Anti-Bullying Week: A Yakster’s Personal Account

Throughout the week, in accordance with our Anti-Bullying initiatives, we will be featuring stories from our very own members in our YakkityYaks forum. These stories are volunteered from people who call our website their internet home and it is just another example of our personal feel and family attitude we pride ourselves in.

That, however, is not the focus of this week. Many, if not all, of these stories don’t need an introduction. They each have a very special message that will speak to us in different ways.

Just a reminder, the stories are unedited and real truths. We have only changed the names of those involved to protect their identities.

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My son, Brandon, who is 11, has always had it fairly easy in school. He’s always been an honor student and is friends with everyone. I wouldn’t consider him to be “popular,” because he has friends in all of the cliques and really doesn’t fit in to just one. He likes it that way, because he likes all different kinds of people.

When he was five years old, he was a very bright kid…he still is. It seemed that everything that he would learn in kindergarten were things that he already knew—thanks to his sister, Emily, who is just one year older than him. She would come home from school and tell him everything she learned and he instantly picked it up. So, we had him tested by the state to see if was a candidate to skip kindergarten and move on to first grade. He aced the test, so we decided to put him in first grade with his sister. We were concerned about how things would work out socially since he was a year younger than all of his classmates, but he fit right in and had absolutely no problems with any of the students.

Last year was the first time that Brandon saw first hand a division in his classmates. He and Emily were in sixth grade and they went to the middle school. Until that time, all of the kids, regardless of race were friends with each other. However, at middle school his Mexican friends wouldn’t talk to him (or any other non-Mexican kids) and developed their own clique. The year before, Brandon’s best friend was one of the kids who no longer talked to him. Since he was a year younger, he was much smaller than the other sixth graders (and would have been considered small even if he had been in the fifth grade). He was immediately targeted by his ex-friend and their clique. It started out relatively harmless. They would stand near him and talk in Spanish making it obvious that they were talking about him. As he has been taught, he ignored them thinking they would stop. When they didn’t get a reaction out of him, they moved on to shoving his books out of his hands in the hallway. After a week or so of not getting a reaction, it escalated to them punching him, usually in the arm or the back. Because he is so small, he knew that he was better off ignoring them. One day he came home with a red, puffy eye, so I asked him what happened. He kept telling me it was nothing, so I asked Emily. She convinced him to come clean with me about everything that had been going on. It was at the time that I found out about everything they had been doing to him along with spitting in his face. He had been dealing with that for nearly a month and never let me know what was going on. I was heartbroken to find out that my son had been going to school every day and facing these kids and was so afraid of what they would do to him that he never told me.

The next day I was at the school in the principal’s office to tell him what Brandon had been going through. He appeared to be just as upset as I was that he had no idea this had been happening. After I left, he called Brandon into the office to get his side of it and to get the names of the kids who had been bullying him. After watching the video, every student who had bullied Brandon in any way (from shoving his books out of his hand to spitting on him) was suspended for 10 days. Every student who stood by and encouraged the bullying was suspended for 5 days.

Thankfully when they all returned to school, the bullying completely stopped. Brandon is now in 7th grade and was on the football team with a few of the kids in that clique and they get along very well. They aren’t friends during school, but they work together as a team on the field.

I feel so sad and fortunate at the same time. Sad because he dealt with that every day for so long and fortunate because the end result could have been so much worse.

Thanks for reading my story.

-YY Member, Kristin

Anti-Bullying Week: “I had to invest all my trust in myself…”

All this week, YakkityYaks will be joining with past and present Reality TV stars and fans just like you in honor of Anti-Bullying Week. We will be featuring stories from Reality TV personalities, members in our YakkityYaks forum, and fans from Twitter and Facebook. In an effort to join forces and increase awareness, we encourage you to share these stories with your friends and family and encourage continuous efforts to make a difference! We all are capable and we just hope that this motivates and encourages each and every one of us to take a stand and put a stop to bullying once and for all. YakkityYaks, don’t talk smack!

Read on below for two personal accounts from fans on Twitter who felt so moved to submit their own personal and touching stories, in addition to all of our other coverage today. Names have been changed to protect identities, but the stories are straight from the heart and unedited.

If you are interested in participating in our anti-bullying initiative by sharing your story, please contact JDMontgomery@yakkityyaks.com or ShellyBB13@me.com (Big Brother’s Shelly). Each and every story can bring about great change.

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A Victim of Bullying

Hi there. Saw the tweet about calling for stories, so here goes mine.

It’s been nearly ten years, but I still remember the day vividly. For years, I had been teased on a daily basis at school. It started off because of my eagerness to learn and my good grades. ‘Egghead,’ ‘nerd,’ ‘teacher’s pet.’ Then it became my weight. ‘Humpty Dumpty,’ ‘big gut.’ Then once I started junior high, kids started picking up on the fact that I might be gay. Heck, they figured it out before I did. But the things they’d say, whether it be sly sarcastic jokes or outright name calling, took a daily toll on me.

At its worst, I would be heckled and teased for hours on end, especially during agriculture class, something I didn’t have an interest in but which was mandated by the school. The other guys in the class would take our textbooks and find every picture in the book that featured any aspect of male animal genitalia and ask what I would do with them. These questions would follow me down the halls, into other classes. I would complain and beg for action from any teacher who would listen. I turned to the school counselor and asked for help.

The day in question, I was in agriculture class again. The lewd questions continued. The heckling got louder and louder until finally I slammed down my books and high-tailed it right out of the classroom. I went out to find the school counselor. Coincidentally, she was coming out to see me. “We want to have a little meeting,” she said, and she led me into the superintendent’s office. The counselor shut the door behind her, joining me in a small office with her, the super, and the high school principal. This is good, I thought. They’re going to tell me what they plan to do to stop this.

Not so.

Over the course of nearly two hours, I was subjected to interrogation from all three of them, asking me to try and pinpoint what it was about me that made the other guys make fun of me. They highlighted my ‘effeminate tendencies,’ my lack of interest in sports, and explicitly told me that I brought all the teasing upon myself. They asked me if I loved myself. The superintendent looked me straight in the eyes after I told her yes, and said “I don’t believe you.”

They then began to tell me they thought I might try to “Columbine” my school, highlighting the then recent one-year anniversary of that school shooting, and advised me that they recommended I seek professional help.

My trust in adults was broken at that moment, at least those in charge of that school. I had no defense, no backup. There was literally no one I could turn to who could do anything, or would do anything, to help me. I was faced with a choice: do I prove everyone right? Do I hurt other people or myself because that’s what these people expected of me, or do I continue on the way I was, relying on nothing but my own future?

I chose the latter. I had to force myself to wake up every morning with the objective of getting through it, promising myself that I would eventually get away from that place and never look back. I focused harder on my grades, graduated, moved on to college, and today I have a very nice, well-paying job and a very loving boyfriend of two years. (Our anniversary was Monday the 7th).

I had to invest all my trust in myself. I knew who I was and trusted that would carry me through in life. And it has.

-C. E.

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A Bully’s Personal Account

Hey,

I guess you kind of know me. I hate telling my story. Because in my story I was the bully. Now, I’m only 16 but I know what I did was wrong. And I regret it 100%.

I live in Philadelphia, a place where almost no one is like the next. I’m not a kid with money but I had it so much better than most. There was a girl named Marie who rode my bus, and she had a lot less. I used to tell her some awful things. Call her names. And once it even got physical. She moved after 6th grade and she was easily forgotten. This year, she moved back and I noticed her at my school. She was always avoiding me. Then one day I approached her at lunch, and I told her how sorry and wrong I was. There’s not a day I don’t think about how much hurt and pain I put her through. I hate myself for that. Now Marie and I have join the school club S.U.R.E for peace. I’m on the strong, growing team of Anti-bullying activists.

Thank you for reading my story.

-S.D.