1. (b) Most children experience bullying
2. (c) He said mean things to him. 
3. (b) He watched some kids being bullied.   
4. (a) People don’t step in to stop it.  
5. (a) To tell a teacher   
6. (c) He took matters into his own hands.

Samu: Has there ever been a phase in your life when you’ve been the bullied or the bully?

Conor: I think everyone as a kid has had some experience, major or minor, of being bullied and it’s almost a passage or something that we go through. But I actually do have recollections of me actually being the bully and I feel obviously very bad about it now, but at the time sometimes you don’t even realize it. And I remember, when I was in the second grade, we had an art project – ‘cause we were learning about spiders – and so we had to make a spider web out of glitter and make all the circles then run stripes and make it look like a spider and then I placed a little spider on. I remember working really hard on mine and wanting to be the best in the class, ‘cause the teacher would always hang in the best spider webs. And I walked over to this one kid making a spider web and I said: “Your spider web looks really bad,” and I walked away and the kid was just bawling and crying and I felt really bad and I do apologize to him. It just kind of reminds me of how sometimes we can unintentionally be the bully. 

Samu: Yeah, exactly, like looking back on my childhood, there have been many cases where I’ve been kind of indirectly bullying someone. Not necessarily being the primary bully, but more of a bystander, just kind of not standing up for the person being bullied, and just kind of trying to ignore it and say “okay, at least that’s not me.” I think that’s one of the biggest problems.

Conor: I think that kind of responds to this complex of “as long as I’m not being bullied it’s okay”. You see that in big groups and there’s always that one agitator, who’s really leading the bullying. And then there are the kids who either kind of play along a little bit or they just distance themselves. I think that that’s just as bad or maybe worse, just because all through your life you’re gonna meet all these kinds of people – some good people – and you’ll meet people who’ll get their self esteem and kind of their pleasure from making others feel bad about themselves. You’re gonna meet those people in your life, but what disappoints at least me more is seeing people who have the power to step up and say “stop it,” and then just let it happen.

Samu: What do you think a person being bullied should do? You see these videos on YouTube, like the person being bullied standing up for the bully and for themselves and then fighting back in a physical kind of way. But is that necessarily the best way or should they kind of go to a teacher and try to solve it through? 

Conor: It’s a tough question because bullying just deals with such- all mental isolation to it and that feeling of being really alone. I think the best thing to do is, obviously you should go to teachers and adults, and that’s not always gonna help. It might actually hurt in some cases. I can give you, going to your friends and try to get people to stand up for you, is helpful. But I think if, there is nothing you can do about it, I think sometimes fighting back and physical retaliation can be the answer if there’s nothing else you can do.

Samu: It might kind of break the deadlock, and you might find yourself actually looking forward to going to school, other than everyday being kind of alone, going battling…

Conor: I had a friend who I went to high school with and in middle school he was bullied constantly for years. He tried to do what everyone told him to, which is to go to teachers, like “people need to stand up for you, Matthew” – it was his name. One day he just – nothing stopped, the bullying was endless, he couldn’t avoid it – and one day he stood up and he punched the kid in the face and broke a few of his teeth and broke his nose and fractured a part of his jaw. That’s obviously like the most extreme you’re really gonna hear, but I think that sometimes we have to bring it to ourselves to stand up forourselves. Because we are the ones being bullied.

Samu: Exactly.