LETTER FROM AUSTRALIA: SCREW 'DEM BULLIES







The guy who bullied me at my secondary school was c**t.

 He picked on the weak. I was on the end of his nastiness for the best part of 5 years. I wasn’t the only one. I saw him very abuse a woman while she was in the midst of an eating disorder, to threatening to punch someone smaller and weaker in the same year. I remember it clear as day: The guy was scared out of his mind.

Fast forward – sweet Lord – nearly 30 years – and he’s apparently married, and he married a very gorgeous woman. It didn’t surprise me, because he was able to be exceptionally funny and charming. Except that his humor was aimed at making other people feel miserable (“Satan can charm anyone, baby!”) 

Some years after he contacted me to send his condolences about my recently-deceased wife and to apologize for his behaviour towards me, if you can count an attempt as a justification of his actions with"I WAS BULLIED TOO,  YOU KNOW" would have led to a great reaction (Note: It didn't), around the time taht my first died in 2012.

So you can imagine that when he left he would never disturb me again. Sure there were others. I could give you a litany of things that happened to me at that school, but I don’t want to. It’s not important. And yet, all I can say coming out of it all was “Thank God”. Thank God Nokia and its text messages was in infancy. The cool iMacs weren’t widely used. Not everyone had AOL Instant Messenger, and we certainly weren’t allowed to use it at school. The Nokia and all its text messages was still two years ago.

Because if I know for a fact that if I'd been the same way at school right now than I was back then, I would have been a repeated target. And that would have led to a pretty good chance of suicide or me thinking about it. 

 THE SERIOUSNESS OF BULLYING 

 And yet, some parts of bullying aren’t taken seriously. People don’t think that a harmful word can be bullying, but it can. Calling someone ‘gay’ can live to a lifetime of worrying about sexual orientation. Calling someone ‘fat’ can lead to someone becoming anorexic. Someone saying that you’re a ‘loner’ can leave someone feeling alone. But people should. Because bullying can perversely lead to something far darker, like mental health issues or even more shockingly, the fact that kids who are bullied online think about suicide 1.9 times more than the ‘average kid’. 





THE ROBOTS ARE TO BLAME 

 OK, so here are some facts. 46% of teens in the USA between 13 and 17 experienced cyberbullying, 28% of teenagers get in the neck in various forms, from false rumours to attacks about their race, sexual orientation to really, really nasty shit (the stats are worse for adults, but we’re sticking to the kids). 

31% had to deal with the sort of persistent name-calling I dealt with for between 1988 to 1997. 

 Social media bullying statistics show that 42% of youths were bullied on Instagram – more than on any other platform. Facebook follows with 37%, while Snapchat, Whatsapp, and YouTube are at 31%, 12%, and 10%, respectively. These range from a bad word here and there to some seriously nasty shit, but in our view, bullying is bullying. 

And bullying is sadistic and sheer evil. 

But when the Australian Government said that they wanted to do a blanket ban on social media by kids under the age of 16, the social media companies rebelled. And other countries are thinking about following suit, worrying about heighting suicide rates among teens are well as the growth in mental health problems. 

 Elon Musk complained about it, basically it was an attack of X/ Twitter. Tik-Tok said that it was ‘disappointed’ the decision (probably because their audience is a bunch of kids). Meta – maker of Instagram – said the legislation was rushed. And while Musk bangs on about government conspiracies, the makers of the other platforms are more worried that a blanket ban on different countries will have a detrimental effect on the biggest thing of all: Their bottom lines (97% of Gen Z say that social media is the biggest source of their buying inspiration). 

It’s frightening. And the move might just have saved some lives of the Gen-Z generation, and the media owners complain bitterly. 

But quite frankly, fuck ‘em.

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