I Friended My Middle School Bullies on Facebook
This is what happened next…
When I decided to friend my middle school bullies on Facebook along with some of my old classmates, my adult son asked, “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” My husband inquired, “Why would you want to speak with those people?”
They had cause for concern. My bullies had put me into a suicidal crisis during middle school. By the time I hit eighth grade, I had endured approximately one and a half years of bullying. I stood in my parent’s bathroom wondering if the blades in my father’s razor would cut my wrist deep enough to kill me. I mused if the kitchen knives would do a better job. If I had a humane way to end my life, I would have used it.
The persistent bullying began in sixth grade; determined to shed my cute-girl-in-pigtails look, I decided to grow my nails and paint them red. This, I reasoned, would be my path to sophistication.
Instead, it was my path to disaster. On that very week, after my nails had peaked over my fingertips, my bully barreled over me while we were waiting on line to get into the library, nearly toppling me over. Instinctively, I grabbed the first thing I could — the boy’s arm — to regain my balance. One of my new, sophisticated nails accidentally dug into his arm. I looked down to see his skin and a single arm hair underneath the nail.
The horror and guilt I felt over hurting a classmate quickly turned into indignation. The boy spread a rumor that I had attacked him, and everyone seemed to buy it, no matter how many times I professed that it was an accident the bully instigated.
Fueled by the sympathy of his classmates, this incident seemed to give the boy license. Every day after school, he followed me home to beat me up. He hit me with his fists, sticks, rocks… anything.
Back then, it was called “kids just being kids.” Today, we call it stalking, harassment, and assault. I endured the rest of the school year with daily beatings that escalated to sexual assault and rape.
Even though my sixth-grade bully moved away, two people took his place and continued the bullying in seventh and eighth grade.
The only response I would get from my parents was to ignore them: they were jealous. I didn’t know how to ignore physical assault. I couldn’t tell the school administrators: that would make me a tattletale, and the abuse would worsen.
The bullies I mentioned abused me the most, but they don’t bully in a vacuum. Their behavior rubs off onto the rest of their classmates. Many joined in with a potshot or two so they could make everyone laugh at my expense. Even if it was an occasional jab, having many occasionally jab me throughout the week made it feel like I experienced another assault every school day. My days were filled with a constant barrage of physical assaults, public humiliation, and verbal, emotional, relational, and mental abuse. The other part of the time, I remained invisible to my classmates.
Without any real advice or intervention, my mental health declined. After a while, I believed I deserved the abuse, and I was better off dead. I believed I had become an outcast. After a while, I felt utterly alone.
If I had a way to kill myself, I would have used it. Luckily, every suicide scenario seemed more painful than my existence at the moment, which included hanging and slashing my wrists. After I gave up on the idea of killing myself, due to a lack of means, I spent every night fantasizing about my own death and the end of my misery. Maybe I would be lucky enough for someone to stab me at school. That one ran through my head most often.
Fortunately, the picture began to change; I imagined life at another school. My new vision came to fruition when I asked my parents to transfer me. I attended parochial high school freshman year, and I made friends. One girl even asked why I didn’t run for class president. Yet, even though I never had to endure another bout of bullying, once suicide took a hold of me, its effects became so ingrained, it took ten years to shake suicidal ideation from my daily thoughts.
Fast forward forty years. I married my best friend. My husband and our children healed me. I wriggled my way into publishing and became a literary agent. My first coauthored book debuted and was well-received, winning an international award only three months after its publication, my lifelong dream. My first novel is coming out next year. Most importantly, I strive to live until 130 years old.
With this newfound strength, I acknowledged a missing piece: my childhood. Last year, I resolved to confront my past.
I literally ran for my life when I left my public middle school behind. I believed I would never see or hear from those people again. The internet-of-things didn’t exist.
Today’s world offers more communication options. Facebook provides a platform to connect with people all over the world. I could make “soft contacts” with my bullies and my old classmates through this venue, which felt more socially appropriate than an awkward telephone call after so many years.
Sure enough, I found the female and male bullies from seventh and eighth grades, but not the bully from sixth grade. It seems that he has managed to remain invisible to the Internet altogether.
I friended as many people from my class as I could find and remember. Most of them accepted my friend request.
After that, nothing. For a little bit, I felt like I did in middle school: neglected and ignored. We had grown apart, and life moved on for all of us. Some remained close to their classmates. They seemed to support each other, I learned from their Facebook posts, the type of support never offered to me.
At this point, I recognized that my relationship with my parents mirrored the types of relationships I had with my classmates. Emotional distance, a lack of trust, ignoring, spanking, and daily verbal abuse pervaded the household. What I experienced at home I was living during school hours in one capacity or another.
So, the first thing I learned from this introspection is that often, the seeds for bullying expression in school begin in the home. According to a study in Child Abuse & Neglect, negative parenting, which includes verbal abuse, physical abuse, and neglect are the behaviors that influence children to act out those experiences from home at school as the bully and/or the victim.
Yet, I did have some bright spots that stabilized me through this period. My neighbors and I were great friends. I had a couple of girlfriends at school who didn’t seem to mind getting together with me. My parents supported my physical needs.
I can enjoy those positives now that I had worked it through, but at the time, bullying and suicide overshadowed the positives until all that was left was the thought of killing myself, stuck on replay 24/7. The darkness the bullying created, the verbal and physical harassment, the constant put-downs, the constant hits to my self-esteem, made those bright spots’ light extinguish. Then, I had to fight my way out of the darkness, and I thank goodness that my parents at least had the financial means and the willingness to help me dig myself out and find myself again.
These revelations spurred me onward. I took the next step. I told my childhood girlfriends how much I enjoyed their company when we were little. They were polite and friendly, even though I abandoned them without explanation forty years earlier. After a few pleasant exchanges, I began to reach out to other people. Again, friendly and polite.
After several months of positive exchanges, it was time to contact my bullies and tell them what I had experienced as a result of their interactions with me.
First, I contacted the people who had provided me with polite conversation and told them that I am writing my experiences about my struggle with suicide while I was in middle school and provided some details of my experiences. Naturally, they responded appropriately. What can I do? I’m so sorry you experienced that. I’m so happy you are still here. I have the support I need from my family, and I had worked out my issues. Nonetheless, I appreciated their efforts.
It was finally time to contact my two bullies. I informed them of the same thing that I shared with everyone else, except I provided them an out: I mentioned that they did not have to contact me.
The female bully did not contact me at all. I contended with the fact that not all people care. All that work I had done on my inner world really paid off, and I now possess what I lacked in middle school: self-confidence and the ability to identify healthy boundaries. Other’s poor behavior does not bother me anymore. If I had not lived as long as I have, I would not have learned this lesson.
The male bully suggested a telephone conversation, and during it, he told me he didn’t remember a lot of his childhood. He explained (rather than apologized) that he was bullied as well. Though, I never bullied him just because I was bullied.
Nonetheless, I realized through this journey of self-examination, I remembered I had almost gotten caught up in the bullying dynamic when I had switched schools. There was something about another girl in class that annoyed one of my best friends. I don’t know what it was. The girl was truly nice enough and was not deserving of my friend’s plan to torture the girl.
Fortunately, before any of her imaginings could come to fruition, my father pointed out the potential bullying (even though he delivered the message with his loud voice), so I told my friend that I would not participate. She seemed a bit bummed out, but she left the girl alone, and we remained friends. I was so relieved when she didn’t dump me as a friend because I tried to do what was right.
Naturally, adult-me felt terrible, so I looked inward. How could I not recognize the behaviors that almost sent me into suicide and almost mindlessly followed my friend into becoming the bully myself?
Through a bit of research, I came to learn how easily children, tweens, and teenagers can become influenced by their peers. I needed my father to intervene and remind me of bullying behavior.
Teenagers, especially, think they are adults, but their level of maturity and brain development says otherwise. The American Psychological Association reported on a study examining the cognitive and emotional capabilities of children and young adults ages ten to thirty. They found that teenagers can reason like an adult but a lag in social and emotional maturity clouds their judgment. Thus, peer pressure and impulsivity can override their logic. Even though I knew the pain of bullying and social out-casting, because I had a friend I loved, I was swept away with my need for acceptance, which ran deeper than my moral and emotional judgment. If I lost the friends I had just made, I don’t know if I could have coped with another day of that aching loneliness I had felt at my old school. What if my friend had turned on me? Fortunately, she turned out to be a better friend than I initially realized.
With what I learned in contacting my old classmates and my bullies on Facebook, I was able to fully forgive my bullies even though they never asked for forgiveness. We were all compromised maturity-wise and did not receive strong adult leadership in combating the problem of bullying in schools. In addition, we all just want our friends to love us, and as teenagers, we need it more desperately than any other time. The students who act most socially awkward are the ones who are most likely to be hurting the most. Bullying can send the wrong person into suicide, whereas before they were managing to get by day to day.
However, while this experience has enlightened, strengthened, and rewarded me, I was also disheartened and dismayed at how little progress has been made. The Internet is thought to be the key factor in the rise of teenage suicides. Cyberbullying is a subject I have written on multiple times since graduate school. Surely, I thought, there had to be at least a bit of progress on bullying in the last four decades. Right?
Out of curiosity, I looked up my son’s old school district in New York to see if they had updated their anti-bullying school policies. Around 18 years ago, the principal of the school at the time told my husband and me that the elementary school does not deal with bullying: that was up to the high school. We already saw the signs of unchecked bullying in as early as kindergarten, so we pulled my son out for first grade and homeschooled him.
Nowadays, the school has well-worded intentions that all students are included and everyone should maintain an atmosphere of mutual respect. Yet, nothing concrete is explained to the community. Without offering any concrete leadership, their carefully worded general policies are a bunch of nice intentions expressed with flowery language.
Expanding my search, I asked Facebookers if their children had experienced bullying, and if so, how helpful were the schools in helping them with the issue?
All the parents from different regions expressed:
1. The schools were more interested in protecting the bullies.
2. The schools wanted to send the victimized children to counseling — not the bully.
3. The school offered a main solution: if you don’t like it, send your children elsewhere or homeschool them.
4. The parents were not satisfied with the way the school handled the situation.
This would not be the last time I heard this laundry list of ineffectual handling of a serious, complex problem.
To round off my research, I sought out stories of kids who committed suicide in the last few years from lower Westchester County, New York, where my hometown is located. The schools had a notorious reputation for not dealing with bullying, and the outcomes turned deadly for one small school, Tuckahoe High School. Within the last few years, a student committed suicide, her father citing the reason as relentless bullying from peers: even her science teacher incited bullying against the girl.
The school district’s solution: further isolate the victim. They offered to allow the student to homeschool, have a tutor teach the child at home for a medical reason, or transfer schools at the family’s expense. The parents could not afford to send their daughter out of district or to a private school, like I had, the action that most likely saved my life. After the daughter took a three-week break, the school coerced the parents to put their daughter return to the school where she did not feel safe or welcome.
And they lost her to suicide. Tragically, the girl had gone to college, but had attended a party with her old peers when she was visiting home. The following morning, her parents found her. They blamed the Tuckahoe school district for the lack of support and care they took in assuring their daughter had a safe environment in which to complete her high school education. They cited not only the incident with her science teacher, but also a field trip into New York City where her bullies had done something to her on the trip, resulting in her being left behind and her father having to meet her to pick her up and bring her home. The father reported that at that moment, he knew something broke in his daughter that left him wondering if it could ever be fixed again.
Another family in the same school sued the district for their failure to provide a safe learning environment for their daughter, who had survived a suicide attempt, their lawyer echoing a familiar laundry list of the behaviors that had been tolerated and ignored for decades:
The victim was “on multiple and numerous occasions, mocked, embarrassed, taunted, harassed, pestered, vexed, intimidated, subject to cyber bullying, verbal bullying, relational bullying, physical bullying, physical intimidation, physical menacing, stalking, property damage, public humiliation, and battered and assaulted by a group of students.”
The lawyer handling the lawsuit against the school expressed: “‘This is a trend (in the Tuckahoe school district), especially with the way they handle things,’ Le Du said. The administration ‘passes the buck, minimizes the situation or doesn’t believe the parents and students.’” What the lawyer did not realize is that he was describing a pattern of bullying that had pervaded the school for the last four decades, the culture of neglect and acceptance of abuse that finally did turn deadly for one unfortunate student of that school and almost deadly for another.
The problem is not really the students, not fully. Teenagers still need adults to serve as leaders and models for appropriate behavior and who know how to be proactive in combating bullying. They need adults possessing the skills to recognize bullying, when a student is struggling, and to remind kids that bullying has consequences beyond their years. Adults need to set standards for all to follow in a school.
Contacting my bullies on Facebook has enlightened me to how much work there still is to encourage all schools to become strong leaders against bullying. There are so many resources available for schools to combat the problem of bullying: student education systems to change a school’s cultural environment to one of inclusion, systems that help schools quantify the progress they make on decreasing bullying incidents, creating and enforcing school policies that do not punish the victim, counseling for both victim and bully, and if necessary, incarcerating students and expulsion for students who do not comply. Children need to hear that hate crimes, assault and battery, sexual harassment, and stalking will land them in jail as adults and are not behaviors that will be tolerated with children. Even the most problematic students have options other than expulsion and jail time, such as special programs that focus on students’ social skills.
Schools can help so much just in establishing school policies that explain bullying behaviors and the consequences of participating in bullying. Schools can also establish guidelines for parents to follow in order to report incidences of bullying. The fact that some schools are not employing any of these tools is tragic and borderline despicable. Schools are responsible for providing the students they serve with a safe learning environment, one in which every child attending has the same opportunity to prosper. By allowing predatory behaviors to exist and propagate within school boundaries, schools are maintaining an unsafe environment and protecting criminal behavior.
The Tuckahoe school district has since remedied their school policies. They employ many of these strategies now, but it took the death of one teenager, the attempted suicide of another girl, and all the attention from the local media to finally employ the strategies they had at their disposal for decades but were not proactive enough to employ them.
I hope my experiences will encourage schools to strive to become truly proactive by preventing bullying before it occurs. Child suicide is on the rise, highlighting the need for schools to become proactive in bullying prevention rather than simply reacting after the fact. This is why it is imperative to continue to find ways to proactively engage students to help develop skills, behaviors, and emotional intelligence so they can effectively recognize not only bullying behavior and end it, but to learn how to behave in constructive ways with family, friends, future coworkers, and everyone else so they can have healthier, happier, more fulfilling lives. In addressing bullying behaviors, schools and parents can identify students in trouble.
Bullies need just as much help as their victims. Bullying behavior is not a healthy or acceptable on any level. Bullies often become tomorrow’s criminals, according to eHealth News. Moreover, bullying is not always about violence, but about popularity. Popular kids often use bullying behavior to gain social status, which can be just as problematic as violent behaviors. A student who displays aggressive and violent behavior is a student in trouble. They make up part of the bullying dynamic, and in order to effectively address bullying, one-half the equation cannot be neglected.
Death failed to beguile me with its sweet promise of a permanent end to my pain. I am so grateful I did not heed its call. My death would have ended my pain, but it also would have ended my voice, and it would not have ended the problem. Awareness, apparently, isn’t enough to make real progress. We have to proactively protect vulnerable students so we don’t lose another precious life to bullying. If I can use my voice to help just one teenager realize that there is life, happiness, healing, love, forgiveness, and strength beyond your wildest imagination after bullying, then I will have successfully twisted all that pain into something beautiful.
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