During my first year of middle school, I was bullied pretty extensively by one guy. Apparently, I had committed the cardinal sin of “not being cool enough” (his words, not mine) and he didn’t want anything to do with me, even though we had been friends for a year before in elementary school. He made up code words that he would drop in group conversations to signal to everyone else that they should ditch me, and everyone obeyed because he was armed with bags of Hi-Chew and would let people try his array of Alpha-Gel pens and pencils (which were the cream of the crop for writing implements in middle school, in case you didn’t know). 

No one stuck up for me. Not even my own friends. Eventually, the only solution I could find was to avoid him as much as possible. I changed the halls I would walk through in between periods so I would avoid him and tried to keep my distance, until about a year and a half later when he said that he wanted us to be friends and didn’t want me to avoid him anymore because it was making him uncomfortable. It wasn’t so much an apology as it was a “truce”, for lack of a better term, which bothered me at the time, but as someone who had a hard time speaking up and making friends at that age, I accepted it.

I’m sure he’s a changed person now, but it still doesn’t sit right with me how everyone basically defended him and didn’t care about me. Even after years of therapy and self-reflection, I’m still hurt by the fact that everyone saw how much I was hurting and was okay with it. He was never punished in any way by anyone, and he continued to be popular, making me wonder if I had deserved all of that somehow. 

It’s frustrating that in our society, when a victim faces discrimination or hatred from a perpetrator, it’s not the perpetrator that gets punished and sent to therapy to work on their harmful behavior. Post-conflict, it’s usually the victim who has to spend the time and money to deal with their feelings and process their trauma through therapy and whatever other bullshit they’re prescribed. There’s no requirement for the perpetrator to work on themselves and grow from whatever they’ve done. There’s no incentive for them to sit down and process their misplaced anger and bigoted feelings and grow from them. It’s up to the victim to deal with the mess that has been thrown their way. We make excuses for the perpetrator and tell the victim to just ignore them because “you’re the better person”, which does nothing to stop the perpetrator from harming other people.

Why aren’t there therapy and rehabilitation programs for perpetrators to unpack their behavior and to help them mature from their lowlife behavior? Why does our society not push for more accountability from people who harm others? Many times, I have sat in therapy working through an issue I’ve faced in the past, and felt frustrated because I was sitting in the chair, processing my trauma and emotions, when it really should’ve been the culprit being sat down down so we can figure out what’s going on with them.

Today, I saw a video of a young high school kid who, after being bullied by a classmate, made the tragic decision to jump off the fourth floor of his building and is now dead. His mother has come out and said that he has been relentlessly bullied for a while. I wonder what would’ve happened had someone done something earlier and protected the kid from his bully.