DeRuiter: I thought my bully deserved an awful life. But then he had one
As a child, I was an easy mark for playground torments: smart, insufferably rule-abiding, decidedly unpretty. The tormenter I remember most distinctly was not my first bully, nor my last, but his attacks would turn the others into footnotes.
He was in my class for years; his mom was my softball coach, driving me to and from practice when my single mother could not. In class photos his face is round and almost cherubic, but I remember it contorted in anger as he spat insults at me, telling me to shut the hell up, flailing his hands against his chest and moaning - an approximation of what he said I sounded like. We were seated next to each other in class, year after year, and when I finally complained about this arrangement, one of my teachers said that maybe I'd be “a good influence on him.”
My proximity to his mother did nothing to protect me. Sitting in the back of her van after my team lost a softball game, he snapped: “It smells in here. Close your legs.” Reflexively, I did as he instructed. When his mother climbed into the driver's seat a few moments later, oblivious to what had happened, he was still doubled over with laughter. I was 10.
When I returned home, tearful and broken down, I comforted myself with the idea that one day, I would be happy and successful and my bully would not. I received the advice that all bullied children of my generation were given - the universe would mete out some sort of karmic justice. This idea is everywhere: Biff Tannen waxes George McFly's car at the end of “Back to the Future,” having been beaten into submission (literally) years earlier. In “A Christmas Story,” Ralphie finally snaps after years of torment and attacks Farkus, who is left tearful and bleeding. Regina George - the Machiavellian queen bee in “Mean Girls” - eventually relinquishes her bullying crown, but only after she's publicly shamed (twice) and flattened by a bus.
Now, as an adult, looking at the fate that befell my bully - a perverse fulfillment of a childhood prophesy, one that left him dead at 25 - I realize how problematic and how ingrained that thinking is. In the past few years, our culture has started to see bullying as a serious problem, one whose victims need help, support and protection. As for the bullies? They're the bad guys. Why they bully doesn't matter, only that they get what they deserve in the end. But this paradigm only further stigmatizes children who need help in their own right.
The idea of some sort of cosmic retribution for bullying feels just. “It's a natural impulse,” writes Emily Bazelon in her book “Sticks and Stones,” which looks at the culture of bullying and its consequences. According to a 2014 study that gathered data from more than 234,000 teenagers and children, victims of bullying are more than twice as likely to contemplate killing themselves than their non-bullied peers. That number goes up considerably for LGBTQ teens, who are five times more likely to commit suicide than their straight counterparts. Studies have shown that individuals who are bullied are more likely to experience low self-esteem and anxiety, more inclined to abuse alcohol and drugs and more likely to suffer from a host of physical ailments such as headaches and sleep disturbances.
We seem well prepared to discuss the stakes of bullying. Dan Savage, the journalist and gay rights activist, launched the It Gets Better Project in 2010 after a rash of suicides by teenagers who were bullied because they were gay or because their peers thought they were. The Obama administration established a Bullying Prevention Task Force, and as of 2015, all 50 states had passed some form of school anti-bullying legislation. Celebrities from Justin Timberlake to Tyra Banks have shared their stories about being victims.
But the idea that bullies themselves might be more than one-dimensional villains is harder to swallow, especially for those of us who've dealt with them. “Who doesn't want to wring the neck of the thug who punches a weaker kid in the face, or the mean girl who starts a hateful gossip thread on Facebook?” writes Bazelon. The internet is rife with stories of bullies getting their comeuppance, from viral videos of little kids fighting back to Reddit threads describing justice doled out against an antagonizer. “It's an age-old story - the idea of bullies getting theirs,” says Meghan Leahy, a licensed school counselor and parenting coach. “It's a very human part of us that likes revenge.”
In this respect, we're embodying one of the key characteristics of bullies - we're acting without empathy, says Leahy, who has written about changing the way she looks at bullies. Nobody wants to extend sympathy to a tormenter. The trouble is, bullies aren't adults. They're kids, and many are grappling with their own problems. In 2008, the Institute of Education in London published a report that found that bullies had higher levels of anger, depression, emotional disaffection, paranoia and suicidal behavior. Other studies have found that as they grow up, bullies tend to have more trouble keeping jobs, have more problems with alcohol and drugs, and are more likely to have criminal records. A large number of bullies are also bullying victims, meaning they face some of the same pathologies that they induce in others.
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