Hand over your lunch money, nerd

A group of senior bullies would force a student to smoke cigarettes, sometimes three at a time.

LAHORE: Azeem’s parents did not have the slightest idea what was happening with their son the first time he deliberately missed school.

“He had lost his appetite and was avoiding family gatherings,” recalls his mother, Rubab. “We thought he was under pressure because of his exams. He wanted to get into Oxford.”

His parents suspected he was taking drugs, but he passed a drug test. Still, he kept missing school. “One night I caught him stealing from his father’s wallet. I knew then something was seriously wrong,” said Rubab.

Azeem finally revealed what had been troubling him. Like many young men and women across Pakistan, he was being bullied at school.

A group of senior students would force him to smoke cigarettes, sometimes three at a time. They recorded this on a mobile phone and threatened to show the video to his parents if he did not give them Rs500 every day. “I used to steal the money daily from my father’s wallet,” he said.

Azeem’s parents eventually put him in another school, but the damage had been done. He had to repeat the last year of his A-Levels.

Bullying can seriously hurt a child’s mental and physical development and a culture of suffering in silence makes it especially hard to help them, say psychologists.

Dr Humaira Mohsin, professor of psychology in Punjab University and a part-time faculty member at the Lahore Grammar School’s Gulberg branch, said children usually become bullies because of insecurities arising out of family problems, academic incompetence or other factors.

Victims of bullying are usually kids that lack self confidence. “They develop a habit of self pity. They blame themselves for everything going wrong around them or with them,” Dr Mohsin said.

Unusual behaviour can be a sign that a child is being bullied. Zunera Hashim noticed that her 8-year-old son had an unhealthy obsession with chicken wings and would demand them for his school lunch every day.

One day, when she couldn’t pack him chicken wings for lunch, he began crying. “He lay down on the floor, refusing to go to school. He then admitted that one of his class mates would snatch his lunch and beat him if it didn’t include chicken wings.”

Boarding school students are particularly vulnerable to bullying, since their parents are far away. An Aitchison College senior school student recalled being forced into cold showers in the middle of the night in winter. “Some students got pneumonia or severe colds,” he said.

Other trials included being forced to eat muddy leaves or drink a mixture of ketchup, cola and tea.

His younger brother, a boarder in the prep school, said there was tighter control over bullying in the younger classes. But in the senior school, students and sometimes even teachers were reluctant to enforce discipline because the bullies came from influential families, said the older brother.

Mazhar Ali Khan, student co-coordinator at Aitchison’s senior school, insisted that the school took such issues very seriously. There are special forms that students, parents or teachers can fill out stating their issues, including bullying, he said. The bullies are given guidance and therapy sessions with the school’s psychological counselor, Shazia Omer.

Omer said these sessions were “very fruitful” and should be made a part of each student’s weekly schedule, not just of the troublemakers.

Samina Asif, administrator at the Lahore Grammar School’s junior section, said cases of bullying were resolved by the principal personally. The school has no special counselor to deal with bullies and the bullied.

Saadia, a banker, recalls how her 13-year-old son was bullied at the Defence branch of a famous chain of schools. “I came across this conversation he had with his cousin, who lives in the States, on Facebook telling him what the bullies did to him,” she said.

“They made him see porn on their cell phones and took photographs of him while forcing him to kiss a class mate in the school bathrooms. It was excruciating.”

She took the matter to the administration, but they had no proof. Her son told her later that the bully was the administrator’s nephew. “They were more concerned about the school’s reputation. I withdrew my son from that branch,” she said.

Bullying can continue past school into college as well. Jawariya Khan said she was forced to leave the Pakistan Institute of Fashion Design in 2008 because of ‘ragging’, a tradition in several colleges where seniors play pranks on newcomers.

In Jawariya’s case, she said, this ragging was a thin veil for a three-month campaign of bullying led by students with personal grudges against her.

“It was the worst time in my life,” she said, and it forced her to drop out. “I had no other option. The administration knew everything, but was not bothered. They say it’s the seniors’ right to bully.”

Dr Shahida Cheema, a child psychiatrist and member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, said bullies often choose their targets based on physical factors. “A slender child is as vulnerable as an obese one. So is a studious or weak child.”

She said bullying was a problem everywhere, but local culture exacerbated the issue. “In this part of the world, there is a concept that problems should be avoided at all costs. People do not want to take up issues or raise their voices against or for something, hence they suffer in silence. Parents who do not come forward or who take bullies lightly are unaware of the danger they are putting their child in.”

Published in The Express Tribune, September 20^th, 2010.