Bullied and beaten...in middle school!

frazzled1
Fri, 19 Nov 2010 14:08:03 +0000

Four students have been charged in the incident, one with third-degree assault and the others with first-degree harrassment: [Oneida youths face charges after bullying leads to a 12-year-old’s broken leg | syracuse.com](Oneida youths face charges after bullying leads to a 12-year-old's broken leg - syracuse.com) Why this doesn’t qualify as a felony is beyond me - the victim has a broken leg, for God’s sake.

I remember that bus stop attacks were frequent when I was in middle school, though they didn’t take this extreme form. 6th and 7th grade boys had a pecking order of who could “take” whom, and there were many days when guys would pile off the bus and stand in a circle, watching as two of them slugged it out in the middle. It never occurred to the girls in my group to tell a responsible adult - we were fairly certain we’d be told to mind our own business.

Why did we feel that way? Many of us were bullied ourselves, if not physically, and we accepted it as the natural order of things. I don’t know if this may have been, in part, due to having grown up in a blue collar town with a poor school system. I wish today’s awareness programs had been in place then. Kids can’t protest bullying if they fear becoming victims themselves, or if they think adults don’t care.