notes on bullying (personal)

I was going to just post a link to delicious, but my notes ended up a bit long. They’re a bit short (and unformed) for a blog post, but I was running out of room….

danah boyd’s post “reflections on Lori Drew, bullying, and solutions to helping kids”

“for the most part, parents only learned of bullying once it had escalated to unbearable levels“

2 incidents from my youth: in jr high, a group of girls tormented me every day on the way home, including throwing my viola into the street. I didn’t ever say anything…until the time they kept going after I picked up Edith at elementary school, she started yelling back, and one of the girls choked her. Mom went to the sheriff. (I was MORTIFIED, but it was the right thing. And the lead girl, the one who choked Edith: she was wary of messing with me all the way thru high school.)

In high school, there was this notebook we passed around (I’ve mentioned it before; it was a sort of physical MySpace/Friendbook) and a girl who had been one of my best friends said horrid things about me, TO me, which pretty much ended our friendship, although we made up in college. she said then that she’d been going thru some severe stuff herself. so, yeah.

Come to think of it, there’s another friend from that period, who I was also alienated from in part through The Notebook, who I only reconnected with just, um, last week. Yay Facebook! 😉 (We emailed briefly a couple of years ago IIRC, but that was from the email address that I’ve since lost.)

I like the idea of the “digital street workers.” C said that when he was in high school, he got trained as a “natural helper” — a sort of peer counselor. It sounds like it was a good program, both for his fellow students and for him, and it seems like something that would be nice to take out to the internets.

(I’m so not touching any of the particulars of the case that spawned danah’s musings.)