The effect of bullying has had a massive impact on my life and it all started when I was just over 12 years old, 10 years ago. As I am close to turning 22, I now feel it is the right time to let people know of the experience I had when I was bullied and how little the authorities and schools did to help me.

When I was in Junior school I loved rugby, I was part of my schools rugby team and really enjoyed playing the game, as I moved over to High School my love for rugby continued with me, except the team I had to play with changed. I no longer enjoyed playing rugby and when I was to join the team by the coach I declined it. This is when the bullying started.

I was 12. I was really enjoying my time at school and then all of a sudden, with no reason people just turned on me. I still don’t know why and no body ever gave me a reason, it just seemed that one day everyone hated me.

Going to school every morning was the worst feeling in the world, I would walk into the school grounds and it would immediately start. There was no time for me to meet up with any friends I had.  At first it was small things, I would get tripped up in the corridor, teased and laughed at for the smallest things, if my trousers were slightly too short or my shoes were old.  This went on for about 2 months before it got worse.

It started getting violent and didn’t just happen in the corridors, it would happen to me in class too, I remember in a Maths lesson, my bag was stolen by some of the bullies and they rooted through it picking out my belongings and throwing it around the class room, they even managed to find a MARS bar which ended its life quite abruptly when it got thrown at the back of my head, this then led to them using things that weren’t mine to hurt me and stealing my belongings.  I remember two occasions on my way to science.  I was walking down the corridor to the lesson with the bullies and I had a brand new pen from a friend who had just come back from Holiday and I loved it. I took it in to school they day I had to use it with pride, I didn’t have that pen for long they learnt I’d liked it so they stole it from me, broke it and threw it on a roof! On a second occasion I remember being pinned against a wall by a science chair (Those big stools you have to sit on when you do experiments).

This is when I didn’t want to go into school and it all happened in about 5 months, it’s when going to school for me started becoming a chore, something I hated doing and something I never wanted to do on a daily basis.  At this point I told my parents and they did the best they could to help me out, we went to my Head of Year, who said he’d look into it and he did – he spoke to the bullies about it and they were told to leave me alone in school.  Which would have been amazing – if it had worked. It didn’t work, in fact after this point it got worse, it got really worse – it went from name calling and tripping up to violence. I even got tricked by them, they told me my friend needed me, so I went to help a good friend of mine and I got violently attacked, almost outside my own house. I remember that night to this day as if it was yesterday. I walked slowly round the street I lived on to see what my friend needed. He wasn’t there, I turned around to go back home and I was confronted by three guys on bikes who quickly got off, the leader of the group hit me full on in the face as hard as he could, then I woke up. I don’t remember what happened when I got attacked that night, I just remember being hit in the face and then blacking out, I woke up covered in my own blood surrounded by these three boys laughing. I did the only thing I could do, I got up and ran to the nearest house just as one of the lads tried to grab me to pull me back. I spent the remainder of that night in hospital.

This is where I wanted it completely stopped, up until this point it was bearable and now it was getting too dangerous for me to just grin and bare it until the end of school, so we went to the Police, as you can imagine I thought this would certainly be the end of it. – It wasn’t.

The Police was were as much help as my school were, they did very little. Which was consisted of them filling out a report and telling me, “Learn self defence.” This was their only solution and advice to someone who had been jumped by three people. From then on School life got worse, I would go in and in the morning I would be hit, kicked, threatened, heckled and laughed at so I would never stay a full day, usually leaving halfway through a day. Avoiding those who had attacked me and those who would bully me some more on the way out.

I became suicidal, I didn’t want to live in this world, it got to the point where I wouldn’t want to get out of bed in the morning, every day felt like a chore and I just wanted to stay in an eternal sleep where everything was normal and I was happy.  My social life became non-existent and I would be too scared to go out, I still do not venture into the City where I was bullied.  The schools and authorities did nothing for me and I go into this world with no qualifications and nothing to fall back on, because I was the victim of bullying.

And what of the bullies? They spent the rest of their time in school picking on someone else, anyone they could find – yes they finished school and yes they are more qualified than me. The worst thing is they don’t even remember the hell they put me through and the mess they made of my life.  I hope one day they know the pain they caused me all those years ago and I hope I never see or speak to them again.

The bullying policies that were put in place didn’t work and I hope that people will learn from this story where to go forward and how they can change peoples lives in school, the authorities need to do more to protect those who are being bullied and the families of those being bullied, as you can tell my life got pretty bad, I’ve had to remove a lot of what happened because of the sheer brutality of the youth. I’m still here today to spread my story with people like Beth and that’s all that counts.

I’ll leave you with this. The moment you start hurting yourself, the moment you think less of yourself because of the bullies, they’ve won. You shouldn’t self harm, you shouldn’t go on a diet or make yourself thinner because of them. Whatever they tell you, whatever they do to you is wrong. You are you and that’s all that is ever asked. You are perfect. Don’t let them win.

Thanks for reading my story. It means a lot.

Matt.

Every school has an anti bullying policy but not all of them stick to it, they have this rule for a reason so they should stick to it and help protect their students from this.
Schools should talk about the subject of ‘Bullying’ more often, this may help the students feel more comfortable talking about this if they are being bullied, and this will help people understand what bullying exactly is, some people get bullied but don’t realise they are being bullied.
I think there should be some students in every school that are there every break time for other students to go and speak to, this could be helpful for the students that don’t have many friends, for the students that are worried etc.
Something should be done with the person who has bullied someone else, instead of just talking to them something else should be done, because talking to them doesn’t always work, and sometimes it may get worse.
Every teacher should be trained on how to deal with bullying and every teacher should be able to do something about it instead of there being a certain teacher. If there is just one teacher who is in charge of this they may be too busy to do something about it, so it would be better if other teachers could do something about it too.
It should be made clearer that bullying will not be tolerated in each school so that students are aware, some students don’t know that their school has an anti bullying policy in place.
A record of the bullying should be kept, this can help the student know it is being taken seriously and that it is always being looked at.

But bullying doesn’t only happen in schools, it happens in the workplace, college, uni etc, and something needs to be done to stop that too.

Bullying can happen to anyone of any age.
Together we can stop it.

“Just ignore them, they’ll stop soon” – Don’t tell any victim of bullying this because it doesn’t matter how long the bullying lasts, it has emotional affects and the person being bullied should not just ignore them, they should go and get help from someone, whether it be a teacher, friend, family member.
“Don’t tell anyone about it because it will make it worse” – This is a lie, telling someone you are being bullied can help stop the bullying and can make you feel less alone and it can be a relief knowing you have someone you can tell, if the bullying ever gets worse more should be done to stop the bullies.
“Fight back” – If you fight back you will get into trouble too.
“Don’t show them that it is affecting you” – Do you know how hard this is? I’ve tried this. I went through  a year of doing this, it doesn’t work, and it is far from easy, if someone calls you ugly can you pretend not to care? I know that this CAN be affective sometimes but it is so hard to do.

Some things you can do:
- Keep a diary of what happens to you and show it to a teacher at the end of every week or at the end of everyday.
- Tell a teacher, they can speak to the bullies and help stop them.
- Make sure other teachers know so that they can keep an eye out for anything happening.
- Ask about counselling to help you deal with the emotional side of what is happening.
- You can get advice from other people that have been through bullying and see what helped them deal with it.
- If the bullies aren’t stopping speak to the headteacher.
- When out of school you can speak to helplines, they can give you advice on what to do.

Stay strong, don’t let them break you.

The bullying can stop but the affects of what happened to you can last forever. Just because i am unwell it won’t stop me trying to help stop what caused me to become unwell. Doing this blog helps me anyway because there is a chance it may help someone, even if it just helps one person, that’s all i want.

Depression, anxiety, self harm, suicide, low self esteem, eating disorders etc, all of these can be caused by bullying.

“Its stormy now but the sun’s gonna shine again
Even the worst storms gotta end
We’re better if we weather it all (yeah)
Together we’re never gonna fall ♫”
(Stormy by Hedley)

Bullying needs to be stopped, and together we can stop it.
Stay strong and keep fighting.

Bullying in school.
- 69% of children in the UK report being bullied
- 87% of  parents report that their child had been bullied in the past 12 months
- 85% had witnessed bullying
- It is estimated that at  least 20 children and adolescents a  year commit suicide because of being bullied
- 1 in 3 young people  who experience bullying truant from school
- 20,000 young people  truant everyday as a result of bullying
(Statistics from Beatbullying.org)

And it isn’t just children and young people being bullied..

Bullying in the workplace
- 18.9 million working days are lost each year as a direct result of workplace bullying
- More than two million people at work consider themselves as being bullied
- 43.5% of employers do not have a policy to deal with workplace bullying
- 82.2% say that weakness in management is the prime reason for bullying
(Statistics from personneltoday.com)

These statistics might even be wrong because a lot of people keep quiet about bullying, or don’t think that they are being bullied when really they are.

Bullying leads to suicide, self harm, eating disorders, people running away and lots of other problems. When is it going to stop?

Stay Strong.
You are better than the bullies.

Although there are times when i take a break from twitter or times when i turn my phone off, i still come back to doing my blog and helping stop bullying.

I hope that through my blog i will help people realise that, yes it is hard but you can fight through this.

You are never alone, so never think you are, there is always someone out there that will help and support you.

We can forget what you did, forget what you said, but we will never forget how you made us feel.

(Click on the picture to make it bigger)

Thank you to every single person who was involved in this post, and to everyone who helped.

Together we can and WILL end bullying.
Words hurt.
Everyone is beautiful in their own way.
Stay Strong.

Please share this post to help me get more people involved.
Together we can end bullying.

Thank you.

I want to help stop bullying so that kids don’t have to be too scared to go to school or adults are worried about going to work. I don’t want people to give up their lives because of bullying, well actually.. i don’t want people to harm themselves in any way because of bullying, i don’t want people to self harm because of other people, or make themselves sick because of other people, and every other thing bullies cause people to do to themselves.

You may shoot me with your words, you may cut me with your eyes ,you may kill me with your hatred, but still, like  air, i’ll rise.

Nobody is perfect, and everyone should be treated the same.

Bullying shouldn’t happen, there have been so many suicides because of this, how many more is it going to take before bullying is finally stopped.

Any form of abuse is wrong and needs to be stopped now.

Words hurt.

I am not going to stop speaking up about this, i won’t be silenced, and i appreciate everyone that helps me and supports what i am doing. I hope to make a difference.
Please help me get my voice heard.

Thank you.

As soon as the alarm goes off you start worrying about what school will be like today. You hope that maybe the people who bully you won’t be in today so you can have one day that’s different from the others.
You go to wait for the bus worrying about who else will be on the bus, or where you’ll sit if there are some bullies on the bus. As you get on the bus you see people looking at you, you think they’re just looking at you because you’re so ‘ugly’ as this is what you have been called so many times. You sit down alone and hope this will soon be over. On the bus you listen to music so you can’t hear their comments if they make any.

You arrive at school and go straight to somewhere you can be alone, the library, a classroom, anywhere to be alone. As the bell goes you start walking up to tutor worrying about who you will see on the way to your classroom. You walk with your head down so you can watch for their feet trying to trip you up, and so you can’t see if they say something to you, you can hear what they say but just not being able to see them say it directly to you makes it somehow better because then you think maybe it wasn’t said to you.

You sit down in your seat worrying about who is around, you look behind you because you are used to people throwing things at you from behind. When the teacher arrives it is a relief because they won’t be too bad when there is a teacher around.
You get scared when a teacher asks you to answer a question because if you get that question wrong the bullies laugh at you and call you stupid, it’s weird how they laugh at you but not other people who get the questions wrong. If you know the answer to a question you still don’t answer it because you’re scared they’ll call you names for getting the answer right.

Whenever the teacher leaves a classroom you get scared because this is when the bullies start again, throwing things at you, shouting at you, “you fat slag” “loser”. You just ignore them and concentrate on your work. You do think about leaving the classroom but you worry that they might know you left because of them and you wouldn’t want them to know this so you just sit and pretend you don’t care when really you do.

When dinner time comes you go straight to somewhere you can be alone and somewhere you know they won’t go. The library was somewhere I went every single break time so I felt safe.
I was someone who never ate dinner at school because I was scared to go to the canteen because I knew they went there and I just wanted to stay away from them.

The end of the day seems like the best thing ever.
This was just a normal day for you.

This was what school was like for me when I was there, I have now left. So many other people have to go through something similar. This shouldn’t happen, school should be a safe place for us to learn, you shouldn’t fear going to school. This needs to be stopped.
Together we can stop it.

I am speaking up for every other victim of bullying, I will not be silenced. Please help me get my voice heard.
Thank you.