Bullied at school? You're not alone

I READ somewhere recently that 77 percent of students are subjected to some form of bullying in school – be it mental physical or verbal. Those are frightening statistics if you are a parent. School-based violence has a tendency of affecting those at the face of it right up to their adult lives.

As I grew up, bullying was taken as a part of life. It was either you were a bully or a victim. My upbringing put me right in the firing line of being bullied.

Apart from the fact that ours was a Christian home, I grew up in a neighbourhood that placed middle-class and low income families in the same area. Because of the divisive policies of the time, affluent blacks could not be integrated with whites.

Coming from a well-off family gave the impression that I always had money on me. What made it worse was that my father ran a shop in the vicinity, something that made me a lightning rod for local bullies. They were mean and did not attend school. All they did was loiter around the school gate at knock off time.

It was not long before I attracted the attention of one called Loit. I never got to know his surname. His name struck fear in the hearts of my classmates and the day our paths crossed, I decided not to run. It was an act that I was to regret for many years to come.

Loit was not violent to me as he was to the others. I was his cash cow, but suffered a form of psychological bullying that seemed worse than physical assault. When I tried to buy him out, it only led to extortion, particularly when he discovered I was the son of a local businessman. I was to pay him to protect me from himself!

It began with a few sweets progressing to cigarettes and money. Sweets I could buy with my pocket money, but when it came to cigarettes, it became a different ball game. It meant that I had to steal from the shop. I was only nine years old then and being found with a packet of cigarettes at that age was deadly serious.

Loit soon left my school mates alone to concentrate on his new gold mine: me. I became increasingly exasperated as Loit tightened the noose. Once he came to my home and even threatened the house maid after I had gone AWOL. He was so daring that he would hang around even if my mother was there, pretending to be a friend. It affected my grades and soon my friends avoided me like a plague since he was frighteningly abusive to them if not to show what he could do to me if I did not comply.

It all ended when I was caught attempting to sneak out the biggest loot yet to him. It was a carton full of cigarette packets. An uncle who ran our shop had suspected something was amiss. I had started asking him for inordinate amounts of money for days in succession. It was unlike me and my father would have killed me if he knew. So a trap was set.

I was to lure my nemesis to the shop in a final gesture of forced generosity. I bargained with him that in exchange for a huge package of goodies I would buy my freedom. I personally knew that Loit would go back on his word anyway. He took the bait and came with two of his cohorts. I was scared. Loit had this aura of invincibility around him. On many occasions, people had tried to accost him, and failed to capture him.

My uncle wasn’t taking any chances and he had summoned the police. I handed over the booty to a gleeful Loit and that is the last I saw of him. Apparently they tailed them to a nearby bush where I assume they were to share the loot amongst themselves. He was carted off to a remand home for juvenile delinquents. By the time he was released, we had moved to another part of town.

Moving was no respite from bullying because at the new school I was transferred to had a strong legacy of bullying. We had characters like Cain, Mtsimana, Mafrondo and others who were involved in a frenzy of endemic bullying. When school knocked off, it was common to witness masses of pupils fleeing these little terrorists. No one was brave enough to stand up to them.

It was near impossible to avoid them because they would share stalking the school entrances among themselves and rob us of anything that was not nailed down. It was a generation of bullying because some of the older pupils who had left school before us had harrowing tales to tell. But this form of bullying affected me less because one could fall through the cracks.

Years later, when I began my teaching career in one of the most dangerous parts of the city, I encountered a different form of bullying. These boys had taken bullying to a corporate level. This was the time of the Terror Ten, the Brand New Heavies and the Dangerous National Army (DNA).

This was not Los Angeles-style gangsterism but juveniles who took advantage of moral erosion in the community and mass education in the school system. I was caught right in the middle because students at the school where I was a senior teacher consorted with them.

Things got out of hand when the Terror Ten started entering the school premises and on a number of occasions assaulted students right in front of terrified female teachers. One had to be careful on how to handle the situation though we knew that they had accomplices within the school who were using then to settle personal scores.

The trick was to weed out these insiders who were invariably girls and make an example of them through expulsion. The police would take care of the problem outside school. This two-pronged approach led to the eradication of the scourge. But not before several running battles and the gangs severely undermining the authority of teachers and local leaders.

On analysis, parents helped perpetuate the crisis by protecting their children who were gangsters. Some went to bail them out when they were arrested. Financially-burdened and helpless, parents and relatives could hardly feed these young charges, let alone educate them. This eroded their respect for them and they took to fending for themselves in any way they possibly could including through robbery and burglary.

Another factor was that at one point, the gangs saw themselves as heroes after their exploits were featured in local newspapers. By hitting the headlines, the gang members achieved what sociologists call ‘self-fulfilling prophesy’ and subsequently played to the press assembled gallery. This tended to perpetuate the problem.

Bullying is a sure way of making a child’s life miserable. They are made to feel helpless, frustrated and angry. I personally know how it felt. Parents should be on the look-out for telltale signs like falling grades and low self esteem. Take an active interest in your child’s school life. Parents should also make an effort to solve specific problems related to the bullying and develop self esteem and resilience in their children.