The new fight against bullying

After being forced out of the closet when Anderson’s mother eavesdropped on a phone call to with her partner, Anderson became very public with her orientation, even becoming nominated as “best couple” in their senior class. Though when it looked as though they might win the title, school administrators took their names off the ballot.

“My family may not consider that bullying,” Anderson said, “but that’s because they don’t take the time to educate themselves.” In addition to growing up in the conservative South, Anderson also comes from a mixed Latino and African American heritage, communities where religious law sometimes rules supreme. “It’s been rough knowing that I don’t have a mom or dad that I can go to for parental support. I don’t have a parent to say ‘so long as you’re happy, that’s all that matters.’”

“My family used to call me things like ‘dyke’ and ‘butch,’” Amaya remembered. “Names that were offensive then, but I can own now. They were always putting me down. And this wasn’t coming from school, but from my family, so it was even closer to my heart. But I was also internally repressed, hating myself for liking people who were the same gender. There was a lot of hate coming from myself.”

“People are bullied for all kinds of reasons,” said Madrid, who also spent much of her childhood in Denver, meeting Amaya years earlier when they both attended Abraham Lincoln High School. “It’s not just sexuality. It could be that you’re too dark, or your hair is too curly, or you speak with an accent, or you’re too big.”

After growing up in the Latino oriented neighborhood of Barnum, Madrid’s family moved to Littleton, where she would attend Henry Middle School, a place where her ethnicity made her a target of bullies. “I faced a lot of physical threats. It was the way my hair was put in a ponytail, because I was darker, because I was a tomboy, because of how I spoke. I shut people out and did what I had to do to survive.”

The image society has of the bully, the victim, and the end result of the dynamic, is often at odds with reality. While some who are bullied have become suicidal or self-destructive (Tyler Clementi; Billy Lucas), there is often a whole range of aspects to this age-old problem.

“It is not necessary to be physically harmed in order to suffer lasting harm. Words and gestures are quite enough,” said Dr. Mark Dombeck, a Clinical Psychologist, in his essay “The Long Term Effects of Bullying.” On how the experience affects a victim’s self image, he wrote:

“It becomes more likely that you will become increasingly susceptible to becoming depressed and/or angry and/or bitter. Being bullied teaches you that you are undesirable, that you are not safe in the world, and that you are relatively powerless to defend yourself. When you are forced, again and again, to contemplate your relative lack of control over the bullying process, you are being set up for Learned Helplessness, which in turn sets you up for hopelessness and depression.”