By José Valle and Kelly Weisbecker
Co-Editor-In-Chief, Opinion Editor

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he harmful effects of bullying are prevalent in today’s society. According to StopBullying.gov, 28 percent of U.S. students in grades six through 12 have experienced it. Nobody understands the impact better than those who not only experienced, but overcame it themselves.

[accordion title=”Amy Powell”]“I didn’t experience (bullying) in high school but I did in middle school. I developed a lot earlier than the other girls, and boys paid a lot of attention to it. It was basically, as I look at it now, sexual harassment because they would talk about my body. Although it might be something some people would find flattering, when you are 12 years old you are not happy with those types of comments. That was basically what was going on. They would say something, then the girls would get jealous because I was getting that attention and then they would just be mean. I didn’t handle it in a good way: I became a bully. I wasn’t a fast runner in middle school. And, it’s actually a funny story now that I think about it. There was a boy in my class and he was a very fast runner. In fact, he went on to play professional football; he’s obviously a good athlete. I told him during recess that he had to chase down these boys and bring them to me so that I could hit them for talking about me and that if he didn’t do it, I would hit him. Isn’t that horrible? But it shows you how if you are bullied, you sometimes become one. I saw mine as retaliation because no one was doing anything about it. That didn’t last too long, because (the boy) was fast and I could hit hard.” [/accordion][accordion title=”Brandon Harris”]

“Looking back, high school is where things like (bullying) seemed to surface. I began to get very paranoid of everything happening around me. My way to deal with that during the transition to high school, where there were almost 2,000 people, was to isolate myself and just kind of stay to myself. Not all of that was because of external factors, it could have just been from certain experiences. I remember lunch. It seemed so crazy and hectic to me that it was easier sometimes to just walk around the halls and eat when I got home from school. I could stay isolated and avoid the potential of going into a negative environment. I’d say the biggest effect was the feeling of being a loner and the feelings of isolation. But one thing that really made my experience all better was my family at home. I continue to have a very close relationship with my family: my mom, my dad and my two brothers.

Part of (the high school experience) kind of led me to become a teacher. I think back in my mind and there’s certain things that involve school and are a given but should never happen. You should never be afraid to come to school. You should never be afraid to be isolated from someone or from a group. These are things that are unnecessary strains on young people in the process of their emotional development. Sometimes, people are able to readily find help when they seek it. Other times, people will continue living on in that isolation, feeling the effects from bullying, and this can take its toll on them. What caused me to really start to relieve the feelings of isolation was the idea of finding friends that were like me — people that I could tell in working with them they really wanted to know me for who I was and respected my friendship — and, of course, my family. I’m really proud of what the Anti-Bullying Club is doing here because I know the ideals of this club are what really, really matter, especially at this level in high school.”

[/accordion][accordion title=”Monica DeFelice”]“The one (bullying incident) that sticks out in my mind was actually in middle school chorus where a girl, that will remain unnamed, had a personal issue with me for no reason; I had never done anything to her before. I’ve always been a very nice person and I have always had a problem with my weight, especially when I was in middle school, when I was chubby. I remember one time we had extra time in class and she thought it would be funny to say ‘BOOM, BOOM, BOOM’ every  time I took a step across the classroom. All of her friends started laughing and all of my friends made it their point to hate her from then on. I waited until class was over and then I went to the bathroom and I cried and I cried and I cried. I felt so bad about myself because she made me feel like a big fat loser, but I knew I wasn’t; she just hurt my feelings. I avoided eye contact with her from that point on; we never talked. After we graduated high school, she reached out and tried to friend me on Facebook and I wasn’t going to go there. I had no desire for her to have any kind of part in my life from that point on. To this day when I see her, I try to avoid her because she hurt my feelings so much back then, and I know that she might be grown and totally different, but I have no desire to go there anymore. I do know that she isn’t very successful in her life right now. I think that might be because she was such a bully. It sort of set her back; like karma. That’s the incident that I remember the most. What’s ironic was that she was larger than I was. I thought it was interesting that she was making fun of me for my weight when she actually had a weight problem. So I feel like maybe she was bullied then she turned around and felt the need to bully to get her emotions out of her system. I was just the victim.”[/accordion][accordion title =”Robin Sawyer”]“When I was going into seventh grade, there was a new girl named Pam I had gotten to know over the summer. When school started, we were in the same class. Pam rode horses and knew another new girl by the name of Tammy through that. Pam didn’t like Tammy very much. Since I was good friends with Pam at that point, I decided I didn’t like Tammy either. We weren’t directly mean or insulting to her. If anything, we just excluded her from everything we did and got our friends to do it, too. I specifically remember Pam pretending to whisper things behind Tammy’s back, though, just to mess with her. The exclusion eventually got to a point that our teacher had to say something to me. He told me he could tell I was a genuinely nice person and that he didn’t understand why I was acting this way toward Tammy. After he asked me if I’d tried getting to know her — which I hadn’t — I realized that what we were doing was wrong. I apologized to Tammy for the way I had behaved. I asked her to hang out, and it wasn’t long before we realized we had a lot in common and became best friends. Her father was involved with NASCAR and I was a NASCAR fanatic. He was like a second father to me. We eventually drifted apart, because she moved back to the city. But we were friends for many years.”[/accordion][accordion title =”Christy May”]“When I was really bullied (I) was in middle school and there was an eighth grader that I didn’t really know who targeted me relentlessly. It got to the point that I asked my mom to let me quit school and go to Wanchese Christian Academy. This went on for about a month and finally I decided that I just had to stand up to her. So I decided we should meet across the street from the school. When we met and I walked up to her she gave me a hug and said, ‘I don’t want to fight you. It’s all good, we’re cool.’ It ended up being that she had a very abusive home life and bullying was her way of making friends; it was the only way that she really knew how to go about it. I didn’t know that until after that bullying incident. I don’t think that most people think that they’re bullies. I think that a lot of people don’t consider themselves bullies when their behaviors are actually exclusionary behaviors that we see in high school. People don’t really see how we form our cliques and don’t accept people who are different than us in any way as a type of bullying. I just don’t think that most kids see that.”[/accordion]

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