by Jericho Garrett

Created on: March 17, 2009

Life can be extraordinarily difficult when you are the victim of a bully, especially since there never seems to just be one. Once a child's weakness, whether real or imagined, is discovered, the weakness is drawn out and exploited - often in the name of harmless fun. However, that line that defines "fun" and "bullying" is so blurred that it really does not exsist.

One of the biggest mistakes made by parents and teachers is to stereotype the bully. Everyone has seen the characterizations of the big, bad kid in the school yard beating up the smaller, weaker kid for his lunch money; but physical bullying is just one aspect of it. There are also social and mental bullies, and, in the case of some small, religiously knit communities, there is another faction of bullies - those who use Jesus as their justification to condemn all who don't meet their "spiritual" requirements.

I was a bully's dream come true; the daughter of a drug addict and prostitute brought to live in such a religiously driven town. When my grandparents brought me to live with them after two years of nonstop abuse at the hands of my mother, my grandmother took every precaution she could think of to prevent others from finding out about my past. She met with the principal of the school I was to attend, and he assured her that it would all be kept completely confidential. What neither she nor the principal expected was the self appointed moral authority, taking form as the school secretary, who decided that the mothers in her ward needed to know about the sinner attending their children's school. Once it was realized that not only was my mother this horrible creature, but that I was illegitimate, my fate in this school was sealed.

By the end of my fourth grade year, I had been fully labeled a whore, a deviant, and every other unrighteous name that could be cast at me. Children were not allowed to associate with me for fear that I would corrupt them; instead, they called me names to my face physically attacked me...until I learned how to fight, and I became a vicious fighter. Then only the boys dared to push any physical confrontations; the girls simply whispered about me behind my back, or resorted to snide comments when I walked by. I became so mean, that instead of being bullied, I became the bully. People didn't like me or respect me any more because they knew I could beat the hell out of them, but they feared me, and I took the gratification of that fear for all I could.

When I was finally able to

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