I'm fortunate that I never experienced some of the serious bullying I've heard from other people in this thread and from friends who went to public elementary, middle and high school. I spent most of my elementary and junior high school education at a very small private religious school where behaving like an aggressive bully was foreign to the kids I went to school with. At most, I experienced a little clique-ish girl bullying ("we don't like her, she can't be part of our group," that kind of thing), but nothing to the extent I've heard that other people experienced in elementary school. I count myself fortunate that I haven't.
I work as a school counselor now for the Los Angeles Unified School District. I've worked at several different middle schools and seen a lot of bullying go on. It's absolutely ridiculous how kids treat other kids and think it's perfectly ok to do so. I now work at a local public high school, but even high school is not immune to bullies.
Last year, I had to take my car into the shop for some minor repairs. While I was waiting for the mechanic to finish, I struck up a conversation with another young woman also waiting for her car. She had attended the same high school where I now worked and talked about her experiences there. She said during her second year of high school, she was getting so much bullying pressure from a group of mean girls that she begged her mom to let her do home schooling for the rest of high school. Her mom agreed, so that's what she did. She didn't return to the public high school until her senior year, when she felt more confident and more able to handle being around a large group of students, most of whom often express open hostility towards one another.
Here are some suggestions I recently wrote on another forum, in answer to a woman who said that she's afraid her 11 year old god-daughter is becoming a bully. It has suggestions of how adults should deal with a bully, and how to help the bully make better behavior choices.
As a school counselor who frequently deals with teen and pre-teen bullying, this is how I handle it. Firstly, your god-daughter must be confronted when she engages in an act of bullying. Right then, in that moment. She should not be confronted in front of her friends or people she’s bullying, but pulled aside, spoken to in private and let know that, under no uncertain terms, is it EVER OKAY to bully someone. The more times she hears this message, the more it will begin to sink in.
Secondly, she needs to have bullying defined for her. Bullying is when you do or say something that is specifically intended to hurt another person, and to get other people to laugh at or ridicule the other person. She also needs to be coached to ask herself, “am I going to hurt someone else by doing/saying this?†before she acts. The more times your god-daughter’s coached on it and repeatedly hears the definition of bullying, the more times she will hopefully think before she acts.
Thirdly, she needs to reflect on the other person’s feelings. This is best done after she’s privately confronted on an act of bullying. The person confronting her needs to ask, “how do you think the other person feels?†and “how would you feel if someone did/said [whatever she’s doing/saying to the other person]?†Your god-daughter needs to be able to say it out loud, putting the other person’s feelings in words. That is the most powerful, therapeutic tool towards changing behavior. The more times she is able to identify someone else’s feelings in words, the more she will be able to reflect on them and reflect on her own actions. At her age, though, she may not yet have the exact words to describe others’ feelings, so it can be helpful if the person talking with her helps her identify them. For example, “How would you feel if someone did [whatever] to you? Would you feel sad? Would you feel angry? Would you feel helpless?†Once she learns the vocabulary, so to speak, she’ll be better able to identify others’ feelings and her own.
Lastly, once your god-daughter starts to work on stopping her bullying behavior, someone should talk with her about picking good friends. She needs to learn that friends who expect her to act like a bully and enjoy her bullying actions are not being good friends to her. She needs to find friends who like her for who she is, without acting out. Those are her true friends.