Within the pack 3: what you can get away with

Anna and stargazer of The Hand Mirror discuss bullying at school in New Zealand. Anjum pulls no punches in her thesis statement, which implicitly asks the reader to site themselves in her triad:

everyone is involved in bullying at school. you were either the bully, the one who was bullied, the one who watched and did nothing, or one of the few who had the courage to try and stop it happening to someone else.

An anonymous commenter to Anjum’s post contends that “My point is that someone told me years later that she thought all children saw themselves as the victims of bullying, that we all saw ourselves as the friendless outsiders”, with which Anjum goes on to disagree.

I would like to consider this point. My contention is that long-term incidents of bullying don’t occur as if at random or by magic; that these arise out of a classroom or school-wide culture that permits such incidents to happen, often by explaining them away. This is not helped by the fact that there is always an explanation, often apparent to adults and outsiders, which is invisible to those dragged down in the brutalising culture. Thus, all involved can feel they are bullied outsiders even as single incidents of targeted bullying stand. It is against this generalised culture, as well as dealing with the specific incidents (the process described by Anna in her post is I think exemplary, and might well be put into the “too-hard” basket by many adults) as they occur, that a stand needs to be taken by all.

I went for two years to a school in which bullying was rife to the point of being structural. The staff I recall as a strange mixture of those who thought such suffering good for us (and perhaps a way of keeping quiet annoying and demanding eleven-to-thirteen year olds), those kind-hearted souls who seemed oblivious to it (and whose classrooms could therefore, in a perverse reversal, be havens for those there enrolled: the rules of the jungle did not apply) and those who disliked it but saw our suffering as part of a wider network of socio-economic indicators.

When the harvestparents repeatedly asked harvestbro’s teacher to deal with the beatings being given him by a particular boy, the teacher replied, again and again, that he could not: the boy was poor, Maori and from a broken home and to move against him, to put him in trouble, would produce consequences worse than the suffering of harvestbro, who was himself solid and likely able to resile from the experience. Today I might roll my eyes and say that this is what happens when you put young and idealistic social scientists in a 1980s classroom, but at the time it seemed a terrible dead end for us all, the other boy included, and profoundly unfair.

In general, when I consider my own experiences I conclude that such a bullying culture is what happens when the abjection pubescent children experience at their own bodies is allowed to extend into the wider culture, and perhaps also what happens when you have enough staff who don’t see children as fully human, working in your institution. I don’t have much to say about my bully, to whom my experiences at that school cleaved for two years, here, except that I perceive now, with adult’s hindsight, the pain out of which she acted.

I remember one incident outside the bullying that I had no ability to decode, even as I sensed it must be important. It was a brief hiatus from the usual pattern of our interaction and my bully and I were looking at a teen magazine together. She grabbed a black biro and with extraordinary speed and consistency, drew engorged genitals and pubic hair on all of the teen models, exclaiming variously, “slut! bitch! whore!” as she wrote on their bodies. This done, we continued comparing fashion plates. This seems to me now indicative of the confused drivers that were at work in her life; even in repose she was in a kind of distress. Picking on me was a kind of diversion, a sport, to take her away from other unhappinesses.

What stands out now in my mind as just as bad as the personal bullying is the way in which we children were allowed to treat each other more generally, the wearying sexualisation and abjection that made what had previously been easy so very difficult. All this seemed to go under the radar of the adults in the school, more or less, unless they thought that this too was part of life. The culture among the twelve-year-old girls was one of surveillance. Our bodies were disgusting to each other and to ourselves. The rules of pubescent conformity were curiously reversed in my class: wearing a bra was considered sluttish, so that dressing for school and sport involved layers and layers of camisoles and singlets to secure our bodies against any movement.

The girls regularly surveyed each other’s use of the toilet: it was known who went, and when, and what to do. One girl had been outed as menstruating when another looked over the top of the adjacent booth to see her handling a tampon. The thought of this happening to me was intolerable, with the result that I constructed elaborate sanitary protection out of pads, tissue paper, toilet paper and pins, to last me through the day when needed. These contraptions were exceptionally uncomfortable to wear and no doubt less than hygienic as well. In addition to this, I stopped using the toilets at school altogether. This made ordinary activities an experiential tightrope and I quickly developed a mental index of the difficulty of doing all kinds of everyday things on a painfully full bladder and tried to moderate my routines accordingly. Of these maladaptations I told almost no-one at the time. I was ashamed, and couldn’t imagine a solution other than opening myself to the possibility of humiliation I was trying to avoid.

Years later, I was discussing such privations with Nanette, who had been schooled in East Auckland almost a decade earlier and experienced much the same things. Dwayne, her husband, with whom I went through high school, sat in silence equal parts fascination and horror.

“I can’t believe all you girls did those things to each other,” he said. “Why didn’t you tell your guy friends about it? We would have helped you out.” Quite how he didn’t say, but that sense of sympathy in the offing, unknown and not taken up, gave me pause. It fuels my conviction now that it is up to adults who work with older children to seize continually on the positive aspects of their natures: their kindness, their functional socialisation, and use the rules of the schoolyard to enforce these as the norm. This is how we treat each other. We allow each other our privacy. We hold each other to the same standards as adults protected under the law: no culture of harassment, physical or verbal, no destructive hierarchies. That children are toughened by this kind of collective suffering, this deathly pack mentality, is to me a lie. We succeed, we thrive, in spite, not because, of the harrowings of our early life.

It’s not fair to expect children to have consistently the moral courage of good adults, to be the ones to speak out first against bullies and the cultures that produce them. It’s not sufficient to expect children to discern the social nuances it takes adults years to learn that would help them understand their bullies. To adults childhood can retrospectively seem like a toughening-ground for adult life, but for children it’s all they have; it’s their world. The one lasting harm was done to me not by my bully or by the policing of girls by each other but by the message reflected from the adults around us that this was the nature of life. This is not so. Adults do better, and should do better for our children, who have as much a right to their humanity as we do to ours. The environment where the adults intervene to seize upon the children’s better natures and make it clear that this is the standard to which all are held is the safe environment where the beaten-down and the borne-up can thrive alike. This is my understanding.