A vigil was recently held to commemorate a “beautiful,
witty, funny” – and bullied – 15-year-old girl named Audrie Pott who committed
suicide last year. This happened in a high school near where I live, and when I
read about the vigil, I felt unnerved and angered, a real sickness in my
stomach, by the details of the tragedy.
In my new novel, I have a scene that’s eerily similar to
what happened to Audrie: A girl with a history of being bullied, a party
without adult supervision, alcohol that had been laced, rape, photos taken of
the horrendous event and then sent viral.
For my character Meg, the only real difference is that she
willingly chooses to have sex with a longtime crush the night of her fateful
party. With a brave, trusting heart, she acts out of love and normal teenage
desire. But the bullies are there with their weapons – humiliation, threats,
taunts and cameras.
In Furious, this
is a turning point for Meg (spoiler alert here). It is the final slap that
unleashes years of misery at the hands of bullies, a lifetime of not being seen
and not being heard by adults, of having to navigate alone through an often-vicious
high school landscape.
Meg’s inner Fury – the goddess of revenge who takes care of
business when we humans are too blind and too self-centered to stand up for the
innocent and vulnerable – literally comes out. Her tormentors get the full
brunt of her uncorked rage.
Unfortunately, Audrie’s Fury didn’t have that same chance to
emerge. Hers was a more familiar pattern in real life, especially for young women. The
cruelty of others twists itself into a chaos of emotions –humiliation, anxiety,
depression, fear, sadness and hopelessness.
I know these feelings. I was bullied in middle school,
imitated mercilessly, taunted, locked into my own locker, and I lived in a
constant state of dread, anxiety and shame. I remember the notes and ugly
drawings of me being passed around my 7th grade classroom. I
remember the headaches and the loneliness. I didn’t even recognize it as
bullying back then, just considered it to be some kind of lack in myself, figured that I was somehow
“asking for it.” I can’t imagine how much worse it is now with the texts and
photos on the Internet.
What I hope is that our entire society is finally having
enough of this. I’m not talking about harsh sentences for the culprits of individual incidents. That’s just a bandage, a way of saying that we solved the problem, that it’s just these few
isolated cases.
My Fury wants us all to stop turning a blind eye to what so
many kids are living with, to stop chalking up bullying behavior to “kids being kids” and expecting the
victims to develop a tougher skin or fend for themselves.
My Fury wants all of us – adults and kids – to
understand just how insidious and prevalent it is. It’s not just the
high-profile cases, like that of Audrie Pott. It’s the everyday, ongoing,
relentless misery lived by kids who are seen as being different.
My Fury wants your Fury to speak out and say: Enough! No
more! We are going to do something about it.
Here are some resources:
http://www.stopbullying.gov/
