Anthropologists state that the outsider is both dangerous and in danger.
I learned this lesson long ago and in a small way when I started at a new school in a clannish farming community, where the alpha girl and her loyal clique seemed to regard me as a threat: I had come from a bigger town, my father was a teacher at the nearby high school, and I was good at both sport and lessons.
In the days before mobile phones and the Internet, the bullying was a pale shadow of persecution today – She’s gonna bash ya up this time, for sure – but it was still a burden. My mother, in whom I confided, trotted out the time-honoured saw of ‘Sticks and stones may break your bones, but names can never hurt you’.
The anxious feeling was slow to leave, however. The later reading of Margaret Atwood’s novel Cat’s Eye,for example, was a painful experience, and a salutary reminder of how cruel little girls can be, while an unexpected meeting with my adversary, whom I’d not seen for decades, caused my heart to give a great lurch, and left me feeling tearful and winded.
Here in Greece, a 20 year old youth learned the anthropologists’ lesson in the hardest way possible. Vangelis Giakoumakis (pictured) was a Cretan from near Rethymnon, but was studying at the Dairy School in Ioannina, in faraway Epirus. The TV photos show a sensitive-looking lad, slightly built, and with a shy expression. But one picture in particular is heart-wrenching: Vangelis is clearly on the verge of tears. Subjected to concentrated and constant bullying, he eventually could bear no more, and so he wandered away to a lonely death: he lay in a ditch and slit a wrist, not far from the scenes of his torment. But it was nearly six weeks before his body was found.
I was once with friends in a Cornish churchyard. A local man was also there, and his conversational gambit was ‘You’re not from here, are you? You’re foreign.’ One friend was a Londoner, but had lived in Cornwall for forty years. ‘How many years does it take?’ she asked. ‘Three hundred,’ came the laconic reply. It seemed obvious that we were irredeemably other. So, it would seem, was Vangelis, although for very different reasons.
Who knows, really, what triggers bullying? Except that bullies, who are always cowards, invariably select as victims people who