How I Started Bullying (Part 1 of 2) | By: Committee for Children Today's blog was written by Media Producer Preben Borch. My experiences with bullying as a child make it meaningful to work for Committee for Children. Like many, I had plenty of experiences being targeted; I was very familiar with what bullying felt like. I’m not certain why; perhaps because I was a sensitive kid who wore his feelings close to the surface, or because my family moved a lot, so I was frequently the new kid with no strong peer connections. What I know for sure is that, like all kids, I wanted to belong, be cared about, have friends, and be treated with respect. By sixth grade, in the late 1970s, I was desperate to belong and not be rejected. As I started in my fifth elementary school, I tried bullying out for myself. This wasn't a premeditated or conscious decision; it was a response to a situation, and I went with it. Two weeks after I started at this school mid-year, John joined my class, and I no longer had to be “the new kid.” I tried to climb out of my place in the social order by turning on John—with insults, ridicule, and verbal threats. Tormenting John got me attention and belonging from the same boys who would otherwise have been rejecting and bullying me. I don't recall feeling good about treating John that way, but it quickly became habitual—“that’s the way I treat John”—and it didn't seem like a choice. The kids who might have been targeting me could now laugh at my treatment of John, and by targeting him, I gained the sense of belonging I wanted so much. What strikes me now is how strongly the identity of “John’s tormentor” stuck to me. I don’t think any kid is inherently a target of bullying or a kid who bullies—we’re all capable of many different behaviors and of action or inaction. Each moment is a new choice. But a child stuck in a behavior pattern may not recognize that he has a choice; it’s up to the adults in his life to teach him that there’s always a choice about how to treat others. Back then, no one ever questioned what I was doing. It was remarkably easy to start and continue the behavior—the bullying was totally accepted and rewarded by my peers. It was easy in that circumstance to ignore how it made me feel, because the feeling of acceptance trumped the feeling that this was wrong. The truth I know now is that hurting John didn’t feel good inside me, and it really was hurting me. I believe that is likely true for every kid who bullies. It might be deeply buried and hard to perceive, but hurting others feels bad. The bullying stopped when I could no longer hide from myself that I was hurting someone else and it felt bad—that it wasn’t me. Once that feeling was impossible to ignore, I couldn’t continue treating John that way.