Won’t happen if she decks him with a chair first.
I hope most of you would realise I’m joking.
I knew I shouldn’t but I did watch that video of that poor girl at the bus stop.
Its not only shocking and infuriating, but probably indicative of the normalisation of violence in people that young who have access to this sort of thing being recorded on phones all the time.
Social media is a curse at best. But it is a quick learning curve too when someone that age sees the consequences of their image being caught as evidence.
I think bullying is a form of immaturity.
We’ve all seen it or experienced it in one form or another in school. Thankfully from my own experience I seem to remember it being more of a primary school thing and the three classes I passed through secondary school with were a great bunch. Everyone knew everybody and yes there were those that were popular, those that were sporty those that were the brains, there was those a bit slow and those that let’s say, we’re a bit effeminate.
I never remember it getting nasty with anyone. It wasn’t allowed as a collective. That’s not to say that there weren’t individual ribbings and collective pile ones, but it changed it was never the same person getting it all the time. It was good humoured in an immature teenager kind of way, but the joke was spread indiscriminately and equitably.
There were rituals we had gone through ourselves that we admittedly partook in, like when we were sixth years’ and the first years come in for the first time in September. The grass would have been mown and like straw. As the bell goes for lineup, invariably an unsuspecting first year would be plucked from the passers by and straw shoved down his kacks. When I say ‘ we’ I don mean I personally partook in these rituals, but you knew they were coming and broke your hole laughing at it, which is the equivalent these days of teenagers taking out their phones and recording for social media.
If social media was around back then, you may be sure it would have been used. It’s an immaturity thing.
But the type of violence seen perpetrated on that young girl, didn’t happen, certainly not amongst the girls schools around us.
Guys fought. Yes but as I said, in our year in secondary school, systematic bullying wasn’t a thing. The whole year was seen as one bunch everyone included.
That’s not to say we didn’t see physical bullying happen every week, but it was generally coming from one or two individual Christian Brothers and they would pick on the same people over and over again.
Perhaps that is a good enough reason why the year seemed united out of the class.