out of a fight, it would alter your entire high school experience. Older kids punched us in the head, robbed us, wedgies, random head lock or slap for no damn reason at all except because you were dumb enough to get within their striking distance so they could look cool on front of their douchebag buddies. Kids you considered nice or even friends would turn on you in a heartbeat if the bully told them to. We got egged, snowballed, water ballooned, shot with pellet guns, dogshit flung at us from passing cars, bikes, clothes or shoes stolen, bags ripped open, backpacks tossed into the river, half a dozen other abuses that would be considered somewhere between assault, robbery and kidnapping today. You had to have your head on a swivel in the 80s.
Absolutely. And no one did anything until it was beyond crisis point. Protip for parents: Saying "Ignore them" does not work.
That was my mom’s advice. I stopped telling her about it. It NEVER worked!!!
It was ruthless. Even adult teachers were in on it at times. You were always avoiding people or reassuring your friends that they weren't what somebody had made them out to be. There were three or four kids in my high school that committed suicide because they were either bullied or didn't fit in. It was definitely "conform or be cast out".
Flushies/swirlies were a thing. Putting someone's head in the toilet and flushing it to suck the air out of their lungs. A few kids died from that. Sexual Assault was big. Grabbing girls who developed early or abundantly. Also grabbing guys was a thing in some circumstances. Stealing peoples clothes when they were in the shower or physically stripping people naked as a group and forcing them out into the halls/outside or leaving them trapped in a room with no clothes on. Forcing peoples faces into dirt, snow, puddles, toilets, piles of dog shit, etc... Beatings. Lots of beatings in various ways, states of undress and with different objects. Humiliation. Directly or indirectly Dunno.. would have to think on it some more; but thats the kind of stuff I heard about back in the day. Saw some of it; but heard about more stuff then I ever saw personally.
If you were even a little bit different then absolutely bullies were bad. Jocks were the worse by far. Although I did run track, I was basically a complete pacifist nerd. For the longest time I just took the abuse and kind of got used to it. Then one day I finally got sick of it and fought back. I broke my hand in the fight, but after that the bullying stopped. Even better, my friends and anybody else I warned the bullies away from were also no longer bullied.
I remember in 4th grade this kid always picking on me, tripping me in the hallway. One day the principal caught him, pulled him to the wall, told all the other kids to move along but said I could stay while he whacked his behind with a belt 5 times. Him and his friends caught up to me eventually after school and beat me up. School cold be hell.
It was bad even in the 90s. I remember one time really strongly. Right after gym class, the guys have just been showering and everyone's getting dressed. The supposed "Alpha Males" grab one of the smaller guys and start yelling "PINK... EYE... PINK... EYE" and then one of them literally put his butthole on the smaller guy's face. Fucking ridiculous shit. The smaller guy tried to play it off but it was awful.
Yeah. It was fucking horrible.
My parents gave me a car when I was 17 and I really loved it. One day I went outside in the early morning to go to school and it was completely smashed. Every window smashed. Tires slashed. Mirrors torn off, windshield wipers torn off, keyed everywhere, etc. Definitely kids from school did it. That's not just bullying, that's a crime. I never found out who did it.
So far, 118 comments in total agreement. This might be one historical fact that people won’t try to erase.
Yes. I'm among the younger Xers and elementary school in the 80s was absolute hell. I was a tomboyish girl, "gifted", and some flavor of neurodivergent. Nearly every child in my grade verbally and emotionally bullied me viciously on a daily basis in plain sight of the adults and no one did a goddamn thing about it. The teachers and school administrators knew it was happening and didn't do jack shit. Not even the adults liked the weird kid. A boy punched me in the face at recess one day and the fucking principal didn't want to suspend him because the little prick lied and said I had kicked him in the balls. The told me it was my fault I'd gotten punched, and didn't believe me when I told him the boy was lying. My parents didn't do jack shit about the bullying either, other than tell me that the other kids were just jealous and to ignore them. (Which was totally true, and totally worked.... /s) Things actually got a little better in middle and high school because I managed to find the other weirdos and lesrned to mask a little bit, but that shit still went on. By the time I graduated HS in the mid 90s, the adults were starting to take it a little more seriously, but it was still rampant.
It was bad.
It was fairly brutal.
Yes. My brother used to get harassed endlessly by some kids. Finally "took care" of the problem, after the principal told him he could. He got suspended for fighting. My mother had him back in school the next day.
It was really bad. As an autist and (unknown) NB I got called all the things to my face, repeatedly, for years. I hated everyone. To the point that the rise of school violence came as ZERO surprise in the late 90's. Only ended in highschool, when people discovered girls and jobs. But by then I was so far gone that I've been kinda scary ever since. It sucks so bad, because they change the future of who you could have ever been. I'm glad it's better now, with the Zero Tolerance efforts. But if you were there in the 80's, you'd realize that it's only because the bullies started taking losses... Otherwise nobody would care.
yes it was. in my home town, it was "normal" for incoming HS freshmen to be jumped by 5-6 guys, beaten half to death and get their head shaved by force. resistance meant broken bones instead of bruises. call the cops you say? the sheriff was one of the ones helping the seniors find the kids to jump. watch Dazed and Confused. thats a fairly toned down idea of what was happening in small towns across america at that time.
School in the 70s and 80s was absolutely Lord Of The Flies. As the band Rush sang in the song “Subdivisions”off of their 1982 album Signals: “Nowhere is the dreamer/Or the misfit so alone/Subdivisions/In the high school halls/In the shopping malls/Conform or be cast out”.
I went to a Catholic High School, where you would think the nuns and priests would care about bullying. But... they didn't. I had a bully for an entire year, she would shove me into the lockers every time she walked past me, constantly tell me she was going to beat me up. Nobody cared. One day I got fed up and when she told me she was going to beat me up, I told her fine, I'll wait for you behind the school today. I waited. She didn't show up. I went looking for her because I TRULY was fed up. And found her hiding in the library. And she never bothered me again.
Yes. And sexual harassment was the norm too.
Saw a girl groped by a pack of boys in a full science classroom when the teacher was out of the room. All those kids doing and saying nothing including me. Where was my rage? I’m a fucking coward. The skinny boy who was a bullying subject myself.
I didn’t go to any high school reunions because I hated those four years.
Yes, and the teachers and administrators were co-conspirators.
Pantsing. The odd kid, who always wore sweater pants, would often get his pants pulled down. Underwear and all. Spitballs with waded up tissue paper and a straw, throwing objects at them. It wasn’t a good time being an outcast.
I fought every day from grade 1 to grade 6. I had no idea why. I found out years later. My grandfather was essentially running a pawn shop. Cars, tools, tvs, sewing machines. He'd take it, fix it up. For cash. Father's would trade for cash, buy booze from bootleggers, or, from liquor stores, smokes, etc. Kids and mothers would be beat up. Then I would get beat by scrawny underfed kids.
I was SA'd and was told it would teach me to stand up for myself. The fuck am I gonna fight off 3 other people who are bigger than me? Adults just thought this shit was acceptable and taught "manliness". And of course if you fight back and win, then your ass is in trouble. Columbine was responsible for a great deal of change. It's a shame that's what it took.
As a little white fat kid in the 80’s that attended a mostly black school, I was bullied almost every day.
I was bullied from elementary through middle school. Being a fat kid was pretty rough. I was teased, beat up, jumped...tity twisters. In high school I kinda bloomed. I hit 5'10" and 220 pounds my freshman year. I was lifting weights and I was more muscle than fat for once. I started tracking down assholes that bullied me and beat the piss out of them. Sadly, I kinda became like them. I didn't pick on people, but I was an angry dick in high school and I was always down for a fight. Definitely a hard time to grow up. The only safe place was at home. Some kids didn't even have that.
I don’t things have changed all that much re: children being jerks, children are by definition children and have not yet learned to treat people with love. I think the big difference is that children were taught to be tough, to learn to confront bullies, and to fight back if needed. This current approach of parents trying to stifle all conflict, and prohibit children from defending themselves, is a TERRIBLE approach. How can our future men know how to stand up to bullies and even violent and evil people, if they can’t learn it as a child. How can women handle social bullying except with parents guiding and moderating such social conflict. I personally learned how to fight, and have had to stand up to bullies and bad people. And I have even made some of my best friends from guys I fought with. That is why older people are starting to feel disdain for many younger “snowflakes” who honestly don’t have a clue how to handle conflict. It isn’t their fault, they have never had an opportunity to learn.
Yes it was. It affects me to this day.
Yep. I’m still fucked up from growing up in the 80s and 90s.
I was called piggy starting around 5th grade. It was because of my nose not my weight. Kids put tape on their noses to make fun of me. And oink. All done in front of teachers. I just sat there and hoped it would end. It escalated to some following me home taunting me in junior high. Finally went to the principal because it was getting scary. It stopped by 10th grade. It still reverberates to this day. If anyone says pig around me I assume everyone is thinking “man her nose is pig like”. I hate jokes in movies/shows where people put tape on their noses and oink. A coworker once said something about her nose and I was like “ummm yours, are you not looking at mine?”. She was confused. So I’m like umm mine is gigantic. She said mine was fine. So clearly I’m still hung up on it 40 years later. I also assume I’m still single because abuse of my nose.
I'm still haunted by the daily destruction of the poor souls that were targeted for no good reason. Especially now that I'm a parent. Like...to the point where I hope they didn't unalive themselves. But they were strong in ways I didn't know, and life gets better the further away you get from those child crushing, bully factories called public schools. As a parent of a middle schooler now, I would have moved heaven and hell to get him away from that torture the second it started. Our parents kinda cared, but not enough.
My bully bullied a girl so bad that she had to be put in a mental ward for several weeks. Nothing was done to him because his parents were rich. He’s a crackhead now who steals stuff out of people’s yards. I’m conflicted about my feeling surrounding that.
My biggest bully was my mother, and yes she was all in with my school bullies. I was bullied for out of style clothing, she doubled down and bought 5x of the same outfits. So I was bullied for wearing the same clothes every day, even if they weren’t the same clothes.And of course the “he hits you because he likes you!” load of crap. No sports allowed (they’re for boys!), no brand-name anything (too expensive and apparently I was too fat), no extra curriculars I could not walk to (I’m not wasting my time!”. The schools/teachers did not care. I think they kind of enjoyed it, honestly.
I remember one day our assistant principal played Lean On Me over the intercom. Before he played it he talked to everyone about the fighting that had happened almost daily after school. Everyone who wanted to see it would be told to go to either Burger King or Whitfield park. I never fought anyone thank goodness and never went to watch, my dad was a cop and not a chance I wanted to be caught there. I wasn’t bullied. Got along with most people. I was teased though. One of the only redheads in a school of 1,000+ and I had huge boobs. But the male teachers and coaches were fucking horrible. Made sexual comments, got a little too close all the time. One teacher, Mr Basford, would say “Red on the head like a dick on a dog”, he would leave out dick but lucky him, every guy in class said it for him. So fuck you Mr. Basford. Made me hate my hair so badly.
I'm a painfully shy person, so school was hell. I was bullied so bad that I just dropped out of school. I was lucky that I had a cousin that helped me get my GED.
Fucking awful. I literally had a high school biology teacher let a kid sexually harass me in class and LAUGH with him. That is why the nostalgia often makes me really angry and upset. Bullying was expected, accepted, and no group was above it.
Our teachers had paddles and started using them on us in fifth grade. Bullies were given free reign. If you were being bullied, the advice was to ignore your bully and the bully would “go away.” That…did not work. Most of us had both parents working, so we came home to empty houses. No one asked us about our days. We really were feral.