POLICE ASSOCIATION OF NOVA SCOTIA 157 An 11-year-old boy just wants to fit in, but he's often left in tears and despair by the taunts, laughter and physical abuse meted out by schoolyard bullies. IT'S A GAME the 11-year-old wants to play. But some of his classmates always make sure he's the loser. Squeals of mocking laughter cut the air when he joins a schoolyard pastime called wall-ball. If the ball touches the kids without them catching it, they're out. And this fair-haired Nova Scotia boy, with a love for tropical fish, art and writing, is almost always out. "They kind of just like throw it at me and it hits me," he says. "They just focus everything on me just to get me out, and then they continue the game." It hurts. But by now, as he completes Grade 6, the student has come to expect such treatment. The school playground has been more and more like a battlefield since Grade Primary, when he started school as a shy five-year-old who cried when others made fun of him, making him a favourite target. Over the years he's been teased about the way he looks and what he likes. Something as simple as preferring toy cars to yo-yos has gotten him branded "uncool." Even his name, which he prefers not to give, has been used as a weapon, called out in a searing sing-song or whispered in a huddle. Then there are the times he's come home with black eyes, bruises on his stomach and a cut lip. "It's scary out there," says his mother, who's watched her son cry for hours over the latest slight or slap. "It was so paradoxical, because they were calling (themselves) a bully-proof school, and I'd be going in with stories - this happened, this happened . . . or (he'd) be coming home . . . with just a note on a piece of paper (saying he) was beaten up in the hallway . . . or on the school grounds. It was just bizarre. "He got beaten up at dances, he'd get beaten up going out the (school) door, in the hallway . . . in the washroom." Last year, he snapped. His two closest friends, whose picture still hangs on his bedroom wall, had moved away. Another chum, who'd also been picked on, joined the bullies rather than be a target of their wrath. One day he could hear them all talking about him in a school lineup. "I got really mad. . . . Just all of a sudden, just kept knocking them down like dominoes, and every time they'd get up I'd knock them right down, and if anyone tried to stop me I'd knock them right down." The boy was suspended. Even hitting back, he says, didn't work, just like all the other ways he'd tried to stop the bullies - ignoring them, telling the teacher, calling them names, even joining their ranks. Once he even picked on a vulnerable kid, he says - just to fit in. "If I was on his side, then I would also be considered an enemy," he says. "Sometimes when I first started bullying the kid, I then realized how much power bullies actually have, and I kind of got really power-hungry. . . . It kind of . . . made me feel good, even though it was the wrong thing to do." Perhaps it has always been this way: children teaching children the harsher lessons of life when they're supposed to be mastering math and science. But until the late 1990s, when a study called Trends in the Health of Canadian Youth showed that up to 50 per cent of kids have been bullied or been bullies, little research had been done in this country. Parents of another generation might have tried to soothe the scars by talking about sticks and stones or dismissing the schoolyard rumbles as a rite of passage. Some still do. But these days, more and more studies are highlighting the brutal aftermath of the verbal brickbats and physical blows meted out in the schoolyard. Adults who were bullied at school are seven times more likely to attempt suicide than those who were not, says a survey by the London, England, charity Kidscope. And a study by the University of New England in New South Wales shows that adults who were bullied at school are at greater risk of depression, schizophrenia and posttraumatic stress disorder. "Post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety - all of that stuff is carried into adulthood, and (victims of bullying) experience higher rates of that than people who have not been victimized," says Cindi Seddon. She's a B.C. teaching principal, author and co-creator of Bully B'Ware Productions, which makes videos and trains teachers on how to stop the problem. Halifax psychologist Nina Woulff has treated children who have been victims of chronic, ongoing abuse at the hands of their peers. School days, cruel days By Lois Legge / Staff Reporter continued...
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