Bullying Can Be A Team Sport!

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By Radical Rhymes

Bullying. It’s a nasty word isn’t it? It’s also a word that is not easily reclaimed. I know from being the dad to sporting sons that it is often used to describe sporting dominance these days. When one person has the upper hand in a sporting contest they are said to be ‘bullying’ the opposition, or in a team context, one side can ‘bully’ another.

However, when I hear the word it leaves me cold. So, what are we talking about? According to Medicine.Net it involves: ‘physical or verbal aggression that is repeated over a period and, in contrast to meanness, involves an imbalance of power.’ As a child bullying used to make my stomach churn. I would see it on TV programs and read about it in Dickens, the travails of David Copperfield or Oliver Twist, and it would induce feelings of helplessness and despair in me. Having seen and experienced it, those feelings have never gone away.

The causes of bullying are complex. It can emerge from a form of sociopathy, but it can be learned behavior. Bullying often reflects low self-esteem and feelings of worthlessness and anger, and bullies have frequently been bullied themselves. By contrast, those people who bully without having been bullied themselves are thought to have above average self-esteem, and the traits are linked to social climbing and ‘success’.

I suppose I was fortunate as a child because I was never subject to systemic bullying. It did happen. Of course, it did. The research seems to suggest that somewhere in the region of 28% of children between grades 6-12 experience bullying at some stage. But for me it was isolated and sporadic, largely because I was an accomplished sportsman. The kudos of that shielded me from the worst of it. As I said, I was lucky.

To my eternal shame though, I did engage in bullying once, and only once. It was on a bus full of athletes on the way to the school county athletics championships. The regular bullies started to tease and torment a girl about her size, and they, for whatever reason, elected to draw me into it. For my part I said a few things and then opted out, only really to deflect their spotlight. I did not want to be the next victim. I know there is no excuse, but that’s the truth of it.

To this day I regret it, and I would give anything to go back or to apologize to that poor girl. But I also never understood why the coaches didn’t step in. They must have heard what was going on and yet they did nothing. Again, the research says that teachers frequently underestimate the amount of bullying that goes on in their classes and schools, but, as in this case, I’m certain that they sometimes choose to ‘stay out of it’.

I know for certain it happens in youth sport outside the school environment. My oldest son played in a regional cricket team for five years and during that time he was ridiculed, humiliated and tormented by three or four members of his team, orchestrated by the captain. At the time I was involved in the coaching team, for another team, and communicated the problems to the guys in charge of his age group. Sadly, they did nothing, and I didn’t really expect them to. You see, the captain was the son of the wealthy family that ran the club the coaches themselves played for. Even the senior administrators were unwilling to believe it: ‘But he’s a lovely boy!’ well, he was when the adults were present…

That sense of entitlement gave the ringleader an inflated sense of himself and he chose to use his influence in the team to systematically bully my son, and several others. The stronger players victimised and excluded the weaker players, to the point where many of them left, not only the regional team, but the game itself. Tragic.

This week, we encountered two of those bullies again, one of which was his erstwhile captain, and I saw for myself the longer-term damage that it causes. They couldn’t look us in the face, and my son was overcome with feelings of repressed shame and rage. In a fair fight he would clean them both up, he always would have, but that isn’t how it works, at least not in this case. It was verbal, spiteful, unrelenting.

Bullying is a terrible thing, and even though teams ought to pull together they often harbour divisions and tensions that develop into bullying. Those of us who are responsible for coaching should look very carefully at the relationships and the environments we operate within. It takes a keen eye, and, at times, a willingness to take on the powerful. But if we want our teams to really operate as such, then we need to weed out and challenge bullying wherever it might be hiding.

Bullying, you see, just cannot be reclaimed.

Radical Rhymes is a professional artist working with a range of media – predominantly animal/human portraits and landscapes – including, most recently, hand painted furniture. You can see his work on Instagram Radicalrhymes1969 or on Twitter @RhymesRadical

For commissions, please contact him on Twitter via Direct Message or by email at: radicalrhymes@outlook.com His work is also available to buy on Etsy

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