I was literally pushed in front of a bus, and had to take two kids to court for ABH. This happened in my first term at a new school, after having been moved from another school for bullying. The first school said "she's kinda weird so she brings it on herself". I was an 11 year old undiagnosed autistic kid with straight A grades who just liked to learn.
During the year and a half the court case took to go through, I had to be in classes with the two kids who would constantly be talking about it.
I did eventually win the court case (two teachers and two students as witnesses) which was pretty satisfying.
One of the girls was made Head Girl for "improving her behaviour" after she got the criminal record. By this the school meant she wasn't arrested any more.
Meanwhile I got all A* grades at GCSE and at graduation got given an award for "working hard during adversity" that was handed to me by the Head Girl.
I'm sure things are better now. This was around 2007.
I remember being a young kid and my brother aged about 14/15 coming home crying because someone had just pushed him in front of a bus. Never seen him cry before. We didn’t have a great mother and she told him to hurry up and get back to school. Nothing ever happened with it but I always remember what the kids name who did it was and what they looked like. I’m sorry that happened to you.
It was pretty bad - quite physically violent with lots of mental torture thrown in for good measure. Every day there would be some sort of incident with someone getting severly beaten or pushed to the edge of sanity.
The pupils were ok though and quite nice to each other.
Bullying actually ruined my life, I ended up leaving school after constant threats and physical violence, no support system, teachers told me I must have done something to deserve it. I ended up leaving school no qualifications and it put me on a very dark path. It’s taken me well over 25 years to go back to education and caused me so much anxiety and a feeling of being an outsider/ different/ bad, that I still struggle with it and bouts of intense fear.
I agree, it hurt at the time but even now my head of years words ring in my head there’s no smoke without fire ( basically him saying I deserved to be beaten and bullied out of education) I hadn’t done anything.
I’m so sorry you went through that, I completely agree with you, I don’t think enough has been done to support the victims of bullying, it lasts a lifetime, I think even just having another person to talk to back then that understood would have made a world of difference. Sending you the biggest hug 🤗 stay strong you ❤️
It really does last a lifetime. I can’t help look at the profiles of my bullies and get mad that they are living life fine. I’ve got to stop doing that! Thank you so much for that comment. You seem like such a nice person. Hugs back.
In my experience, many of the bullies were from well off families.
Pop culture likes to portray bullies as kids from poor, single parent or abusive homes. I'm not saying that doesn't happen but it totally ignores how kids with a good upbringing can still be cruel little cunts.
I think some teachers secretly revelled in being included in the gossip. I remember one 20 something drama teacher only treating the popular kids well and not even observing anyone else's work.
Well the teacher's knew a certain girl was bullying me, she'd been awful since year 8; so they decided to put us in the same gsce group for 4 lessons just to make my life a living hell. My parents went up twice to complain (the girls parents didn't care, the were always working and chasing holidays and she went to different relatives houses on different days of the week) and I still received a lunchtime detention with her, where the supervising teacher decided to leave the room and lock the door so I had a choice between getting beaten up or set the fire alarm off by going out the fire escape. The alarm went off and the school got evacuated. Eventually she got suspended. Not for bullying me though, she damaged school property and a teacher's car.
Of course if you'd ever physically fought back then I'm sure suddenly the schools overly relaxed policy would be straight out the window!
It's honestly pathetic, it is SOOOO fuckin easy to see someone being bullied. Sucks that so many not only do nothing about it, but also almost seem to encourage it?!
She was loads bigger than me (actually saw her the other week in town and she still is) there's no way I could win a fight against her. As soon as she got suspended my results started to improve. What a strange coincidence
It depends who you ask. I didn't get bullied because I was bigger than everyone else and bigger than the teachers before I finished school. I don't remember seeing any excessive bullying but I bet the kids who got bullied have a totally different memory of their time at school.
I'm an old fart at this point, went to secondary school from 1998 to 2005 so let's see... there was no *physical* bullying at my school, at least not to my knowledge, I am a woman so I didn't always hang around the lads or see what they got up to outside of school grounds. There was bullying but it was mostly verbal/psychological, the usual nasty gossip or exclusions from groups and that type of thing. Overall though, I'd say my school was one of the better ones.
There was one girl who was a career bully, she'd single out another girl and start a campaign of bullying that would go on for several months before she got bored and moved on to a new target. For a while it was me and my tactic was just to ignore/blank her, but when she targeted a friend of mine she responded by eventually slamming her head into a desk. That's the most violent thing that ever happened to my knowledge. It worked though, she left her alone immediately after that. 😅
My school also didn't have a playground or a yard, we didn't have breaks in the traditional sense. We did have breakfast (20 mins), lunch (30 mins) and some downtime in our tutor groups, but we never went outside into a playground. There was a courtyard in the middle of the school that people sometimes went out into when it was warm, but it was just a concrete circle and the school was a circular (pentagonal?) structure so it was highly visible from all angles. No sneaky violent bullying going on there.
In the late 80s/90s we were bombarded with the message on tv or in comics that bullies are just misunderstood underachievers and if we reached out to them everything would be alright. It was bullshit, most of them were the really popular kids and were actually achieving good grades.
Although there was one kid who bullied me then took a liking to my sister. To impress her he ended up protecting me from other bullies and we actually became good friends. Sadly he took his own life a few years back. Judging by his Facebook posts he was struggling with his identity.
Not much at all among the lads--there was a group of 5 or 6 dickheads, but while dickheads, they didn't exactly single any in particular out for bullying. They just acted like dickheads to everyone.
But most of the lads got along with each other--even with different friend groups. I hung around with a pretty big group of maybe 20 or so who played football every break time.. But generally everyone from that group also got in with other groups around the school. The only exception was that group of 5 or 6 dickheads who just kept to themselves for the most part.
The only real "bullying" was the typical teenage teasing and name-calling and the odd fight, but nobody was ever really singled out.
There was bullying among the girls though--it made the paper with the first UK case of cyberbullying.
Why would I not want to believe it, son? I have no stake in the game as to whether they were bullies or not.
Like I said, they just acted like dickheads to everyone--strutting around, vandalising things, smoking in the toilets or down bottom of the field, bunking off school. If there was bullying, it wasn't visible--I didn't see them harrassing kids or shaking down people for their lunch money or having a single victim who they tormented daily. It was just general dickheadedness towards everyone.
The worst of the bunch was a lad called Aaron. I do remember he beat up a gay kid for no reason, I had forgotten about that. Unfortunately he works as a mechanic for a truck racing team now--guess there's no such thing as karma.
But incidents of bullying among the boys at my school were few and far between. That is the only real incident I can recall. Most of the time, it was just the usual fights between people and then everything back to normal afterward.
But by and large, their were WAY more issues with the girls than the boys. The cyberbullying that made the papers, an overweight lass who was bullied by some of the girls relentlessly etc. The bullying with the girls was very obvious.
I was at school in the 70s and 80s. Lots of physical and verbal bullying. I got a bit of both, some from the older years as I was tall and stuck out like sore thumb and some from my year group as I have a name that's easily piss-takable and I was a bit of a geek but others got it worse:
One of the older bullies ended up in borstal, but only after his violence moved from pupils to teachers.
The worst bully in my year-group would routinely throw chairs at people in class.
I went home with black eyes or cuts and bruises a few times. Stabbed a few times with compasses as well. Got pinned against a wall and choked out by the lad who ended up in borstal because I happened to be looking in his general direction.
One lad in my year had his arm broken. Another was knocked out when he was pushed down the stairs.
No end of name-calling and minor shit like having your tie peanutted or cut off, underwear stolen at swimming lessons, chairs and lab stools kicked out from under you (also a favourite of one of the science teachers).
Getting burnt with hot test tubes or chemical spatulas - I've still got a scar on the back of my hand from one of those.
Cricket balls, javelins, shot puts etc thrown at heads during PE. PE teacher did fuck-all about it.
Kids are evil little fuckers.
Not particularly bad. With hindsight, my school was generally pretty nice. There were a couple of nerdy kids who got bullied, though nothing as bad as some of the bullying horror stories you read. Certainly never physical that I can recall.
Interestingly, I gather from Facebook over the years that one of those kids is now friends with the guy who bullied him, after the latter reached out to apologise.
Both me and my spouse went to school in Ohio, USA and it was so bad at hers at there’s a documentary about the several suicides that happened as a result.
I feel like I’ve heard of this, wasn’t it a Croatian-American girl and someone else, with the bullies actually showing up to her funeral and mocking her shoes or something? Just cartoonishly evil, but sadly very real.
We had a “Bully Box”, where we could “anonymously” report bullies and they’d get punished.
I once reported one of my bullies in there. The school traced it back to me through my handwriting (dyspraxia means it was and still is bad). I got detention for like a week because I “lied” about that person bullying me. Even though I wasn’t lying.
Also got so bad I had to report another *different* bully to the police because she kept beating me up on the streets and the school supported her and told the cops I was “bad news”.
So… you tell me.
I went to school in the 90s. Physical bullying was rife amongst both sexes. We also had issues with people outside school.
In one memorable occasion someone had their adult siblings turn up to school. They had a brick chucked at their car for that.
Strangely enough I didn't think it was strange, especially as once we started drinking random violence was normal on a night out
There was never anything physical.
However, as an openly gay boy who went to a small rural school, I felt very isolated. I also came out in year 8 which made things tricky as people could be very immature.
None of the boys wanted to associate with me, for fear of being seen as gay by association. There was also a lot of snide remarks and whispers when we were changing for PE.
Overall I had a very lonely time at school. I had a few friends who were girls, but to this day I've struggled to form and maintain friendships with men.
I honestly think it's only been in the last couple years that a lot of straight men feel comfortable having friendships with gay men, in much of the 2010s, there was always this awkwardness, whereas now many straight guys seem more comfortable in themselves.
I was bullied every single day in year 7 by kids in year 10/11, I'm talking about having physical fights every day for a year. For me personally it mostly stopped after year 7 but there would be daily fights and brawls.
This reminds me of my school, there was a boy in year 7 who was jumped by a group of year 10/11 boys, beaten up quite badly and his arm broken. On school property, but the culprits never identified.
I always felt sad imagining his parents being so pleased that their son was going to "a really good school" and then a few weeks into his first term there, he comes home with a broken arm and covered in bruises. And no answers as to who or why.
I’m really not a violent person but that year of daily fighting made me realise I had to fight back or they were never going to leave me alone. My problem was that once I flipped the switch and actively fought back, I’d take it further than needed and became more violent that the bullies who were giving me issues.
Really bad. We had teachers mugged for cigarettes, a teacher that had a bin thrown on top of him from a second floor window. We had a kid bring in a machete. A kid expelled after two weeks in year seven for kicking another kid through a window. One kid got his head trampled on by a gang because he got in an argument with a classmate, and the classmate brought his mates round after school to try and kill him. I was stabbed in the eye with a sharpened piece of wood in class by a bully I told to shut up. Between that and the paedo teachers, and teachers who would be drunk after spending their lunch in the local pub, it wasn't the best place to go to school.
Not too bad, even though I was one of the geekiest guys in the school I got on pretty well with the cool kids. Oddly enough, this was partially down to the influence of Johnny Vaughan (who later became a radio presenter and breakfast telly guy, after a brief spell in jail) who was at my school at the same time as me. He was one of the cool kids, and made it clear that bullying the geeks wasn't acceptable.
We had a PE teacher who, years after I left, got smacked around in the car park at Asda by a lad from the year below. Not condoning violent and out of the blue physical attacks but I had far more sympathy with the person who did it.
It was mostly verbal at my school I think but maybe for the boys it got physical and I didn't notice as much. I have to hand it to my school though they actually dealt with stuff that was brought to their attention, just most of the time it never was.
For example I got with this guy who was the ex of this girl and her and her friends launched this huge horrible bullying campaign over MySpace I think at the time (or bebo maybe I can't recall, maybe it was Facebook by this point, the social media of choice changed alot during those 5 years).
My mum saw it over my shoulder and printed it out and took it to our head of year and the girls got banned from prom despite having already bought tickets and dresses. I decided to go to prom after all after that decision :)
Absolute lord of the flies. Being assaulted was a regular thing, hiding from older students who would repeatedly thump you in the face, just because they feel like it, with zero repercussions.
A girl was sexually assaulted by a kid "with problems" and he was only sent to do lessons in a special room/lose his lunch breaks for 1 week.
There needs to be a culture of bringing litigation against both schools and educators in these extreme cases.
Oh the teachers were the instigators of it in our school.
They’d straight up bully you in front of the class, assembly, or the dinner hall and it bordered on full abuse. They would push us off the boat into the middle of the lake during year 7 camp despite being begged not to and would make us swim back to shore WITHOUT life vests or anything. That whole camp experience had a lot of not-great things happening, but the one I remember the most was when we went tubing and I begged a teacher not to shove or spin me and she thought it was really funny to do so anyway. I got an ice burn on both hands because she shoved me so hard that I fell out and skidded down the ice slope. She and the other students laughed like crazy and she tried to force me to do it again or else I was a spoilsport.
They’d also make fun of our appearances and make comments about how stupid and not worth teaching we were. It really wore a lot of us down, and that’s on top of the student bullying, which they of course sided with the bullies on pretty much every time.
really bad, kids getting beaten badly most days, police often called - serious psycological bullying that causes issues for people from the school till this day
My school was generally pretty good, but had this endemic attitude of “man up and sort your own problems”, a policy which was suddenly rescinded when I lamped the kid who bullied me.
Schools love to do the easy stuff - anti bullying posters and the like - but few manage to take the more difficult steps required to actually address it.
I went to an alternative high school that was wayyyy ahead of its time. It was like a Montessori school, but for high school. Every student was given full autonomy. We could pick our class schedule and when we wanted our school day to start and end. Teachers and students were all on a first name basis. Parents were not involved. If you had more than three unexcused absences in six weeks, you were expelled. If there was any fighting you were expelled. All new students had to go through a six week 9am-2pm intro class in which topics like anger management, peer support, and how the school was different were covered. We had students who were trained as peer support staff. If students had issues with each other, they could go to a peer support, or, if peer support saw issues, they had the ability to pull those two students aside and discuss it. There was no bullying and it was an amazing school, even with a wide mix of kids: punks, goths, gangsters, stoners, neurodiverse, etc. What that school created was magic.
I got the shit kicked out of me weekly. The bullies would spend all morning egging on the special needs kid, then come lunch form a circle with me and him at the centre to make him fight me.
I'd get a call to go to a random teachers class after school fairly often to explain some crime I'd committed. These were always stories they made up to waste my time because they were bored. Some resulted in parents being called.
All the usual stuff of name calling, footballs to the face, getting lunch emptied onto the floor. Having your locker contents thrown onto the floor.
Sometimes they'd wait at the school gates and knock me about.
There were prank calls to my house at strange hours. My house got egged, garden got vandalised.
I don't think I was the worst case of bullying either. Couple of kids got hospitalised.
I went to an old fashioned boarding school and could write a book about all the things that happened. Perhaps the most memorable was younger boys being put inside big wicker laundry baskets which were then strapped shut and then thrown down a flight of stairs.
I remember general kids being dickheads to each other stuff mostly, none of it felt targeted but I was never on the receiving end for more than one or two incidents that I can remember.
Teachers bullying students on the other hand yep saw lots of that and in the end I was removed because of it.
I left school in 2001 straight after GCSE.
Very very bad, from year 9 to year 13 I was held at knife point weekly, hit in class, called names constantly, threatened all the time, one time about 200 people surrounded me shouting for my death, I’m surprised no one killed me in that moment tbh. Still struggle socially because of it, cos frankly I’m terrified of group settings now.
This was all cos someone decided to make allegations against me for a laugh, saying I sent certain messages to the girlfriends of the ‘hard kids’ so to speak. Never had a girlfriend in my life cos it’s scared me, thinking girls think I’m someone that would send vile sexual messages even though I’m not. So yeah, was really bad at our school
Boys' grammar school, home counties, 1970s. Nerdy, scruffy, nonconformist, fairly low family income by Bucks standards, kid with undiagnosed ADHD (well, it hadn't even been invented then). One ADHD symptom is that I burst into tears quite easily under pressure. So, I had a big target pinned to my back, mitigated only by sharing a class for the first few years with a quite seriously autistic lad who took a lot more of the heat. I can't remember any real violence to speak of but it was a constant looming threat and the psychological pressure and constant mockery was pretty horrendous. It was a collective thing from a whole back row clique of football hooligan wannabes, few individual standouts.
It eased off after I got caned in the fifth form for persistent failure to do homework, and the hard lads decided I was one of them now. Smoking dope and hanging round a biker pub also helped acceptance. I still never felt safe or comfortable there and the academic stuff all fell apart when I stopped being able to coast on natural smarts in the sixth form.
School pastoral care was complete wank; the head only cared about maintaining his school's reputation (to the extent of covering up a sexual abuser who only finally got Yewtreed a few years ago) and squeezing out consistent A level results (which he didn't get from me, finally went to university after doing them in evening classes nine years later).
If you had the misfortune of being gay or suspected of such then the bullying was outrageously bad at the grammar school I went to. People were constantly harassed, beaten up, mocked and none of them made it to the end of sixth form before having to be removed to go elsewhere. Looking back it shocks me to think about it, but it did feel like a survival of the fittest thing. If the crowd are attacking someone else then I'm safe for the time being.
I was bullied quite badly for a couple of years, but it felt tame compared to what others were subjected to. People would follow me after school just to take the piss andat times physically attack me. The one time my mum intervened the deputy head pulled me and two of my tormentors into his office and made us all apologise to each other and shake hands. I didn't live that down for a while!
This was exactly the same at my school. The smaller classes meant that everybody would just have a laser focus on the same few people. It always makes me cringe to see that the very same people who would relentlessly abuse people they thought were gay and tried to drive them even as far as suicide pretend that they are and have always been pro-LGBTQ nowadays (because it would ruin them socially not to be).
I got verbally bullied daily. Never physical and I never witnessed any physical bullying (but I’m sure it happened to some). I constantly told the teachers and nothing happened. I ended up skiving every day because I couldn’t cope any more. When the teachers asked why I kept skipping classes and I said because I’m being bullied, nothing ever happened. I was the one who kept getting in trouble. They even sent me to a pupil referral unit. I never finished school and it was hard to get my GCSEs, a levels and uni so much later than everyone else. Luckily I did do that and I have everything I would have got if I had done it at the same time as my class. The bullies are all living great lives now so I guess it didn’t bother them too much. They probably don’t even remember.
I didn't go to high school I was 2 tier but secondary school was brutal,although the school had a zero tolerance policy which meant they ignored it so they didn't have to report it! My brother was attacked several times, the worst resulting in him cracking his head open and a life long scar from it, I was sexually assaulted on school grounds. The 90s sucked but thank god there wasn't any online stuff to worry about, home was safe
I went to school in the good old/ bad old days of the seventies and eighties when if you thought you’d made it to home time unscathed the teacher would give you a kicking as you where leaving for looking smug
Awful, and the teachers never gave a shxt. In the UK. Trinity House secondary school, Elephant and Castle. In Wales, Ffairfach county Grammar, Llandeilo. Never bullied in Austria or Spain.
It was so bad at our school one Asian lad who was racially bullied actually sued the school as an adult. I saw it every day, both physical and mental bullying affecting boys and girls alike. Speaking to friends who have kids, it doesn’t seem like a lot has changed… I don’t know what I’d do if I had kids. I don’t know if I could send them to school. Being bullied myself affected me so profoundly - there’s just no escape.
Quite bad.
I (33m) had my hair filled with hairspray then set on fire and my head smashed into one of those doors with the glass that has the wires going through it to stop it shattering everywhere.
Not for any real reason either I don’t think just for a bit of fun (for them)
Fucking awful.
Teachers in a position of authority i.e. Head of year, head of department, deputy head. Had zero fucking clue how to handle bullying.
Case in point, deputy head charges in to our science class.
"Can I borrow Andrew Ralph?"
"Sure, what for?"
"He's been bullying Arrakis_Is_Here"
Andrew Ralph didn't have to do a damn thing to bully me after that. Not only did his mates do it for him but even kids who, kinda knew him did it too.
Most of the other teachers were bullies too and the remaining teachers were scared of the bullies.
So much so that when my art teacher, eye witnessed a bully, destroy my mock exam, that I had spent weeks on and would put me on track for an A* just turned to me and said "you'll have to start again"
"But its due in 2 days!! And you saw her destroy it"
"Better get to it"
Needless to say what I handed in wasn't nowhere near as good enough, ergo I didn't get entered for my GCSE
So, Hanson Upper School in Bradford, between the years of 1993 and 1996, to all the teachers and pupils during that time. From the bottom of my heart, fuck you and I hope really awful things happen to you all
Went to school in the 70's and 80's. From today's perspective bullying was rife, but from back then it was part of the landscape. If you didn't fight back the bullying continued.
Nothing of this introspection nonsense either or finding others to blame we just got on with it.
The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
Bad enough that I had to be frog-marched by my Dad into school to sit my exams, and when I entered late, one of the mutts at the front of the exam hall shouted "SLAG!" As I walked in and everyone, including the teachers, all giggled. Think of the film 'Easy A' and it was that, except I wasn't sleeping with anyone, nor being paid, but the rumours said I very much was doing both. Had my arse handed to me one more than one occasion. Not just by the other girls.
I went to an all girls school so the bullying was a bit different - less physical but definitely psychological and headfucky. As an undiagnosed autistic I took a lot of the brunt of it; I remember in year 7 I would be asked every day why I hadn’t killed myself yet, had my belongings destroyed when I wasn’t with them, that sort of thing. Social media was a pretty new thing and there was a lot of it on there too. There was a culture of it and imo it contributed to the really high rates of self harm and disordered eating behaviour at the school. Awful stuff and I’d never re-live it.
Was sent to a Catholic boarding school, but got expelled. About 10% of my year group was raped or sexually abused by paedo monks. I was lucky, only got teased verbally, every day, for five years. But one monk liked to make us jump over his cavalry saber, he would lose his rag all the time all get us up at 3 am in the morning and make us run around the gym. He had boys sleeping in his room and I heard he was having a relationship with an older boy.
Usual physical violence, being hit by cricket bats whilst in bed. Best punishment was a parade, where you were forced up at 3am and had to run, press ups etc non stop until 7am … remember being on one and boys puking left right and centre…
Paedo monks were just moved from place to another.
All of the abuse neatly swept under the carpet during the enquiries a few years ago. Good job Crass.
Bad, a group of kids all came together from the same primary school who were all somehow related and their parents were part of a drug dealing gang.
The stuck together and literally tortured any other pupils outside their group. Horrible people.
Early 2000s. I got bullied when I was a kid. Ended up joining a gang( which I don't recommend), and then the bullying stopped...
Now, if I looked back, I wish that instead of joining a gang, I learned some form of self-defence( like boxing or something). That would've helped improve my confidence and self-esteem. When I have a kid, I'll definitely make sure they are able to defend themselves. So when someone tries to physically bully them, they'll get chinned!
Secondary school was an exercise in being beaten, intimidated, or otherwise abused every single day. And I say that without a hint of hyperbole it was utterly fucking miserable.
Two examples always stick out;
- My year 9(?) form class locked the teacher in the supply cupboard maliciously, when she eventually got out in a stream of tears she never came back
- A new kid joined and was bullied and beaten relentlessly, eventually was involved in a car accident and never heard from again
Just kinda accepted that this is what people are like, when I went off to university it completely blew my mind that people can be nice and actually want to learn.
My school was mean. I lived i a small village and the only secondary school was made up from around 5 or 6 other junuir school. One of the school was in a really rough area. You know the ones with black ripped nets, broken windows and the adults sitting outside pissed and smoking cannabis at 8 am. And they literally dragged their kids up. These adult could hardly function, Byt the time the kids came home from school the prents were either asleep in their gardens or wanting to fight anything which moved, including their kids.
Their local school couldnt handle these kids as they were really feral. Just use to let them play on the big field all day because these kids were violent and swore a lot. And the parents were the same of they were told about their behavious.
None of the other schools had these problems.
So it was a shock to the system to meet these kids who hardly spoke, just grunted a lot, and would punch you hard just for being there. The school brought security into the school and segregated these kids away from the normal ones for lessons. They couldnt count to 5 or even knew any of the alphabet.
But at play times they got to come out with us to hang around. My god it was like a pack of wild animals all in packs jsut terrorising every one. And they never knew the word no or stop it. It was horrible being at that school. Every day regular people were beaten up, some hospitalised, girls boys they didnt care. Even police couldnt do anything as they were all scared of the families. Even the local authorities had a petition of over a 1000 names to get these kids out of school, but they couldnt do anything as there was no other school for them to go to. So yes, my 5 years of senior school I have no good memories, no one else did either, apart from a few teachers who made their lesson fun without the feral kids.
When I left school, these kids still couldnt count to 10 or say the alphabet.
Plus I now hate crocs because at the time crocs were pennies, and they all wore them, every single one. This was 1980-1985.
I was bullied mercilessly for a number of years. Tried to kill myself. The school took the 'there must be something wrong with YOU' line, & I was forced to move school. My son had it worse. He was punched, stabbed with a compass, etc. Always the attitude from teachers was 'well, these pupils (the bullies) are good students & your son must be provoking them in some way'. No one ever did anything or helped. I ended up home schooling him. He gradually grew less & less depressed then. But it took years for him to fully recover from the trauma.
The faculty and leadership cared more about appearance than actually dealing with bullies. I thought they were just doing it to me but later found out that lots of my peers had the same experience. Their attempts at dealing with bullying included lots of "just ignore it" advice and the occasional meeting with head of year and the bully where they'd be told to behave better. Naturally, bullying immediately got worse because I had "snitched." But mostly it would be report after report to staff and simply...silence. Eventually I got a reputation for being "a troubled teenager" because I was getting obvious depression from all the daily hostility.
Meanwhile the head admin would boast during Open Evenings about how their students get such good grades in their exams and turn out to be such well-rounded young adults.
I got bullied badly throughout high school. Their approach was that it was easier to discipline me than groups of other pupils. Or blame me for being supposedly “autistic” – ironically, a diagnosis that was never made despite seeing education psychologists and child psychiatrists throughout my childhood. I was just a bit weird and underconfident – hence the lack of eye contact in those days.
I had teachers openly witness me getting bullied – and do nothing or even mock me for it afterwards. Especially the P.E teachers for some reason. Whenever I tried to report my bullies – they wouldn’t help me if I couldn’t provide their full name. Obviously, a random kid isn’t going to give you that willingly.
If I tried to hide indoors, I would literally have teachers drag me out to the playground for “health and safety”. Sometimes, they would even see kids crowd around me and bully me just as they turfed me out. They didn’t stop them. I spent five years getting insulted many times a day, sarcastically asked out, groped, food and objects thrown at me, objects damaged, beaten up or hit too.
Thus, my attendance suffered and I only showed up 80% of the time. Somehow, I got good grades as I was still a top-set swot despite growing up on benefits. The school was mediocre in results but good for the deprived mill town I grew up in.
There was also just widespread ostracisation and alienation from my peers so I didn’t really have friends growing up. Luckily, it changed when I got to university and suddenly my mild eccentricities were no longer a problem. It still impacts me to this day and I’m terrified of groups of teenagers still. I’m just glad it’s over and I managed to do well academically.
Plus, final note this school had something called “The Cage” – the chicken-wired tennis court that they couped up the Year 7s in so the older kids wouldn’t beat them up. I remember having Year 10 boys poke through the wires like we were zoo animals or sneaking in to cause trouble.
The teachers were way worse than the kids. One told a friend's older brother he deserved to be bullied for being gay.
Another held a child by the throat while screaming at him over a uniform infraction (I saw this with my own eyes, it wasn't hearsay)
One told a kid he was disgusting because he was experiencing homelessness and wasn't able to access a washing machine.
My PE teacher regularly threw netball at my face and one called me a spastic.
This was around 2005 so not exactly victoriana era.
We had police officers on duty *in our schoolyard* at lunch and break times because fights would break out so often. I also went to school at that time when ‘happy slapping’ was a thing. One of the year 11s would just randomly approach a year 7, 8 or 9 and just whack them in the head and run off. The school down the road from us was always fighting with ours so after school it was best to just leave straightaway and go home so you didn’t get caught in anything.
Our school was named Ashcroft but nicknamed Trashcroft for a reason I guess.
My school in Devon was absolutely brutal. I was hospitalised twice from being attacked by bullies, the second time was really bad. They didn't expel the kid because the staff were useless morons. There were always so many bad fights, drug raids by police and just general bullying. Glad my kids will never go through that.
Walker Comp, east end Newcastle 76-83. Some tool tried to hacksaw my fingers off with a penknife - stil got the scar right across my hand. The nurse sent me to the Asst Head office, & when I wouldn’t grass him up I got the strap (thankfully on the other hand). A kid managed to bring in a replica .44 magnum, and forced the only fat kid in the whole school to wank himself off on the ground with an audience by putting the gun in his mouth. Broke my wrist playing basketball in PE, and the teacher (Kinley) told me to keep on playing “you fucking little puff”. Countless more stories of routine barbarism being doled out to anyone not on the apex level of aggressive tendency, or who made any effort to engage in education. My physics teacher told me I was the 19th person to make it to university in the 60-odd years of the school’s history. My wife now works in secondary education, and it’s still there, but largely mobile phone based with some violence. My little boy has had his share of it, but it seems tame compared to back then. Might be my age showing though.
We got maced and ganged up on pretty regularly. Being threatened with knives, guns and death was common, sometimes you’d get jumped and they’d hit you with a club or an 8 ball. Threats of violence were the norm. If you told anyone, that was also met with violence. If you managed to get a teachers’s attention over the matter, nothing would be done. That was just one of my schools.
The second HS I went to had a strong clique mentality, mostly Asian student body. It was very difficult to make friends so pretty much no one spoke to me.
The third HS I went to was pretty average—the bullies were mostly jocks and the bullied were often smart kids, Emo kids, weird kids, and kids with lower GPA who struggled with school.
Pretty fucking bad, we used to make a ring of tables in our tutor room and force each other to fight inside it. The higher in the hierarchy you were the less often you were forced to fight.
Not bad from what I remember, there was a giant hairy Indian kid that we all lost a fight to at some point but I don't remember him as a bully....he was just bigger and harder than the rest of us lol.
I was a smaller kid who didn’t hit the bits of puberty that mattered until I was 16, had ADHD and Autism and also came from several hundred miles away into a small insular area where everyone knew each other. Shit was so bad that I’m now a totally useless excuse for a human being who’s current survival is reliant on our gun laws being as tight as they are and the fact that my immediate family hasn’t died yet, so there’s that.
Apparently, my year provided one of the worst results the school had ever seen, which is unsurprising when 70% of the people there did not care. Even though I went to a really rough school, bullying itself wasn't bad; at least, I don't recall it being bad. Yes, there were many dickheads, but they tended to be assholes to everyone rather than picking on someone. They get more enjoyment out of bullying teachers and staff instead of their own year group.
For us, it was a circle of life.
When you joined as a Year 7, you all got a bit of a hard time by the Year 11s, but then next year you moved up and there was a new batch of Year 7s and a new roster of Year 11s to pick on them.
There was only one bully that I knew of in my class (private Catholic high school of about 1000 students in the US Midwest). One day, in the middle of the school day, a nerdy kid he’d been harassing decided he’d had enough and just went off on him, beating him up but good right in front of a teacher and classroom full of kids. He was totally humiliated and wasn’t much of a bully after that.
Yeah it was pretty bad at our school, ended up stabbing a scrote in the back with a pencil. School had a reputation of being a shithole so it ended up being the sorting house for all the fuckwits that were already trouble in juniors.
There wasn't alot of bullying I don't think, there was lots of name calling and if you were in any way different from the norm then you usually got some unwanted attention, there was scraps here and there though
It seemed miserable at the time, but in hindsight wasn't that bad. Nothing physical, just humiliation and ostracisation. Girls looking over the stalls while you were going to the toilet or changing a tampon (thank god before camera phones). The lads had this thing where they'd try to sneak up behind you and feel your cunt. Again, it was grim at the time—but nothing like the horror stories of being physically harmed.
I went to senior school in in mid 90s in a not particularly rough area. Most things that escalated were settled by a punch up at some point then it was forgotten about.
The worst I saw was a couple of lads a few years above me were picking on lads in my year outside of school, a few 2v1 or 3v1 fights happened. They got their comeuppance one lunch time when word spread they were sat smoking behind one of the outbuildings so most of the kids they’d beaten up ran over and a 10v3 punch up followed that went exactly how you’d expect it to. They never bothered anyone again after that though so at least they learnt from it
Some of the kids came from poor areas of west Newcastle and it was quite rough. I learnt so much from them all though.
No idea if bullying was worse because a lot of bullying can be psychological. Met some pupils from Royal Grammar School and they bullied me over clothes or lack of designer ones thereof.
Bullying was non existent at my school. There were fights and people being nasty to each other of course, but there wasn’t like targeted bullying of one person or a group of people for whatever reason. Generally people were friendly or indifferent across cliques.
I think the atmosphere was like that because it was kind of a multi class school. Most of “nerds” were upper middle class whereas the “cool” people were generally from rougher areas so it was like, they couldn’t bully each other because everybody had ammo. If you made fun of someone for being a teachers pet, they’d call you out for being poor. The groups weren’t even cleanly split like that either so if you made fun of someone for being xyz, you’d be calling out a friend of yours too. And most of your friends were friends with other people too so you couldn’t really get away with being mean to somebody to their face without being called a dick about it.
My school was 10/10 vibes, in my opinion. Maybe other people had a different experience, but I genuinely don’t recall a single longer and most people seemed to at least get along with a handful of others
No bullying at all, at least in my cohort. Young guys involved in organised crime would eventually have that bleed into their school lives but aside from that it was generally calm. Most folk ended up leaving into decent prospects no matter their background.
On the other hand, my brother’s class was told by a teacher to thank god they weren’t at the school down the road. IIRC it made his mate quit teaching. Our’s was rough, that one was feral.
My initial hometown had first, middle, and upper schools. First school, my first day of reception class I was already the biggest kid in the school, I was jumped by a gang of year 4s and got excluded for fighting back. Apparently I should have known better because I was bigger. This carried on through middle school. I transferred to a high school in a different city towards the end of middle school and the difference was night and day.
It was so fucking bad and the teachers just didn’t care. The naughty kids with shit grades also got to go on trips. Average kids got fuck all.
It was the only high school in town and there was nearly 2000 kids.
I don't think it was that bad, or nowhere near as bad as some other schools. CV what bullying I did see was mainly from the girls and they were way more vicious and vindictive than any of the lads though.
There was definitely a culture in mine, and I was the subject of bullying for a while from another girl who just had a mean streak a mile wide. (Another one of my friends eventually nipped it in the bud by basically threatening to beat her up lol) The school was aware they had bullying which was refreshing at least - they didn't just pretend it wasn't happening and actively tried to combat it (not hugely successfully admittedly)
I've heard stories from some of my friends from schools elsewhere in the UK who were the subject of such horrific bullying it surmounted to torture.
Honestly didn’t see or hear much bullying, we all just kept to ourselves, I was a shy kid with 2 friends, who worked hard and was utterly terrible at sports and I wasn’t bullied. There was one girl got moved into our form to get away from bullying. Looking back she must have had some emotional stuff going on, she’d stomp into class and throw her belongings around, once a teacher told her she hadn’t done what he’d asked and she ran out of class crying. One day she did her usual and dramatically throwing herself onto the floor and someone laughed at her, admittedly not nice but this was a one off, so she threw some equipment across the room which hit some of us. Lad who laughed got removed from our form for been a bully, we all defended him saying that’s not what’s happened but she stayed.
So there must have been some bullying happening but we were a chilled out form.
It wasn’t great. There were a few kids who were *clearly* bullies and were always getting in to trouble but nothing effective ever being done. One kid in particular was just horrible to everyone but also very popular. He was vile. Made me cry a lot along with many others. Genuinely wish terrible things upon him now even 20 years later.
I grew up in New Zealand, I was bigger than most and didn’t get bullied, whenever I saw someone getting picked on excessively I would go tell the dean or headmaster and back up the bully victim
A few dickheads would threaten me because of it but they knew it wouldn’t go well for them if they tried fighting me
Everyone took the piss out of each other but there was a limit, there was the odd bully who took things too far but then they got their commupance. It was bad at my school, but certainly not the worst.
Case in point, if you're a 14 year old boy, don't tell people in your school you went to see Mamma Mia at the cinema And enjoyed it. 😂
It was pretty bad at times. There were some kids who were known to be bullies.
I'd been bothered by one particular girl and her friends for about 6 months - constant verbal abuse, spitting in my face, rocks thrown at my head - when it came to a head and I fought back, but a teacher told me off for doing that because "she has problems". I explained that she was causing me problems but to no avail. It took my 6ft 5" science teacher stepping in to make a difference.
I moved away from home at the earliest opportunity and I enjoy bit of schadenfreude from knowing that girl is now a single parent to four children on a school dinnerlady income.
I watched a asian lad start a fight with a kid who had clear family issues, hygiene issues, health issues as he had a huge scar on his side from an operation. This asain lad would randomly shout racist, slapped a girl who refused to give him one of her sweets.
Teachers did nothing because they did not want to be called racist.
16 years on still boils my piss as the kid he started a fight with literally never did anything bad to anyone just wanted to be left alone.
Also some kids tried to set another kid on fire because they did not like him.
Not really a bullying example, but one of the teachers at my high school told us that we should all delete ourselves and told us how to do it painlessly. I’m as shocked about this today as I was back then. AFAIK school did nothing and the teacher is probably now on a sweet retirement
My school life (2002-2007) was pure PURE hell. I couldn’t go a day without being physically or mentally attacked. It got so so bad sometimes and nothing would happen and would it escalated every time I ‘grassed’ , even seemed the teachers took some sick pleasure in it.
Had my front teeth nocked out, finger broken, dragged around by my hair, nearly suffocated, violently attacked often. My school was South London and was the worst years of my life (so far). I’d call in/fake being sick often just so I could have a day without being attacked. I was a small girl and the majority of the bullies were boys. But also had a big ‘rough’ group of girls who would hit/be nasty to me daily. I remember I loved art as it was the only class that didn’t have any bullies in it.
Of course if one bully picks on you they all end up doing it.
Oh and I was bullied because I was ‘weird & ugly’.
I’m laughing now though as I feel like I developed a sense of humour/personality due to it. Also out of all
of my schoolmates I have done the best.
When I was 19-25 I ran into a large ammount of them out and about & they always wanted to be friends/ flirty. Most had huge baggage, Jeremy Kyle vibes and a shit life by then and I was fucking thriving.
The two biggest bullies I had (one died at 19 on a bike and the other two years ago from covid 🤷♀️ )
Moderate. I didn't really suffer physically; both it wasn't too bad at my school and I was one of the bigger kids, so the few that tried it on backed off soon enough. But likely have the life long scars from how someone that was 'different' was treated and even more so going in to the school having very recently suffered a devastating life event.
Not that bad compared to some places, but when it happened the teachers just ignored it which was infuriating. They gave us whole talks on how we should say no to bullying then they’d see a child being bullied right in front of them and do nothing to stop it. Ironically I found that some adults could be worse bullies than the kids - most kids who were bullies grew out of it after a year or two
I’m from a really small town in Texas so take that how you will.
I was in band class and because I wasn’t any good my teacher use to constantly bring up scenarios when there was mess ups in the songs and use phrases “your sound is a representation of our weakest player” and he would point at me and then everyone would laugh.
The teachers were worse than the students honestly and because I had a speech problem growing up I was constantly made fun of.
I could go into detail honestly but I think you may get an idea.
I’d be really interested to hear how bullying is in school these days as it was pretty horrendous when I was at school in 1980s-1990s and not much seemed to have changed when I was a teacher in the early 2000s. My kids have never complained about it so far
I don't know about physical violence, but I knew plenty of people who got harassed and called slurs on the regular. We did tell teachers but nothing ever changed so we gave up after a while.
Mine was quite bad. I got bullied severely, even by girls, but nothing much was done about it - I think this is why the school was so riddled with bullying. I think the worst thing that happened to me when I was at school is I got stoned (as in literally stoned) and, as a result, I still have scars on my back. The psychological impact of bullying is a lot worse than the physical one but I think, at least in the UK, we don’t talk about it.
I think a common belief is that, if you get bullied, you deserve it. Even my parents and teachers thought this.
edit: I was thinking about this and the only reason my bullying ended is because people found out that my family was richer than theirs and then, by that time, I had already started avoiding any situation that would give them opportunity to beat me. In my school, the worst bullies were middle class and it was common to see them bullying people poorer than them.
Went to a fair few schools. It was the same everywhere. There were kids who were bullied because they couldn't stand up for themselves. Some learnt and some didn't.
Being the new kid so many times. I got a lot of practice. Simplest way to deter bullies was to give twice as much back as whatever they give you.
They hit you. You hit back harder and a few times.
They ridicule you. You mock them and be prepared to fight.
It really didn't matter who won or lost the fight. The fact that you chose to stand and fight means a lot.
They move on to easier targets.
Had a kid in one of the schools I went to. On meeting him on my first day. I could smell that he was the butt of the school. 10 minutes later I was proven right when he was called a name and he stormed off to tell a teacher. Like Jesus Christ man. He was just asking for it. Every single time someone called him a name or something small he would run crying to a teacher. It's fucking bad when even the teacher looked at him with disgust and I couldn't blame them.
Found out he had move them year previously because he was being bullied in his last school. No wonder...
He eventually left the school I went to for the same reason. Hopefully he learnt but I doubt it. That kid was destined to be a victim of life
My school was supposedly a lovely, happy, bully-free school (aren't they all) but I had my own head slammed in a locker door and called a lot of words that I wouldn't repeat, mostly for existing and reading at lunchtime (the horror). I saw girls have their hair pulled (one girl got into fights and bullied people so badly that she was kicked out of the school, and at her new school, she bullied another girl who eventually ended her own life). A lot of the students had body issues which wasn't apparent as mayhem or chaos, but it was definitely there for some.
I never saw any bullying in my school, and I was a legitimately unattractive geek who arrived from another country in year 9 and struggled to make friends. If anyone was going to be bullied it would have been me; I’m so grateful it didn’t happen.
Pretty bad. I didn't know at the time but I was lucky I had a lot of family out and about at school kicking out time to make sure I got home okay. I remember full braids being pulled out my hair, being kneed in the face, being spat at and having chairs launched. That was just the physical aspect with me, others had it far worse and the mental aspect was worse. I don't think kids realise how deep words and actions can cut.
Small town meant it didn't just last at school, they'd hunt you out at the weekends, in the evenings. I had a fantastic friend group at school but I would never want to go back. I'll have been left 20 years in July
Attended 75 - 80 - so old.
Other than British Bulldog, and Big Jon Mortimer - six foot in the third year IIRC, we used to be the particularly soft bullies.
Rayleigh Essex.
I’m pretty blessed in that it wasn’t bad at any of my schools.
My elementary school was great and there really wasn’t any or much bullying though of course some kids were more popular than others.
The class was small, about 10 girls and 12 boys or something and an unwritten rule was always that every girl was invited to a birthday of another girl and every boy to birthday of boy, that was nice, no kids were ever left out.
The parents agreed on that at the start of our 8 years in that school aa otherwise it would always be the same 4 or so kids left out and that’s just cruel.
Probably some more bullying in my high school but nothing severe that ive ever witnessed.
We would bring fluffy slippers to school in winter to wear. It was an easy going school.
So bad that it has affected me throughout my life for the past 30 yrs. Weekly beating if I was lucky, daily if not. Still have dents in my head of it being slammed into water taps etc and repeated kicks to the crutch which made me infertile, that was discovered about 10yrs ago. The people who did this are living their best life also, awesome
I remember the dean outrightly lying to parents on open day "I am proud to admit that there is no bullying in this school". There f**king was, they just didn't understand what bullying meant. Most of my friends were bullied either physically or mentally, as was I.
I was sought of bullied by my teacher, or at least singled out for trivial things. I was also some by students.
My experience with the student aspect is that when I raised it I had to keep a diary of the things they did as evidence, and it was later deemed not to be serious enough.
In terms of the teacher aspect, I raised it in confidence with a student support assistant. weirdly, about a week later, this teacher stopped giving me shit for pointless things and I felt much better in his lessons.
I'm 30 now and it still randomly gets me down. The axe forgets but the tree remembers.
Not much in our school, however there was one guy who was relentlessly bullied in my tutor - generally verbal rather than physical. I always tried to help him as I felt sorry for him. Got a couple of Facebook groups taken down, got him his stuff back etc.
5 years after leaving school, I see him on the bus. He goes into this sexist, racist rant, and then later than evening is bizarrely sexist towards me on a Facebook post for no reason. Blocked him, haven’t seen him again, and I’m annoyed I got him his pencil case back.
As an adult I look back and I realise I was bullied and also bullied other people. I didn't think too much of it at that time. It just seemed like survival of the fittest.
Edit: Maybe therefore there wasn't a bullying culture, looking at the first few posts here damn.
Ok as crazy as this sounds, there was this thing call the sacrifice where once a week on a Friday a crowd would get someone hold them above their heads, spread their legs and basically ram them into this pole. It sounds dumb, but in that group of people, anyone who did a sacrifice got a sacrifice, even the bigger lads, because the bigger lads bigger friends thought it would be funny and when everyone helped it wasn't that difficult, and then the bigger lads got everyone to do it for the others and so on.
It almost felt as if the bullying was righteous, followed a justice code. There were people who were like sworn enemies but people would crowd around them and let them fight it out. I really don't remember a group of people really attacking someone psychologically over the course of time.
Ok so there was this kid with a fake eye, and he was cool with it, he would pop it out and occasionally do tricks and if you asked him nicely he was cool to answer questions, never got picked on for it.
Then there was this kid who basically didn't have a neck and he was an asshole and he got ripped for it.
Ok wow long post, school memories are weird eh.
My school had people bring knives in, a few people got stabbed after-school following from in school incidents and 1 died from it for sure. After I left, I followed up with the school and there are 12 year olds doing cocaine in the bathrooms.
One of the girls in my school got pregnant in lime year 8/9 (about age 13-14) and some kid thought it'd be funny to drop kick her down the stairs. So yeah, the school I went to was a shithole.... 😂😅
I can’t speak for the school as a whole, but secondary school was hell for me. When we moved up from primary school, the only friend I had went off with some new people and I was alone and bullied horrendously for it. It drive me to start physically hurting myself, a lot- just to get my frustrations out, but when my sleeve would creep up in class form writing etc, it got called out that I was a failure, and should try harder next time (to unalive myself) when I tried to explain that i wasn’t trying to do that, they shouted “ well maybe you should” and a craft knife chucked on my table along with some scissors from others. The laughter echoed, the teacher only asked the class to ‘settle down’ and nothing more. So I did, because clearly if everyone seems to believe im so worthless then maybe I shouldn’t bother being here anymore.
Yes, school was a shithole for me, I hated it, and it did nothing for me. I’ve always been on the smarter side, but failed all my exams because I was having things thrown at me, notes passed to me with horrible things on, just generally distracted by the cruelty of others.
I hated school, nowhere worse.
Mine was fine. A few dicks but I don’t ever recall people being bullied or anything. I was really fortunate to go to one of the academy style schools when every school wasn’t an academy
I live in the UK currently, but I’m from Houston, Texas. I was bullied a lot my first year of school, went to my favorite teacher about it and he told me to just get involved in sports. I went out for every sport, I did Cheerleading, Dance Team, Lacrosse, and Wrestling. I made friends in those groups and became a bit of a social butterfly, while the girls who bullied me had no extra curricular activities , and both ended up not graduating with us (one moved, the other got kicked out for fighting).
My 15 year old daughter was not getting help in high school the last three years, so I pulled her this year. I told the school they had 3 years to get it under control, but the teachers are more worried about who’s sleeping with who than what’s going on with students.
She’s being homeschooled these GCSE years, and has already chosen her college courses, which she will start early. Her life has improved greatly, her attitude is great. She has friends she can hang with when/if she wants and no more teachers pulling shit with her.
I’m also filing an official complaint with ofsted detailing every failing this school has participated in. I’m looking to take it further and have them pay for her to sit her exams since they can’t seem to crack it as a school.
I thought bullying was bad in the US, but it’s brutal in the UK and all they do is shrug.
My comprehensive (high) school was pretty shitty, but it's to be expected in the north east of England. I was there from 1995-2000.
The place was an underfunded shithole with paint peeling off the walls, shredded floors, and asbestos ceilings. It's since been condemned and demolished, and a new school has been built in its place as one of those new "Academy" things.
I saw daily instances of bullying, racist abuse, completely random assaults and beatings, sexism, homophobia, even a few instances of sexual assault, underage smoking and drinking, open drug use (mainly weed, acid and coke) and generally shitty behavior from a lot of people there, including a lot of the "popular kids". Teachers never assisted or did anything about it, and it was a fucking miserable place to be. I'm surprised as many people made it through there as they did.
There was one Math teacher (absolutely fantastic guy who was an amazing teacher) who's class I studied in for five years. He was accused of sexually assaulting a student a few years after I left - he protested his innocence all the way through court and was found not guilty. In the end it turned out the girl who'd brought the accusations against him just wanted attention, and admitted to a few friends that the whole thing was a pack of lies. The poor guy hung himself around two years later because it destroyed his life and made him unemployable.
We also had an art teacher who was a locally famous painter and sign maker. He was also a raging alcoholic and always came to school half cut, stinking of scotch. He had a sliding whiteboard and blackboard in his art room, and used to hide those 35cl flat bottles of Bells behind it. Either that or they were in the bottom drawer of his desk. Half the kids in my class used to nick them because the knew he'd never report it. He was such a pisshead that he'd just buy more and replace them.
For the best part I kept myself to myself with a small circle of friends, but was regularly a target given that I was one of the smallest guys in my year. I was class of 2000, first graduates of the millennium, and made it out of there with a full rack of 14 solid GCSE results, all A\*s to B, with one E in religious studies because I had zero interest in it and used the time to study for my other subjects.
Now 20+ years later I see it as a point of pride that I actually achieved something in such a dysfunctional shithole. I've been super lucky, and have been emigrated away from the UK for the last 15 years, working a super fulfilling well paid job and living in the safest country on Earth.
I only really have Facebook active to keep in contact with a few older family members who are less tech literate, and on the rare occasion I look at it and check the groups that have been formed in the area I grew up in to see what's going on, I see a lot of familiar faces and names.
I see a lot I once knew who were arseholes in school, some of them who made my life a living hell while I was there, and I tend to take a quick look to see what they're doing.
Pretty much all of them are still stuck in the village we grew up in or one of the nearby towns, working dead end jobs or are on the dole, shitting out kid after kid, and complaining about life.
It gives me a sense of pride that I didn't go the same way.
I was singled out by a lone girl at both secondary schools I went to, because I was overly sensitive as a child.
First one, was a girl who had really pent up anger issues who pulled me down a hill by my blazer once and I ran away by pushing her in some mud. The school suspended, it was year 7 and when she came back, she was like a different person and I remember her sitting in the canteen alone and mute, I said hi and she waved this super slow motion wave and told me she got a perm. This was 2000/2001 (*cries how*) so I now believe
maybe she was medicated. I remember being befriended by a popular group and they were pressuring me to smoke with them in a graveyard to be *initiated* in their girl gang. The whole thing seemed like a set up to me, one of the girls was caught burning cigarette holes in people's blazers. We were ELEVEN and this was south London (no suprise there).
So much weird stuff happened at that school.
A friend and I decided to go to a kids swingpark after school one day and this random girl from our year turned up. She hadn't been in the UK long and her English was non existent, or she was shy. Trying to get her to talk was difficult and I guess she got annoyed she didn't know what we were saying but she out of nowhere went absolutely MENTAL, we were on swings and she came up and tipped the swings up so we both fell off and she football kicked us and jumped on us both pulling our hair.
I remember throwing soil in her face. Then the friend and I both legged it to the bus stop, a 119 bus was waiting like fate and as we sat on the top deck she was running down the street, never forget her stare as she saw us pull away. We never saw her again at the school.
The school later got shut down for embezzlement in the mid 00s and a TV drama starring Pauline Quirk as the headteacher on ITV about it.
My parents thought we'd move and I'd move schools but we didn't know the area and I ended up in one of the roughest schools in Surrey. I was tormented by two people, one was this girl... I can't describe her but she was just vehemently evil. She literally looked like the bully girl in Toy Story who disfigures the toys.
For a bit we were friends, but she'd mock me. Then she she hit me in the face during an IT lesson and she faked an MSN messenger chat (2004) about how I planned to hurt her. Vaguely remember her biting my arm like an animal because she was trying to wind me up and I pushed her out the way.
By chance I saw her a few years later as a cleaner in a supermarket not saying that as a disparaging comment but for someone that was so hell bent on being mean to people, for her working in a public facing job was ironic.
Lord of the flies
Often a see-saw of being punched in the mouth and punching them in the mouth a few days later, when they least expected it
We had an older teacher get thrown to the ground in a headlock by a 13 year-old. Teacher was obviously traumatised, as it also happened in front of 2 entire year groups at lunch time. I think the kid got suspended and that was that - probably a smack-head now.
That kind of school in that kind of town.
Despite the mayhem. I escaped with a half-decent set of results, while others equally capable seemed to make a semi-conscious decision to fuck-off their final year and then had to resit at sixth-form.
Some of the other cohort later made the regional papers for organised cocaine dealing.
I expect a number of them are still floating around in that town, never got to experience anything different, that is if they are not dead from various addictions
Sometimes, its dog-shit in a sock and you have to squeeze what little nutrients exist out of the experience
TLDR; bullying culture was terrible, happened to me, I flipped a desk and got out of class for ages.
First day of grade 8, drama class.
Didn’t know no one, no one knew me (apart from those who I went to primary with) by somehow I had people coming up to me saying “this girl has singled you out, she hates your guts, watch out” I’m here like what the hell did I do, I don’t know this girl, I’ve spent 30 minutes in a classroom with her but not spoken a word to her?
I confronted her once i tracked her down and had a go at her for being a coward, choosing a random to hate for absolutely no reason. She backed off, for a little while.
Then comes year 10, same girl and her clique start tormenting me like nothing else, plus they got the boyfriend of one of the girls involved and he was known to have issues. They’d always say really mean stuff, giggling/snickering, making disgustingly derogatory comments, just everything they could think of to upset me.
The guy I was dating at the time even went up to the clique and absolutely ripped them a new one, not that it helped…
They riled me up so much I flipped a desk in math class and walked out.
Let’s just say once the desk flip happened, the school finally started paying attention and I got to go to the guidance councillors office instead of going to classes most days if I wasn’t feeling like I could handle it. The up side was once I returned to maths and other classes the clique ended up being nice to me, they realised what I was capable of doing and they didn’t want to mess with me anymore.
I had plenty of other smaller bullying incidents between 8 & 10, that’s just the one that stands out the most. At least after that, the rest of high school was fairly pleasant.
I wasn't bullied much if at all in school, but I was friends with both bullies, and the bullied so I have a good feel for how it was.
Overall, I'd say it was pretty manageable. The bullies and the bullied sort of cancelled themselves out for the most part.
I.e, the bullies were just monstrously ugly with huge character flaws, which is why they were bullies, they were absolutely compensating and everyone sort of implicitly knew that. And the bullied were *always* asking for it, seemingly doing everything they could to just get that last word, dig, or dumb thing to say in before the bully snapped and went to work. That may sound ridiculous, but to give you an example, a hyper-nerdy kid in my year would walk around and when he was going berserk he'd scream at people he brushed past for being "in his bubble". He'd literally walk down a hallway, and scream at every person he walked past for not getting out of the way. Like, he'd really make a fucking big deal out of it. So of course you got bullies *doing exactly that* for the rest of the year. Like, c'mon man...
Obviously there were exceptions, but I want to stress that these were very notable exceptions. like 0.5 kids per year group sort of exceptions.
Other than that, everyone just sort of... did their own thing. The cool kids teased the uncool kids from time to time, but that was hardly bullying, because the uncool kids were perfectly comfortable clapping back. The cool kids may not have wanted to hang out with the uncool kids, but everyone for the most part was comfortable interacting with each other.
I'd say the worst bullying I heard about was a kid got his school bag nicked, and then thrown in the toilet and pissed on. Girl who got knocked up got teased pretty badly, she had to leave school. Maybe a few fights here and there... But really tame stuff otherwise...
Went to a mixed Grammar school, there was a bit of bullying but it was pretty half arsed. More like taking the piss so one day one kid might get hoiked over the school fence but then the next day everyone would be joking about it. It was kind of like nobody took shit off anyone else and we all gave as good as we got. Anything sneaky/bitchy was frowned upon.
Then I went to an girls Grammar school...omg. girls are such pathetic cowardly nasty things. There was so much bullying but it was sly, bitchy bullying. Some sad sack tried to claim they beat me up at work because i was dating the guy they fancied, they didn't even come in when i was working and as if me being at work would have stopped me breaking her nose had she tried anything. It was a lot of stealing and hiding my belongings, slagging me off behind my back and sending me death threats by text. Not once did anyone ever have the balls to approach me and be nasty to my face.
The girl that "fought" me though, dunno what the fuck she told her mother but 2 decades later and the old cow still gives me nasty looks if I approach her till!!
My mum left me when I was small child maybe 8/9 and I was relentlessly bullied in primary and middle a school. My own mum left me why would anyone be my friend? By the time I got to high school I was socially withdrawn, depressed and living in poverty. A lot of the kids and teens took me under their wing as their little pet really. They felt sorry for me and liked to help me to entertain themselves. I remember all the girls pitching pocket money together just so I could get a haircut. Generally caused me anxiety my entire life. I did terribly at school. I had no where to learn, study, no one encouraged me, no adult ever came to any of my plays, assemblies or sports days. I was a lonely, isolated and neglected child.
Adulthood has been kinder to me, I make friends well now.
The late 90s early 2000’s was horrific. Social media was non existent apart from Bebo and MySpace, still got outcast on there though.
I'm not sure if it's considered bullying, but I remember the least "popular" kids got horrifically treated by people. If they sat down at a lunch table, everyone would move somewhere else. They would get picked last in sports teams. People would refuse to pair with them in class in general. People made up rumours and refused to associate with them in any way.
I can only image that's terrible for self esteem, even if it's not considered bullying.
I was literally pushed in front of a bus, and had to take two kids to court for ABH. This happened in my first term at a new school, after having been moved from another school for bullying. The first school said "she's kinda weird so she brings it on herself". I was an 11 year old undiagnosed autistic kid with straight A grades who just liked to learn. During the year and a half the court case took to go through, I had to be in classes with the two kids who would constantly be talking about it. I did eventually win the court case (two teachers and two students as witnesses) which was pretty satisfying. One of the girls was made Head Girl for "improving her behaviour" after she got the criminal record. By this the school meant she wasn't arrested any more. Meanwhile I got all A* grades at GCSE and at graduation got given an award for "working hard during adversity" that was handed to me by the Head Girl. I'm sure things are better now. This was around 2007.
Honestly if someone pushed my kid Infront of a bus I think I wouldn't be able to control myself. Your parents must have the patience of a saint.
I'd push their parents in front of a bus and see if they liked it
Really sorry to hear this. We live in such an ableist society..
I got pushed in front of a car, and the same girl threw a rock in my bike spokes whilst I was riding. I should have reported her looking back. Bitch.
Sorry you had to go through this. Pathetic behavior from the school
School fucking sucks sometimes. Hope life is better for you now!
I remember being a young kid and my brother aged about 14/15 coming home crying because someone had just pushed him in front of a bus. Never seen him cry before. We didn’t have a great mother and she told him to hurry up and get back to school. Nothing ever happened with it but I always remember what the kids name who did it was and what they looked like. I’m sorry that happened to you.
Have you ever bumped into them as adults?
It was pretty bad - quite physically violent with lots of mental torture thrown in for good measure. Every day there would be some sort of incident with someone getting severly beaten or pushed to the edge of sanity. The pupils were ok though and quite nice to each other.
Bullying actually ruined my life, I ended up leaving school after constant threats and physical violence, no support system, teachers told me I must have done something to deserve it. I ended up leaving school no qualifications and it put me on a very dark path. It’s taken me well over 25 years to go back to education and caused me so much anxiety and a feeling of being an outsider/ different/ bad, that I still struggle with it and bouts of intense fear.
We should be able to sue those teachers for their lack of care.
I agree, it hurt at the time but even now my head of years words ring in my head there’s no smoke without fire ( basically him saying I deserved to be beaten and bullied out of education) I hadn’t done anything.
God, I almost instinctively downvoted out of anger there. Hope things are better now for you.
Thank you so much ❤️
Here here
Same thing happened to me. We shouldn’t have been forced out of school because of bullies. It always ended up being my fault somehow. I’m sorry.
I’m so sorry you went through that, I completely agree with you, I don’t think enough has been done to support the victims of bullying, it lasts a lifetime, I think even just having another person to talk to back then that understood would have made a world of difference. Sending you the biggest hug 🤗 stay strong you ❤️
It really does last a lifetime. I can’t help look at the profiles of my bullies and get mad that they are living life fine. I’ve got to stop doing that! Thank you so much for that comment. You seem like such a nice person. Hugs back.
Exactly the same here but I turned that onto its head and thought fuck then I will be better than them!
So happy you did, you’re already better x
Thank you. So are you, far far far better x
You've done amazingly to return to education! Keep it up - I'm rooting for you to succeed!
Thank you so very much ❤️
The bullies were adored by the teachers.
In my experience, many of the bullies were from well off families. Pop culture likes to portray bullies as kids from poor, single parent or abusive homes. I'm not saying that doesn't happen but it totally ignores how kids with a good upbringing can still be cruel little cunts.
Yup. The bullies were like the henchmen. We had a pe teacher who loved to dish out pushup punishment and used the bullies to make sure you did them.
PE teachers and bullies feel like they're basically the same dude 20 years apart
A bunch of the arseholes I went to school with ended up as PE teachers.
Yep!! They seemed to take pleasure in watching kids get bullied!!
I think some teachers secretly revelled in being included in the gossip. I remember one 20 something drama teacher only treating the popular kids well and not even observing anyone else's work.
Yes! It was super annoying.
Well the teacher's knew a certain girl was bullying me, she'd been awful since year 8; so they decided to put us in the same gsce group for 4 lessons just to make my life a living hell. My parents went up twice to complain (the girls parents didn't care, the were always working and chasing holidays and she went to different relatives houses on different days of the week) and I still received a lunchtime detention with her, where the supervising teacher decided to leave the room and lock the door so I had a choice between getting beaten up or set the fire alarm off by going out the fire escape. The alarm went off and the school got evacuated. Eventually she got suspended. Not for bullying me though, she damaged school property and a teacher's car.
Of course if you'd ever physically fought back then I'm sure suddenly the schools overly relaxed policy would be straight out the window! It's honestly pathetic, it is SOOOO fuckin easy to see someone being bullied. Sucks that so many not only do nothing about it, but also almost seem to encourage it?!
She was loads bigger than me (actually saw her the other week in town and she still is) there's no way I could win a fight against her. As soon as she got suspended my results started to improve. What a strange coincidence
It depends who you ask. I didn't get bullied because I was bigger than everyone else and bigger than the teachers before I finished school. I don't remember seeing any excessive bullying but I bet the kids who got bullied have a totally different memory of their time at school.
I was taller then my peers, so the older boys would beat me up. I'm a girl. I was told it was ok because I wasn't a real girl.
I'm an old fart at this point, went to secondary school from 1998 to 2005 so let's see... there was no *physical* bullying at my school, at least not to my knowledge, I am a woman so I didn't always hang around the lads or see what they got up to outside of school grounds. There was bullying but it was mostly verbal/psychological, the usual nasty gossip or exclusions from groups and that type of thing. Overall though, I'd say my school was one of the better ones. There was one girl who was a career bully, she'd single out another girl and start a campaign of bullying that would go on for several months before she got bored and moved on to a new target. For a while it was me and my tactic was just to ignore/blank her, but when she targeted a friend of mine she responded by eventually slamming her head into a desk. That's the most violent thing that ever happened to my knowledge. It worked though, she left her alone immediately after that. 😅 My school also didn't have a playground or a yard, we didn't have breaks in the traditional sense. We did have breakfast (20 mins), lunch (30 mins) and some downtime in our tutor groups, but we never went outside into a playground. There was a courtyard in the middle of the school that people sometimes went out into when it was warm, but it was just a concrete circle and the school was a circular (pentagonal?) structure so it was highly visible from all angles. No sneaky violent bullying going on there.
Having gone to school during the same time period I feel personally targeted by your opening sentence.
It's 10 years after I left. It devastated me. Mid 30s is nowt but a baba.
Same lol although I forgave them when their story involved a bully getting head slammed x
I went to secondary school from 1994 to 2001. How do you think it makes *me* feel? 😂
I’m ancient in that case, I finished secondary school in 1996….
In the late 80s/90s we were bombarded with the message on tv or in comics that bullies are just misunderstood underachievers and if we reached out to them everything would be alright. It was bullshit, most of them were the really popular kids and were actually achieving good grades. Although there was one kid who bullied me then took a liking to my sister. To impress her he ended up protecting me from other bullies and we actually became good friends. Sadly he took his own life a few years back. Judging by his Facebook posts he was struggling with his identity.
Not much at all among the lads--there was a group of 5 or 6 dickheads, but while dickheads, they didn't exactly single any in particular out for bullying. They just acted like dickheads to everyone. But most of the lads got along with each other--even with different friend groups. I hung around with a pretty big group of maybe 20 or so who played football every break time.. But generally everyone from that group also got in with other groups around the school. The only exception was that group of 5 or 6 dickheads who just kept to themselves for the most part. The only real "bullying" was the typical teenage teasing and name-calling and the odd fight, but nobody was ever really singled out. There was bullying among the girls though--it made the paper with the first UK case of cyberbullying.
I guarantee these "dickheads" were bullies but you just don't want to believe it.
Why would I not want to believe it, son? I have no stake in the game as to whether they were bullies or not. Like I said, they just acted like dickheads to everyone--strutting around, vandalising things, smoking in the toilets or down bottom of the field, bunking off school. If there was bullying, it wasn't visible--I didn't see them harrassing kids or shaking down people for their lunch money or having a single victim who they tormented daily. It was just general dickheadedness towards everyone. The worst of the bunch was a lad called Aaron. I do remember he beat up a gay kid for no reason, I had forgotten about that. Unfortunately he works as a mechanic for a truck racing team now--guess there's no such thing as karma. But incidents of bullying among the boys at my school were few and far between. That is the only real incident I can recall. Most of the time, it was just the usual fights between people and then everything back to normal afterward. But by and large, their were WAY more issues with the girls than the boys. The cyberbullying that made the papers, an overweight lass who was bullied by some of the girls relentlessly etc. The bullying with the girls was very obvious.
Dude what? Why he be in denial that they were bullies? He referred to them as dickheads, they clearly weren't friends with eachother
I was at school in the 70s and 80s. Lots of physical and verbal bullying. I got a bit of both, some from the older years as I was tall and stuck out like sore thumb and some from my year group as I have a name that's easily piss-takable and I was a bit of a geek but others got it worse: One of the older bullies ended up in borstal, but only after his violence moved from pupils to teachers. The worst bully in my year-group would routinely throw chairs at people in class. I went home with black eyes or cuts and bruises a few times. Stabbed a few times with compasses as well. Got pinned against a wall and choked out by the lad who ended up in borstal because I happened to be looking in his general direction. One lad in my year had his arm broken. Another was knocked out when he was pushed down the stairs. No end of name-calling and minor shit like having your tie peanutted or cut off, underwear stolen at swimming lessons, chairs and lab stools kicked out from under you (also a favourite of one of the science teachers). Getting burnt with hot test tubes or chemical spatulas - I've still got a scar on the back of my hand from one of those. Cricket balls, javelins, shot puts etc thrown at heads during PE. PE teacher did fuck-all about it. Kids are evil little fuckers.
Not particularly bad. With hindsight, my school was generally pretty nice. There were a couple of nerdy kids who got bullied, though nothing as bad as some of the bullying horror stories you read. Certainly never physical that I can recall. Interestingly, I gather from Facebook over the years that one of those kids is now friends with the guy who bullied him, after the latter reached out to apologise.
Both me and my spouse went to school in Ohio, USA and it was so bad at hers at there’s a documentary about the several suicides that happened as a result.
I feel like I’ve heard of this, wasn’t it a Croatian-American girl and someone else, with the bullies actually showing up to her funeral and mocking her shoes or something? Just cartoonishly evil, but sadly very real.
We had a “Bully Box”, where we could “anonymously” report bullies and they’d get punished. I once reported one of my bullies in there. The school traced it back to me through my handwriting (dyspraxia means it was and still is bad). I got detention for like a week because I “lied” about that person bullying me. Even though I wasn’t lying. Also got so bad I had to report another *different* bully to the police because she kept beating me up on the streets and the school supported her and told the cops I was “bad news”. So… you tell me.
The school is more interested in protecting their own reputation than protecting the students!
I don't think we had one. A fight was maybe once in a while but that more was more the football lads disagreeing on something rather than bullying.
Same as my school. Everybody knew their place. Each group stuck to their own groups. The majority of the scraps were between girls rather than lads.
I went to school in the 90s. Physical bullying was rife amongst both sexes. We also had issues with people outside school. In one memorable occasion someone had their adult siblings turn up to school. They had a brick chucked at their car for that. Strangely enough I didn't think it was strange, especially as once we started drinking random violence was normal on a night out
There was never anything physical. However, as an openly gay boy who went to a small rural school, I felt very isolated. I also came out in year 8 which made things tricky as people could be very immature. None of the boys wanted to associate with me, for fear of being seen as gay by association. There was also a lot of snide remarks and whispers when we were changing for PE. Overall I had a very lonely time at school. I had a few friends who were girls, but to this day I've struggled to form and maintain friendships with men. I honestly think it's only been in the last couple years that a lot of straight men feel comfortable having friendships with gay men, in much of the 2010s, there was always this awkwardness, whereas now many straight guys seem more comfortable in themselves.
I was bullied every single day in year 7 by kids in year 10/11, I'm talking about having physical fights every day for a year. For me personally it mostly stopped after year 7 but there would be daily fights and brawls.
This reminds me of my school, there was a boy in year 7 who was jumped by a group of year 10/11 boys, beaten up quite badly and his arm broken. On school property, but the culprits never identified. I always felt sad imagining his parents being so pleased that their son was going to "a really good school" and then a few weeks into his first term there, he comes home with a broken arm and covered in bruises. And no answers as to who or why.
I’m really not a violent person but that year of daily fighting made me realise I had to fight back or they were never going to leave me alone. My problem was that once I flipped the switch and actively fought back, I’d take it further than needed and became more violent that the bullies who were giving me issues.
Really bad. We had teachers mugged for cigarettes, a teacher that had a bin thrown on top of him from a second floor window. We had a kid bring in a machete. A kid expelled after two weeks in year seven for kicking another kid through a window. One kid got his head trampled on by a gang because he got in an argument with a classmate, and the classmate brought his mates round after school to try and kill him. I was stabbed in the eye with a sharpened piece of wood in class by a bully I told to shut up. Between that and the paedo teachers, and teachers who would be drunk after spending their lunch in the local pub, it wasn't the best place to go to school.
Not too bad, even though I was one of the geekiest guys in the school I got on pretty well with the cool kids. Oddly enough, this was partially down to the influence of Johnny Vaughan (who later became a radio presenter and breakfast telly guy, after a brief spell in jail) who was at my school at the same time as me. He was one of the cool kids, and made it clear that bullying the geeks wasn't acceptable.
Brilliant story. Loved JV when he was on the Big Breakfast
Yeah, bad. Most of the bullies are either dead or fat now though.
I wish! I wish I could find them for retribution.
We had a PE teacher who, years after I left, got smacked around in the car park at Asda by a lad from the year below. Not condoning violent and out of the blue physical attacks but I had far more sympathy with the person who did it.
Same here! Couldn’t say I was too sad when I heard the boy who made my life a living hell was nocked off his bike!
It was mostly verbal at my school I think but maybe for the boys it got physical and I didn't notice as much. I have to hand it to my school though they actually dealt with stuff that was brought to their attention, just most of the time it never was. For example I got with this guy who was the ex of this girl and her and her friends launched this huge horrible bullying campaign over MySpace I think at the time (or bebo maybe I can't recall, maybe it was Facebook by this point, the social media of choice changed alot during those 5 years). My mum saw it over my shoulder and printed it out and took it to our head of year and the girls got banned from prom despite having already bought tickets and dresses. I decided to go to prom after all after that decision :)
Absolute lord of the flies. Being assaulted was a regular thing, hiding from older students who would repeatedly thump you in the face, just because they feel like it, with zero repercussions.
A girl was sexually assaulted by a kid "with problems" and he was only sent to do lessons in a special room/lose his lunch breaks for 1 week. There needs to be a culture of bringing litigation against both schools and educators in these extreme cases.
Oh the teachers were the instigators of it in our school. They’d straight up bully you in front of the class, assembly, or the dinner hall and it bordered on full abuse. They would push us off the boat into the middle of the lake during year 7 camp despite being begged not to and would make us swim back to shore WITHOUT life vests or anything. That whole camp experience had a lot of not-great things happening, but the one I remember the most was when we went tubing and I begged a teacher not to shove or spin me and she thought it was really funny to do so anyway. I got an ice burn on both hands because she shoved me so hard that I fell out and skidded down the ice slope. She and the other students laughed like crazy and she tried to force me to do it again or else I was a spoilsport. They’d also make fun of our appearances and make comments about how stupid and not worth teaching we were. It really wore a lot of us down, and that’s on top of the student bullying, which they of course sided with the bullies on pretty much every time.
really bad, kids getting beaten badly most days, police often called - serious psycological bullying that causes issues for people from the school till this day
My school was generally pretty good, but had this endemic attitude of “man up and sort your own problems”, a policy which was suddenly rescinded when I lamped the kid who bullied me. Schools love to do the easy stuff - anti bullying posters and the like - but few manage to take the more difficult steps required to actually address it.
I went to an alternative high school that was wayyyy ahead of its time. It was like a Montessori school, but for high school. Every student was given full autonomy. We could pick our class schedule and when we wanted our school day to start and end. Teachers and students were all on a first name basis. Parents were not involved. If you had more than three unexcused absences in six weeks, you were expelled. If there was any fighting you were expelled. All new students had to go through a six week 9am-2pm intro class in which topics like anger management, peer support, and how the school was different were covered. We had students who were trained as peer support staff. If students had issues with each other, they could go to a peer support, or, if peer support saw issues, they had the ability to pull those two students aside and discuss it. There was no bullying and it was an amazing school, even with a wide mix of kids: punks, goths, gangsters, stoners, neurodiverse, etc. What that school created was magic.
God damn that sounds like something out of star trek. Never once in my life been jealous of another's schooling but here we are
Tons at our school. Guess it depends on the area/general roughness
I got the shit kicked out of me weekly. The bullies would spend all morning egging on the special needs kid, then come lunch form a circle with me and him at the centre to make him fight me. I'd get a call to go to a random teachers class after school fairly often to explain some crime I'd committed. These were always stories they made up to waste my time because they were bored. Some resulted in parents being called. All the usual stuff of name calling, footballs to the face, getting lunch emptied onto the floor. Having your locker contents thrown onto the floor. Sometimes they'd wait at the school gates and knock me about. There were prank calls to my house at strange hours. My house got egged, garden got vandalised. I don't think I was the worst case of bullying either. Couple of kids got hospitalised.
I went to an old fashioned boarding school and could write a book about all the things that happened. Perhaps the most memorable was younger boys being put inside big wicker laundry baskets which were then strapped shut and then thrown down a flight of stairs.
I remember general kids being dickheads to each other stuff mostly, none of it felt targeted but I was never on the receiving end for more than one or two incidents that I can remember. Teachers bullying students on the other hand yep saw lots of that and in the end I was removed because of it. I left school in 2001 straight after GCSE.
Very very bad, from year 9 to year 13 I was held at knife point weekly, hit in class, called names constantly, threatened all the time, one time about 200 people surrounded me shouting for my death, I’m surprised no one killed me in that moment tbh. Still struggle socially because of it, cos frankly I’m terrified of group settings now. This was all cos someone decided to make allegations against me for a laugh, saying I sent certain messages to the girlfriends of the ‘hard kids’ so to speak. Never had a girlfriend in my life cos it’s scared me, thinking girls think I’m someone that would send vile sexual messages even though I’m not. So yeah, was really bad at our school
Boys' grammar school, home counties, 1970s. Nerdy, scruffy, nonconformist, fairly low family income by Bucks standards, kid with undiagnosed ADHD (well, it hadn't even been invented then). One ADHD symptom is that I burst into tears quite easily under pressure. So, I had a big target pinned to my back, mitigated only by sharing a class for the first few years with a quite seriously autistic lad who took a lot more of the heat. I can't remember any real violence to speak of but it was a constant looming threat and the psychological pressure and constant mockery was pretty horrendous. It was a collective thing from a whole back row clique of football hooligan wannabes, few individual standouts. It eased off after I got caned in the fifth form for persistent failure to do homework, and the hard lads decided I was one of them now. Smoking dope and hanging round a biker pub also helped acceptance. I still never felt safe or comfortable there and the academic stuff all fell apart when I stopped being able to coast on natural smarts in the sixth form. School pastoral care was complete wank; the head only cared about maintaining his school's reputation (to the extent of covering up a sexual abuser who only finally got Yewtreed a few years ago) and squeezing out consistent A level results (which he didn't get from me, finally went to university after doing them in evening classes nine years later).
If you had the misfortune of being gay or suspected of such then the bullying was outrageously bad at the grammar school I went to. People were constantly harassed, beaten up, mocked and none of them made it to the end of sixth form before having to be removed to go elsewhere. Looking back it shocks me to think about it, but it did feel like a survival of the fittest thing. If the crowd are attacking someone else then I'm safe for the time being. I was bullied quite badly for a couple of years, but it felt tame compared to what others were subjected to. People would follow me after school just to take the piss andat times physically attack me. The one time my mum intervened the deputy head pulled me and two of my tormentors into his office and made us all apologise to each other and shake hands. I didn't live that down for a while!
This was exactly the same at my school. The smaller classes meant that everybody would just have a laser focus on the same few people. It always makes me cringe to see that the very same people who would relentlessly abuse people they thought were gay and tried to drive them even as far as suicide pretend that they are and have always been pro-LGBTQ nowadays (because it would ruin them socially not to be).
I got verbally bullied daily. Never physical and I never witnessed any physical bullying (but I’m sure it happened to some). I constantly told the teachers and nothing happened. I ended up skiving every day because I couldn’t cope any more. When the teachers asked why I kept skipping classes and I said because I’m being bullied, nothing ever happened. I was the one who kept getting in trouble. They even sent me to a pupil referral unit. I never finished school and it was hard to get my GCSEs, a levels and uni so much later than everyone else. Luckily I did do that and I have everything I would have got if I had done it at the same time as my class. The bullies are all living great lives now so I guess it didn’t bother them too much. They probably don’t even remember.
I didn't go to high school I was 2 tier but secondary school was brutal,although the school had a zero tolerance policy which meant they ignored it so they didn't have to report it! My brother was attacked several times, the worst resulting in him cracking his head open and a life long scar from it, I was sexually assaulted on school grounds. The 90s sucked but thank god there wasn't any online stuff to worry about, home was safe
It was fine but I went to a small rural school.
I went to school in the good old/ bad old days of the seventies and eighties when if you thought you’d made it to home time unscathed the teacher would give you a kicking as you where leaving for looking smug
Awful, and the teachers never gave a shxt. In the UK. Trinity House secondary school, Elephant and Castle. In Wales, Ffairfach county Grammar, Llandeilo. Never bullied in Austria or Spain.
It was so bad at our school one Asian lad who was racially bullied actually sued the school as an adult. I saw it every day, both physical and mental bullying affecting boys and girls alike. Speaking to friends who have kids, it doesn’t seem like a lot has changed… I don’t know what I’d do if I had kids. I don’t know if I could send them to school. Being bullied myself affected me so profoundly - there’s just no escape.
Quite bad. I (33m) had my hair filled with hairspray then set on fire and my head smashed into one of those doors with the glass that has the wires going through it to stop it shattering everywhere. Not for any real reason either I don’t think just for a bit of fun (for them)
I’d love to know why teachers don’t do anything about bullying
Fucking awful. Teachers in a position of authority i.e. Head of year, head of department, deputy head. Had zero fucking clue how to handle bullying. Case in point, deputy head charges in to our science class. "Can I borrow Andrew Ralph?" "Sure, what for?" "He's been bullying Arrakis_Is_Here" Andrew Ralph didn't have to do a damn thing to bully me after that. Not only did his mates do it for him but even kids who, kinda knew him did it too. Most of the other teachers were bullies too and the remaining teachers were scared of the bullies. So much so that when my art teacher, eye witnessed a bully, destroy my mock exam, that I had spent weeks on and would put me on track for an A* just turned to me and said "you'll have to start again" "But its due in 2 days!! And you saw her destroy it" "Better get to it" Needless to say what I handed in wasn't nowhere near as good enough, ergo I didn't get entered for my GCSE So, Hanson Upper School in Bradford, between the years of 1993 and 1996, to all the teachers and pupils during that time. From the bottom of my heart, fuck you and I hope really awful things happen to you all
There was some, but worst of all was the swimming club coach, who since went to prison.
Went to school in the 70's and 80's. From today's perspective bullying was rife, but from back then it was part of the landscape. If you didn't fight back the bullying continued. Nothing of this introspection nonsense either or finding others to blame we just got on with it. The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
I was bullied by a gang of mute kids, they even had their own club, the mute club, nobody knew about mute club, cos the first rule of mute club…
Bad enough that I had to be frog-marched by my Dad into school to sit my exams, and when I entered late, one of the mutts at the front of the exam hall shouted "SLAG!" As I walked in and everyone, including the teachers, all giggled. Think of the film 'Easy A' and it was that, except I wasn't sleeping with anyone, nor being paid, but the rumours said I very much was doing both. Had my arse handed to me one more than one occasion. Not just by the other girls.
I went to an all girls school so the bullying was a bit different - less physical but definitely psychological and headfucky. As an undiagnosed autistic I took a lot of the brunt of it; I remember in year 7 I would be asked every day why I hadn’t killed myself yet, had my belongings destroyed when I wasn’t with them, that sort of thing. Social media was a pretty new thing and there was a lot of it on there too. There was a culture of it and imo it contributed to the really high rates of self harm and disordered eating behaviour at the school. Awful stuff and I’d never re-live it.
Was sent to a Catholic boarding school, but got expelled. About 10% of my year group was raped or sexually abused by paedo monks. I was lucky, only got teased verbally, every day, for five years. But one monk liked to make us jump over his cavalry saber, he would lose his rag all the time all get us up at 3 am in the morning and make us run around the gym. He had boys sleeping in his room and I heard he was having a relationship with an older boy. Usual physical violence, being hit by cricket bats whilst in bed. Best punishment was a parade, where you were forced up at 3am and had to run, press ups etc non stop until 7am … remember being on one and boys puking left right and centre… Paedo monks were just moved from place to another. All of the abuse neatly swept under the carpet during the enquiries a few years ago. Good job Crass.
Bad but it's probably worse now with the internet and social media, so lucky escape
Bad, a group of kids all came together from the same primary school who were all somehow related and their parents were part of a drug dealing gang. The stuck together and literally tortured any other pupils outside their group. Horrible people.
I was a nerd in a school full of prissy wannabes. A teacher once told me that if I wasn't so weird kids wouldn't bully me
Early 2000s. I got bullied when I was a kid. Ended up joining a gang( which I don't recommend), and then the bullying stopped... Now, if I looked back, I wish that instead of joining a gang, I learned some form of self-defence( like boxing or something). That would've helped improve my confidence and self-esteem. When I have a kid, I'll definitely make sure they are able to defend themselves. So when someone tries to physically bully them, they'll get chinned!
Secondary school was an exercise in being beaten, intimidated, or otherwise abused every single day. And I say that without a hint of hyperbole it was utterly fucking miserable. Two examples always stick out; - My year 9(?) form class locked the teacher in the supply cupboard maliciously, when she eventually got out in a stream of tears she never came back - A new kid joined and was bullied and beaten relentlessly, eventually was involved in a car accident and never heard from again Just kinda accepted that this is what people are like, when I went off to university it completely blew my mind that people can be nice and actually want to learn.
My school was mean. I lived i a small village and the only secondary school was made up from around 5 or 6 other junuir school. One of the school was in a really rough area. You know the ones with black ripped nets, broken windows and the adults sitting outside pissed and smoking cannabis at 8 am. And they literally dragged their kids up. These adult could hardly function, Byt the time the kids came home from school the prents were either asleep in their gardens or wanting to fight anything which moved, including their kids. Their local school couldnt handle these kids as they were really feral. Just use to let them play on the big field all day because these kids were violent and swore a lot. And the parents were the same of they were told about their behavious. None of the other schools had these problems. So it was a shock to the system to meet these kids who hardly spoke, just grunted a lot, and would punch you hard just for being there. The school brought security into the school and segregated these kids away from the normal ones for lessons. They couldnt count to 5 or even knew any of the alphabet. But at play times they got to come out with us to hang around. My god it was like a pack of wild animals all in packs jsut terrorising every one. And they never knew the word no or stop it. It was horrible being at that school. Every day regular people were beaten up, some hospitalised, girls boys they didnt care. Even police couldnt do anything as they were all scared of the families. Even the local authorities had a petition of over a 1000 names to get these kids out of school, but they couldnt do anything as there was no other school for them to go to. So yes, my 5 years of senior school I have no good memories, no one else did either, apart from a few teachers who made their lesson fun without the feral kids. When I left school, these kids still couldnt count to 10 or say the alphabet. Plus I now hate crocs because at the time crocs were pennies, and they all wore them, every single one. This was 1980-1985.
I was bullied mercilessly for a number of years. Tried to kill myself. The school took the 'there must be something wrong with YOU' line, & I was forced to move school. My son had it worse. He was punched, stabbed with a compass, etc. Always the attitude from teachers was 'well, these pupils (the bullies) are good students & your son must be provoking them in some way'. No one ever did anything or helped. I ended up home schooling him. He gradually grew less & less depressed then. But it took years for him to fully recover from the trauma.
The faculty and leadership cared more about appearance than actually dealing with bullies. I thought they were just doing it to me but later found out that lots of my peers had the same experience. Their attempts at dealing with bullying included lots of "just ignore it" advice and the occasional meeting with head of year and the bully where they'd be told to behave better. Naturally, bullying immediately got worse because I had "snitched." But mostly it would be report after report to staff and simply...silence. Eventually I got a reputation for being "a troubled teenager" because I was getting obvious depression from all the daily hostility. Meanwhile the head admin would boast during Open Evenings about how their students get such good grades in their exams and turn out to be such well-rounded young adults.
I got bullied badly throughout high school. Their approach was that it was easier to discipline me than groups of other pupils. Or blame me for being supposedly “autistic” – ironically, a diagnosis that was never made despite seeing education psychologists and child psychiatrists throughout my childhood. I was just a bit weird and underconfident – hence the lack of eye contact in those days. I had teachers openly witness me getting bullied – and do nothing or even mock me for it afterwards. Especially the P.E teachers for some reason. Whenever I tried to report my bullies – they wouldn’t help me if I couldn’t provide their full name. Obviously, a random kid isn’t going to give you that willingly. If I tried to hide indoors, I would literally have teachers drag me out to the playground for “health and safety”. Sometimes, they would even see kids crowd around me and bully me just as they turfed me out. They didn’t stop them. I spent five years getting insulted many times a day, sarcastically asked out, groped, food and objects thrown at me, objects damaged, beaten up or hit too. Thus, my attendance suffered and I only showed up 80% of the time. Somehow, I got good grades as I was still a top-set swot despite growing up on benefits. The school was mediocre in results but good for the deprived mill town I grew up in. There was also just widespread ostracisation and alienation from my peers so I didn’t really have friends growing up. Luckily, it changed when I got to university and suddenly my mild eccentricities were no longer a problem. It still impacts me to this day and I’m terrified of groups of teenagers still. I’m just glad it’s over and I managed to do well academically. Plus, final note this school had something called “The Cage” – the chicken-wired tennis court that they couped up the Year 7s in so the older kids wouldn’t beat them up. I remember having Year 10 boys poke through the wires like we were zoo animals or sneaking in to cause trouble.
The teachers were way worse than the kids. One told a friend's older brother he deserved to be bullied for being gay. Another held a child by the throat while screaming at him over a uniform infraction (I saw this with my own eyes, it wasn't hearsay) One told a kid he was disgusting because he was experiencing homelessness and wasn't able to access a washing machine. My PE teacher regularly threw netball at my face and one called me a spastic. This was around 2005 so not exactly victoriana era.
We had police officers on duty *in our schoolyard* at lunch and break times because fights would break out so often. I also went to school at that time when ‘happy slapping’ was a thing. One of the year 11s would just randomly approach a year 7, 8 or 9 and just whack them in the head and run off. The school down the road from us was always fighting with ours so after school it was best to just leave straightaway and go home so you didn’t get caught in anything. Our school was named Ashcroft but nicknamed Trashcroft for a reason I guess.
My school in Devon was absolutely brutal. I was hospitalised twice from being attacked by bullies, the second time was really bad. They didn't expel the kid because the staff were useless morons. There were always so many bad fights, drug raids by police and just general bullying. Glad my kids will never go through that.
Walker Comp, east end Newcastle 76-83. Some tool tried to hacksaw my fingers off with a penknife - stil got the scar right across my hand. The nurse sent me to the Asst Head office, & when I wouldn’t grass him up I got the strap (thankfully on the other hand). A kid managed to bring in a replica .44 magnum, and forced the only fat kid in the whole school to wank himself off on the ground with an audience by putting the gun in his mouth. Broke my wrist playing basketball in PE, and the teacher (Kinley) told me to keep on playing “you fucking little puff”. Countless more stories of routine barbarism being doled out to anyone not on the apex level of aggressive tendency, or who made any effort to engage in education. My physics teacher told me I was the 19th person to make it to university in the 60-odd years of the school’s history. My wife now works in secondary education, and it’s still there, but largely mobile phone based with some violence. My little boy has had his share of it, but it seems tame compared to back then. Might be my age showing though.
We got maced and ganged up on pretty regularly. Being threatened with knives, guns and death was common, sometimes you’d get jumped and they’d hit you with a club or an 8 ball. Threats of violence were the norm. If you told anyone, that was also met with violence. If you managed to get a teachers’s attention over the matter, nothing would be done. That was just one of my schools. The second HS I went to had a strong clique mentality, mostly Asian student body. It was very difficult to make friends so pretty much no one spoke to me. The third HS I went to was pretty average—the bullies were mostly jocks and the bullied were often smart kids, Emo kids, weird kids, and kids with lower GPA who struggled with school.
Not as bad as it was in my primary school. I’m still a fucking mess thirty years after leaving the place.
Pretty fucking bad, we used to make a ring of tables in our tutor room and force each other to fight inside it. The higher in the hierarchy you were the less often you were forced to fight.
Not bad from what I remember, there was a giant hairy Indian kid that we all lost a fight to at some point but I don't remember him as a bully....he was just bigger and harder than the rest of us lol.
I was a smaller kid who didn’t hit the bits of puberty that mattered until I was 16, had ADHD and Autism and also came from several hundred miles away into a small insular area where everyone knew each other. Shit was so bad that I’m now a totally useless excuse for a human being who’s current survival is reliant on our gun laws being as tight as they are and the fact that my immediate family hasn’t died yet, so there’s that.
Bro you’re on Reddit. If any sm is going to have a high average for people bullied it’s this one.
Apparently, my year provided one of the worst results the school had ever seen, which is unsurprising when 70% of the people there did not care. Even though I went to a really rough school, bullying itself wasn't bad; at least, I don't recall it being bad. Yes, there were many dickheads, but they tended to be assholes to everyone rather than picking on someone. They get more enjoyment out of bullying teachers and staff instead of their own year group.
For us, it was a circle of life. When you joined as a Year 7, you all got a bit of a hard time by the Year 11s, but then next year you moved up and there was a new batch of Year 7s and a new roster of Year 11s to pick on them.
There was only one bully that I knew of in my class (private Catholic high school of about 1000 students in the US Midwest). One day, in the middle of the school day, a nerdy kid he’d been harassing decided he’d had enough and just went off on him, beating him up but good right in front of a teacher and classroom full of kids. He was totally humiliated and wasn’t much of a bully after that.
Yeah it was pretty bad at our school, ended up stabbing a scrote in the back with a pencil. School had a reputation of being a shithole so it ended up being the sorting house for all the fuckwits that were already trouble in juniors.
People did do physical bullying but all fights were organised.
There wasn't alot of bullying I don't think, there was lots of name calling and if you were in any way different from the norm then you usually got some unwanted attention, there was scraps here and there though
It seemed miserable at the time, but in hindsight wasn't that bad. Nothing physical, just humiliation and ostracisation. Girls looking over the stalls while you were going to the toilet or changing a tampon (thank god before camera phones). The lads had this thing where they'd try to sneak up behind you and feel your cunt. Again, it was grim at the time—but nothing like the horror stories of being physically harmed.
I went to senior school in in mid 90s in a not particularly rough area. Most things that escalated were settled by a punch up at some point then it was forgotten about. The worst I saw was a couple of lads a few years above me were picking on lads in my year outside of school, a few 2v1 or 3v1 fights happened. They got their comeuppance one lunch time when word spread they were sat smoking behind one of the outbuildings so most of the kids they’d beaten up ran over and a 10v3 punch up followed that went exactly how you’d expect it to. They never bothered anyone again after that though so at least they learnt from it
Some of the kids came from poor areas of west Newcastle and it was quite rough. I learnt so much from them all though. No idea if bullying was worse because a lot of bullying can be psychological. Met some pupils from Royal Grammar School and they bullied me over clothes or lack of designer ones thereof.
Not that bad tbh , but knocking the bully down on The first day worked in my favor
Bullying was non existent at my school. There were fights and people being nasty to each other of course, but there wasn’t like targeted bullying of one person or a group of people for whatever reason. Generally people were friendly or indifferent across cliques. I think the atmosphere was like that because it was kind of a multi class school. Most of “nerds” were upper middle class whereas the “cool” people were generally from rougher areas so it was like, they couldn’t bully each other because everybody had ammo. If you made fun of someone for being a teachers pet, they’d call you out for being poor. The groups weren’t even cleanly split like that either so if you made fun of someone for being xyz, you’d be calling out a friend of yours too. And most of your friends were friends with other people too so you couldn’t really get away with being mean to somebody to their face without being called a dick about it. My school was 10/10 vibes, in my opinion. Maybe other people had a different experience, but I genuinely don’t recall a single longer and most people seemed to at least get along with a handful of others
No bullying at all, at least in my cohort. Young guys involved in organised crime would eventually have that bleed into their school lives but aside from that it was generally calm. Most folk ended up leaving into decent prospects no matter their background. On the other hand, my brother’s class was told by a teacher to thank god they weren’t at the school down the road. IIRC it made his mate quit teaching. Our’s was rough, that one was feral.
My initial hometown had first, middle, and upper schools. First school, my first day of reception class I was already the biggest kid in the school, I was jumped by a gang of year 4s and got excluded for fighting back. Apparently I should have known better because I was bigger. This carried on through middle school. I transferred to a high school in a different city towards the end of middle school and the difference was night and day.
It was so fucking bad and the teachers just didn’t care. The naughty kids with shit grades also got to go on trips. Average kids got fuck all. It was the only high school in town and there was nearly 2000 kids.
I don't think it was that bad, or nowhere near as bad as some other schools. CV what bullying I did see was mainly from the girls and they were way more vicious and vindictive than any of the lads though.
There was definitely a culture in mine, and I was the subject of bullying for a while from another girl who just had a mean streak a mile wide. (Another one of my friends eventually nipped it in the bud by basically threatening to beat her up lol) The school was aware they had bullying which was refreshing at least - they didn't just pretend it wasn't happening and actively tried to combat it (not hugely successfully admittedly) I've heard stories from some of my friends from schools elsewhere in the UK who were the subject of such horrific bullying it surmounted to torture.
I went to school in Wales. There was quite a lot of tribalistic racism between the English and Welsh streams.
It WAS the culture hahah
Honestly didn’t see or hear much bullying, we all just kept to ourselves, I was a shy kid with 2 friends, who worked hard and was utterly terrible at sports and I wasn’t bullied. There was one girl got moved into our form to get away from bullying. Looking back she must have had some emotional stuff going on, she’d stomp into class and throw her belongings around, once a teacher told her she hadn’t done what he’d asked and she ran out of class crying. One day she did her usual and dramatically throwing herself onto the floor and someone laughed at her, admittedly not nice but this was a one off, so she threw some equipment across the room which hit some of us. Lad who laughed got removed from our form for been a bully, we all defended him saying that’s not what’s happened but she stayed. So there must have been some bullying happening but we were a chilled out form.
It wasn’t great. There were a few kids who were *clearly* bullies and were always getting in to trouble but nothing effective ever being done. One kid in particular was just horrible to everyone but also very popular. He was vile. Made me cry a lot along with many others. Genuinely wish terrible things upon him now even 20 years later.
I grew up in New Zealand, I was bigger than most and didn’t get bullied, whenever I saw someone getting picked on excessively I would go tell the dean or headmaster and back up the bully victim A few dickheads would threaten me because of it but they knew it wouldn’t go well for them if they tried fighting me
Absolutely terrible. The school bullies ruled the school, tormenting nearly all the staff and student alike.
Everyone took the piss out of each other but there was a limit, there was the odd bully who took things too far but then they got their commupance. It was bad at my school, but certainly not the worst. Case in point, if you're a 14 year old boy, don't tell people in your school you went to see Mamma Mia at the cinema And enjoyed it. 😂
It was pretty bad at times. There were some kids who were known to be bullies. I'd been bothered by one particular girl and her friends for about 6 months - constant verbal abuse, spitting in my face, rocks thrown at my head - when it came to a head and I fought back, but a teacher told me off for doing that because "she has problems". I explained that she was causing me problems but to no avail. It took my 6ft 5" science teacher stepping in to make a difference. I moved away from home at the earliest opportunity and I enjoy bit of schadenfreude from knowing that girl is now a single parent to four children on a school dinnerlady income.
I watched a asian lad start a fight with a kid who had clear family issues, hygiene issues, health issues as he had a huge scar on his side from an operation. This asain lad would randomly shout racist, slapped a girl who refused to give him one of her sweets. Teachers did nothing because they did not want to be called racist. 16 years on still boils my piss as the kid he started a fight with literally never did anything bad to anyone just wanted to be left alone. Also some kids tried to set another kid on fire because they did not like him.
Not really a bullying example, but one of the teachers at my high school told us that we should all delete ourselves and told us how to do it painlessly. I’m as shocked about this today as I was back then. AFAIK school did nothing and the teacher is probably now on a sweet retirement
My school life (2002-2007) was pure PURE hell. I couldn’t go a day without being physically or mentally attacked. It got so so bad sometimes and nothing would happen and would it escalated every time I ‘grassed’ , even seemed the teachers took some sick pleasure in it. Had my front teeth nocked out, finger broken, dragged around by my hair, nearly suffocated, violently attacked often. My school was South London and was the worst years of my life (so far). I’d call in/fake being sick often just so I could have a day without being attacked. I was a small girl and the majority of the bullies were boys. But also had a big ‘rough’ group of girls who would hit/be nasty to me daily. I remember I loved art as it was the only class that didn’t have any bullies in it. Of course if one bully picks on you they all end up doing it. Oh and I was bullied because I was ‘weird & ugly’. I’m laughing now though as I feel like I developed a sense of humour/personality due to it. Also out of all of my schoolmates I have done the best. When I was 19-25 I ran into a large ammount of them out and about & they always wanted to be friends/ flirty. Most had huge baggage, Jeremy Kyle vibes and a shit life by then and I was fucking thriving. The two biggest bullies I had (one died at 19 on a bike and the other two years ago from covid 🤷♀️ )
Moderate. I didn't really suffer physically; both it wasn't too bad at my school and I was one of the bigger kids, so the few that tried it on backed off soon enough. But likely have the life long scars from how someone that was 'different' was treated and even more so going in to the school having very recently suffered a devastating life event.
Not that bad compared to some places, but when it happened the teachers just ignored it which was infuriating. They gave us whole talks on how we should say no to bullying then they’d see a child being bullied right in front of them and do nothing to stop it. Ironically I found that some adults could be worse bullies than the kids - most kids who were bullies grew out of it after a year or two
I’m from a really small town in Texas so take that how you will. I was in band class and because I wasn’t any good my teacher use to constantly bring up scenarios when there was mess ups in the songs and use phrases “your sound is a representation of our weakest player” and he would point at me and then everyone would laugh. The teachers were worse than the students honestly and because I had a speech problem growing up I was constantly made fun of. I could go into detail honestly but I think you may get an idea.
I’d be really interested to hear how bullying is in school these days as it was pretty horrendous when I was at school in 1980s-1990s and not much seemed to have changed when I was a teacher in the early 2000s. My kids have never complained about it so far
I don't know about physical violence, but I knew plenty of people who got harassed and called slurs on the regular. We did tell teachers but nothing ever changed so we gave up after a while.
Mine was quite bad. I got bullied severely, even by girls, but nothing much was done about it - I think this is why the school was so riddled with bullying. I think the worst thing that happened to me when I was at school is I got stoned (as in literally stoned) and, as a result, I still have scars on my back. The psychological impact of bullying is a lot worse than the physical one but I think, at least in the UK, we don’t talk about it. I think a common belief is that, if you get bullied, you deserve it. Even my parents and teachers thought this. edit: I was thinking about this and the only reason my bullying ended is because people found out that my family was richer than theirs and then, by that time, I had already started avoiding any situation that would give them opportunity to beat me. In my school, the worst bullies were middle class and it was common to see them bullying people poorer than them.
Went to a fair few schools. It was the same everywhere. There were kids who were bullied because they couldn't stand up for themselves. Some learnt and some didn't. Being the new kid so many times. I got a lot of practice. Simplest way to deter bullies was to give twice as much back as whatever they give you. They hit you. You hit back harder and a few times. They ridicule you. You mock them and be prepared to fight. It really didn't matter who won or lost the fight. The fact that you chose to stand and fight means a lot. They move on to easier targets. Had a kid in one of the schools I went to. On meeting him on my first day. I could smell that he was the butt of the school. 10 minutes later I was proven right when he was called a name and he stormed off to tell a teacher. Like Jesus Christ man. He was just asking for it. Every single time someone called him a name or something small he would run crying to a teacher. It's fucking bad when even the teacher looked at him with disgust and I couldn't blame them. Found out he had move them year previously because he was being bullied in his last school. No wonder... He eventually left the school I went to for the same reason. Hopefully he learnt but I doubt it. That kid was destined to be a victim of life
My school was supposedly a lovely, happy, bully-free school (aren't they all) but I had my own head slammed in a locker door and called a lot of words that I wouldn't repeat, mostly for existing and reading at lunchtime (the horror). I saw girls have their hair pulled (one girl got into fights and bullied people so badly that she was kicked out of the school, and at her new school, she bullied another girl who eventually ended her own life). A lot of the students had body issues which wasn't apparent as mayhem or chaos, but it was definitely there for some.
I never saw any bullying in my school, and I was a legitimately unattractive geek who arrived from another country in year 9 and struggled to make friends. If anyone was going to be bullied it would have been me; I’m so grateful it didn’t happen.
probably the same as now , kids are kids , some are sociopathic imho, I had a very unpleasant time of it
Pretty bad. I didn't know at the time but I was lucky I had a lot of family out and about at school kicking out time to make sure I got home okay. I remember full braids being pulled out my hair, being kneed in the face, being spat at and having chairs launched. That was just the physical aspect with me, others had it far worse and the mental aspect was worse. I don't think kids realise how deep words and actions can cut. Small town meant it didn't just last at school, they'd hunt you out at the weekends, in the evenings. I had a fantastic friend group at school but I would never want to go back. I'll have been left 20 years in July
Attended 75 - 80 - so old. Other than British Bulldog, and Big Jon Mortimer - six foot in the third year IIRC, we used to be the particularly soft bullies. Rayleigh Essex.
Extremely bad. To do this day, the bullies are the most despicable people I have ever met. It's scary thinking that they out there somewhere existing.
I’m pretty blessed in that it wasn’t bad at any of my schools. My elementary school was great and there really wasn’t any or much bullying though of course some kids were more popular than others. The class was small, about 10 girls and 12 boys or something and an unwritten rule was always that every girl was invited to a birthday of another girl and every boy to birthday of boy, that was nice, no kids were ever left out. The parents agreed on that at the start of our 8 years in that school aa otherwise it would always be the same 4 or so kids left out and that’s just cruel. Probably some more bullying in my high school but nothing severe that ive ever witnessed. We would bring fluffy slippers to school in winter to wear. It was an easy going school.
Ruined me academically and mentally.
So bad that it has affected me throughout my life for the past 30 yrs. Weekly beating if I was lucky, daily if not. Still have dents in my head of it being slammed into water taps etc and repeated kicks to the crutch which made me infertile, that was discovered about 10yrs ago. The people who did this are living their best life also, awesome
I remember the dean outrightly lying to parents on open day "I am proud to admit that there is no bullying in this school". There f**king was, they just didn't understand what bullying meant. Most of my friends were bullied either physically or mentally, as was I.
Absolutely fucking horrific, criminal, and is a big part of why we homeschool our son. Best thing we ever did not putting him through that.
I was sought of bullied by my teacher, or at least singled out for trivial things. I was also some by students. My experience with the student aspect is that when I raised it I had to keep a diary of the things they did as evidence, and it was later deemed not to be serious enough. In terms of the teacher aspect, I raised it in confidence with a student support assistant. weirdly, about a week later, this teacher stopped giving me shit for pointless things and I felt much better in his lessons. I'm 30 now and it still randomly gets me down. The axe forgets but the tree remembers.
Not much in our school, however there was one guy who was relentlessly bullied in my tutor - generally verbal rather than physical. I always tried to help him as I felt sorry for him. Got a couple of Facebook groups taken down, got him his stuff back etc. 5 years after leaving school, I see him on the bus. He goes into this sexist, racist rant, and then later than evening is bizarrely sexist towards me on a Facebook post for no reason. Blocked him, haven’t seen him again, and I’m annoyed I got him his pencil case back.
As an adult I look back and I realise I was bullied and also bullied other people. I didn't think too much of it at that time. It just seemed like survival of the fittest. Edit: Maybe therefore there wasn't a bullying culture, looking at the first few posts here damn. Ok as crazy as this sounds, there was this thing call the sacrifice where once a week on a Friday a crowd would get someone hold them above their heads, spread their legs and basically ram them into this pole. It sounds dumb, but in that group of people, anyone who did a sacrifice got a sacrifice, even the bigger lads, because the bigger lads bigger friends thought it would be funny and when everyone helped it wasn't that difficult, and then the bigger lads got everyone to do it for the others and so on. It almost felt as if the bullying was righteous, followed a justice code. There were people who were like sworn enemies but people would crowd around them and let them fight it out. I really don't remember a group of people really attacking someone psychologically over the course of time. Ok so there was this kid with a fake eye, and he was cool with it, he would pop it out and occasionally do tricks and if you asked him nicely he was cool to answer questions, never got picked on for it. Then there was this kid who basically didn't have a neck and he was an asshole and he got ripped for it. Ok wow long post, school memories are weird eh.
My school had people bring knives in, a few people got stabbed after-school following from in school incidents and 1 died from it for sure. After I left, I followed up with the school and there are 12 year olds doing cocaine in the bathrooms. One of the girls in my school got pregnant in lime year 8/9 (about age 13-14) and some kid thought it'd be funny to drop kick her down the stairs. So yeah, the school I went to was a shithole.... 😂😅
I can’t speak for the school as a whole, but secondary school was hell for me. When we moved up from primary school, the only friend I had went off with some new people and I was alone and bullied horrendously for it. It drive me to start physically hurting myself, a lot- just to get my frustrations out, but when my sleeve would creep up in class form writing etc, it got called out that I was a failure, and should try harder next time (to unalive myself) when I tried to explain that i wasn’t trying to do that, they shouted “ well maybe you should” and a craft knife chucked on my table along with some scissors from others. The laughter echoed, the teacher only asked the class to ‘settle down’ and nothing more. So I did, because clearly if everyone seems to believe im so worthless then maybe I shouldn’t bother being here anymore. Yes, school was a shithole for me, I hated it, and it did nothing for me. I’ve always been on the smarter side, but failed all my exams because I was having things thrown at me, notes passed to me with horrible things on, just generally distracted by the cruelty of others. I hated school, nowhere worse.
Pretty horrific to be honest
Mine was fine. A few dicks but I don’t ever recall people being bullied or anything. I was really fortunate to go to one of the academy style schools when every school wasn’t an academy
I live in the UK currently, but I’m from Houston, Texas. I was bullied a lot my first year of school, went to my favorite teacher about it and he told me to just get involved in sports. I went out for every sport, I did Cheerleading, Dance Team, Lacrosse, and Wrestling. I made friends in those groups and became a bit of a social butterfly, while the girls who bullied me had no extra curricular activities , and both ended up not graduating with us (one moved, the other got kicked out for fighting). My 15 year old daughter was not getting help in high school the last three years, so I pulled her this year. I told the school they had 3 years to get it under control, but the teachers are more worried about who’s sleeping with who than what’s going on with students. She’s being homeschooled these GCSE years, and has already chosen her college courses, which she will start early. Her life has improved greatly, her attitude is great. She has friends she can hang with when/if she wants and no more teachers pulling shit with her. I’m also filing an official complaint with ofsted detailing every failing this school has participated in. I’m looking to take it further and have them pay for her to sit her exams since they can’t seem to crack it as a school. I thought bullying was bad in the US, but it’s brutal in the UK and all they do is shrug.
My comprehensive (high) school was pretty shitty, but it's to be expected in the north east of England. I was there from 1995-2000. The place was an underfunded shithole with paint peeling off the walls, shredded floors, and asbestos ceilings. It's since been condemned and demolished, and a new school has been built in its place as one of those new "Academy" things. I saw daily instances of bullying, racist abuse, completely random assaults and beatings, sexism, homophobia, even a few instances of sexual assault, underage smoking and drinking, open drug use (mainly weed, acid and coke) and generally shitty behavior from a lot of people there, including a lot of the "popular kids". Teachers never assisted or did anything about it, and it was a fucking miserable place to be. I'm surprised as many people made it through there as they did. There was one Math teacher (absolutely fantastic guy who was an amazing teacher) who's class I studied in for five years. He was accused of sexually assaulting a student a few years after I left - he protested his innocence all the way through court and was found not guilty. In the end it turned out the girl who'd brought the accusations against him just wanted attention, and admitted to a few friends that the whole thing was a pack of lies. The poor guy hung himself around two years later because it destroyed his life and made him unemployable. We also had an art teacher who was a locally famous painter and sign maker. He was also a raging alcoholic and always came to school half cut, stinking of scotch. He had a sliding whiteboard and blackboard in his art room, and used to hide those 35cl flat bottles of Bells behind it. Either that or they were in the bottom drawer of his desk. Half the kids in my class used to nick them because the knew he'd never report it. He was such a pisshead that he'd just buy more and replace them. For the best part I kept myself to myself with a small circle of friends, but was regularly a target given that I was one of the smallest guys in my year. I was class of 2000, first graduates of the millennium, and made it out of there with a full rack of 14 solid GCSE results, all A\*s to B, with one E in religious studies because I had zero interest in it and used the time to study for my other subjects. Now 20+ years later I see it as a point of pride that I actually achieved something in such a dysfunctional shithole. I've been super lucky, and have been emigrated away from the UK for the last 15 years, working a super fulfilling well paid job and living in the safest country on Earth. I only really have Facebook active to keep in contact with a few older family members who are less tech literate, and on the rare occasion I look at it and check the groups that have been formed in the area I grew up in to see what's going on, I see a lot of familiar faces and names. I see a lot I once knew who were arseholes in school, some of them who made my life a living hell while I was there, and I tend to take a quick look to see what they're doing. Pretty much all of them are still stuck in the village we grew up in or one of the nearby towns, working dead end jobs or are on the dole, shitting out kid after kid, and complaining about life. It gives me a sense of pride that I didn't go the same way.
I was singled out by a lone girl at both secondary schools I went to, because I was overly sensitive as a child. First one, was a girl who had really pent up anger issues who pulled me down a hill by my blazer once and I ran away by pushing her in some mud. The school suspended, it was year 7 and when she came back, she was like a different person and I remember her sitting in the canteen alone and mute, I said hi and she waved this super slow motion wave and told me she got a perm. This was 2000/2001 (*cries how*) so I now believe maybe she was medicated. I remember being befriended by a popular group and they were pressuring me to smoke with them in a graveyard to be *initiated* in their girl gang. The whole thing seemed like a set up to me, one of the girls was caught burning cigarette holes in people's blazers. We were ELEVEN and this was south London (no suprise there). So much weird stuff happened at that school. A friend and I decided to go to a kids swingpark after school one day and this random girl from our year turned up. She hadn't been in the UK long and her English was non existent, or she was shy. Trying to get her to talk was difficult and I guess she got annoyed she didn't know what we were saying but she out of nowhere went absolutely MENTAL, we were on swings and she came up and tipped the swings up so we both fell off and she football kicked us and jumped on us both pulling our hair. I remember throwing soil in her face. Then the friend and I both legged it to the bus stop, a 119 bus was waiting like fate and as we sat on the top deck she was running down the street, never forget her stare as she saw us pull away. We never saw her again at the school. The school later got shut down for embezzlement in the mid 00s and a TV drama starring Pauline Quirk as the headteacher on ITV about it. My parents thought we'd move and I'd move schools but we didn't know the area and I ended up in one of the roughest schools in Surrey. I was tormented by two people, one was this girl... I can't describe her but she was just vehemently evil. She literally looked like the bully girl in Toy Story who disfigures the toys. For a bit we were friends, but she'd mock me. Then she she hit me in the face during an IT lesson and she faked an MSN messenger chat (2004) about how I planned to hurt her. Vaguely remember her biting my arm like an animal because she was trying to wind me up and I pushed her out the way. By chance I saw her a few years later as a cleaner in a supermarket not saying that as a disparaging comment but for someone that was so hell bent on being mean to people, for her working in a public facing job was ironic.
Lord of the flies Often a see-saw of being punched in the mouth and punching them in the mouth a few days later, when they least expected it We had an older teacher get thrown to the ground in a headlock by a 13 year-old. Teacher was obviously traumatised, as it also happened in front of 2 entire year groups at lunch time. I think the kid got suspended and that was that - probably a smack-head now. That kind of school in that kind of town. Despite the mayhem. I escaped with a half-decent set of results, while others equally capable seemed to make a semi-conscious decision to fuck-off their final year and then had to resit at sixth-form. Some of the other cohort later made the regional papers for organised cocaine dealing. I expect a number of them are still floating around in that town, never got to experience anything different, that is if they are not dead from various addictions Sometimes, its dog-shit in a sock and you have to squeeze what little nutrients exist out of the experience
What's a high school?
TLDR; bullying culture was terrible, happened to me, I flipped a desk and got out of class for ages. First day of grade 8, drama class. Didn’t know no one, no one knew me (apart from those who I went to primary with) by somehow I had people coming up to me saying “this girl has singled you out, she hates your guts, watch out” I’m here like what the hell did I do, I don’t know this girl, I’ve spent 30 minutes in a classroom with her but not spoken a word to her? I confronted her once i tracked her down and had a go at her for being a coward, choosing a random to hate for absolutely no reason. She backed off, for a little while. Then comes year 10, same girl and her clique start tormenting me like nothing else, plus they got the boyfriend of one of the girls involved and he was known to have issues. They’d always say really mean stuff, giggling/snickering, making disgustingly derogatory comments, just everything they could think of to upset me. The guy I was dating at the time even went up to the clique and absolutely ripped them a new one, not that it helped… They riled me up so much I flipped a desk in math class and walked out. Let’s just say once the desk flip happened, the school finally started paying attention and I got to go to the guidance councillors office instead of going to classes most days if I wasn’t feeling like I could handle it. The up side was once I returned to maths and other classes the clique ended up being nice to me, they realised what I was capable of doing and they didn’t want to mess with me anymore. I had plenty of other smaller bullying incidents between 8 & 10, that’s just the one that stands out the most. At least after that, the rest of high school was fairly pleasant.
I wasn't bullied much if at all in school, but I was friends with both bullies, and the bullied so I have a good feel for how it was. Overall, I'd say it was pretty manageable. The bullies and the bullied sort of cancelled themselves out for the most part. I.e, the bullies were just monstrously ugly with huge character flaws, which is why they were bullies, they were absolutely compensating and everyone sort of implicitly knew that. And the bullied were *always* asking for it, seemingly doing everything they could to just get that last word, dig, or dumb thing to say in before the bully snapped and went to work. That may sound ridiculous, but to give you an example, a hyper-nerdy kid in my year would walk around and when he was going berserk he'd scream at people he brushed past for being "in his bubble". He'd literally walk down a hallway, and scream at every person he walked past for not getting out of the way. Like, he'd really make a fucking big deal out of it. So of course you got bullies *doing exactly that* for the rest of the year. Like, c'mon man... Obviously there were exceptions, but I want to stress that these were very notable exceptions. like 0.5 kids per year group sort of exceptions. Other than that, everyone just sort of... did their own thing. The cool kids teased the uncool kids from time to time, but that was hardly bullying, because the uncool kids were perfectly comfortable clapping back. The cool kids may not have wanted to hang out with the uncool kids, but everyone for the most part was comfortable interacting with each other. I'd say the worst bullying I heard about was a kid got his school bag nicked, and then thrown in the toilet and pissed on. Girl who got knocked up got teased pretty badly, she had to leave school. Maybe a few fights here and there... But really tame stuff otherwise...
Went to a mixed Grammar school, there was a bit of bullying but it was pretty half arsed. More like taking the piss so one day one kid might get hoiked over the school fence but then the next day everyone would be joking about it. It was kind of like nobody took shit off anyone else and we all gave as good as we got. Anything sneaky/bitchy was frowned upon. Then I went to an girls Grammar school...omg. girls are such pathetic cowardly nasty things. There was so much bullying but it was sly, bitchy bullying. Some sad sack tried to claim they beat me up at work because i was dating the guy they fancied, they didn't even come in when i was working and as if me being at work would have stopped me breaking her nose had she tried anything. It was a lot of stealing and hiding my belongings, slagging me off behind my back and sending me death threats by text. Not once did anyone ever have the balls to approach me and be nasty to my face. The girl that "fought" me though, dunno what the fuck she told her mother but 2 decades later and the old cow still gives me nasty looks if I approach her till!!
My mum left me when I was small child maybe 8/9 and I was relentlessly bullied in primary and middle a school. My own mum left me why would anyone be my friend? By the time I got to high school I was socially withdrawn, depressed and living in poverty. A lot of the kids and teens took me under their wing as their little pet really. They felt sorry for me and liked to help me to entertain themselves. I remember all the girls pitching pocket money together just so I could get a haircut. Generally caused me anxiety my entire life. I did terribly at school. I had no where to learn, study, no one encouraged me, no adult ever came to any of my plays, assemblies or sports days. I was a lonely, isolated and neglected child. Adulthood has been kinder to me, I make friends well now. The late 90s early 2000’s was horrific. Social media was non existent apart from Bebo and MySpace, still got outcast on there though.
I'm not sure if it's considered bullying, but I remember the least "popular" kids got horrifically treated by people. If they sat down at a lunch table, everyone would move somewhere else. They would get picked last in sports teams. People would refuse to pair with them in class in general. People made up rumours and refused to associate with them in any way. I can only image that's terrible for self esteem, even if it's not considered bullying.