Support Zone
Bullies

Starting school at eleven is always daunting and when you’re bullied at school as well; each day can be like living in hell.

I was bullied because I had decided to stick up for myself. A boy called Roger and his friend John had felt that giving me a slap on my back in front of the whole class was a good thing to do to someone at school.

To deal with the situation: I decided to slap Roger back and not take the slap, while John stood to the side watching. I’m not sure if that was the right thing to do, but something came over me and I ended up just wanting to slap him back. Looking back at that moment in time, I feel sick to the stomach; why didn’t I just take it? From where did I get the strength to attack him? My hand just became raised and I felt powerless over controlling it . . .

I didn’t even think about the fact that he would later seek out his revenge. What also gets to me is that; where was my teacher when all of this was taking place?! Roger and John should have been stopped and taken to the Head Teacher’s Office – I was supposed to have been supervised at school. What happened next is a bit of a blur and I don’t even remember if any of my teachers actually did intervene.

What I do remember is that the whole class cheered me as I sat back down on my chair and I don’t even know if I felt better, bad or just like I’d saved my sense of dignity. What I do know though, was that this incident was going to shadow the rest of my two years at my fist secondary school. I was never forgiven by Roger for that slap I gave him and his best friend John was also not going to let me forget it as well.

I felt that what I had done that day had been an act of trying to protect myself; I was upset and the both fellow class members had gotten to me that much, that I had in a split second moment decided to act upon the violence that I had received. Today looking back at that awful incident at school I feel sadden that none of my teachers at school felt the need to help me or even send me home (I did have to sit through a whole day at school when the incident took place).  

If you’re being bullied at school today: try and keep it together and if you can speak to a friend or a teacher, then please do so, as talking about bullying or even writing about it can help you to try and cope with the pain caused by bullies.

* This piece was inspired by my experiences of living in South West London in the Nineties. While living on a council estate I came across lots of images of dogs as posters, signs and huge warning signs to word off perspective burglars and thieves. I felt threatened and labelled by the signage that was around me and came up with the idea venting my frustrations by creating a number of paintings based on the theme of the 'DOG'; there are at least 20 paintings that I made in this 'Dog Signage' series to see more of the paintings in this series please place a request through the site.