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Bullying in Malaysian schools is rampant. Many sad cases in the news show how bullying can lead to injuries, hospital visits, or even death. Students are meant to report cases of bullying, but this tends to lead to retaliation by the bullies.
Often, the students have to take matters into their own hands, but how do you do this when your bully is much more physically bigger than you?
In Real Life interviewed Malaysian primary school students on their wildest stories of how they came up with creative solutions to get their bullies to stop.
Bully Revenge Story #1: “He copied my math test, so I made him fail on purpose.”
Image: Sekolah Kebangsaan Seksyen 9 Kota Damansara.
I grew up studying in SK Seksyen 9 Kota Damansara. In my standard 4 class, we had a bully named Frankie (*not real name).
Frankie would sit beside me and copy my mathematics test MCQ answers whenever possible. Afraid of being beaten up, I would let him copy my answers.
One day, I had a great idea: I intentionally answered my MCQ answers wrongly, and let him copy it. Then after he had put it down on the teacher’s table, I erased everything and did it correctly.
When he saw me redoing the test, he realized what I had done.
I went to turn in my test paper, and when I returned to my seat, I smiled at him. This provoked him, and in a flash of anger, he jumped out of his chair and threw a punch at me, right in the middle of class!
It was an easily avoidable attack and I dodged it. He didn’t expect me to move aside and he lost his balance.
He fell down and hit his face on his own desk! It was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.
But that wasn’t all. After hitting the table, he fell to the floor, screaming in pain. When he got up, his face was bleeding!
The teacher freaked out and called the school nurse – it turns out he hit the table at an angle and broke one of his teeth, and he needed to see the doctor to have it removed.
He returned to school a week later when the test results came out, and I managed to lean over to sneak a peek at his very well-deserved “F.”
Bully Revenge Story #2: “I gave my bully a laxative chocolate bar.”
Image: A chocolate laxative bar.
Hisham studied in SK Seri Permai. Every morning, Hisham’s mother would put a tiny chocolate bar in his bekal (lunchbox) for break time, and everyday, someone was stealing it from his lunchbox, which he kept in his backpack.
“I put up with this, every single day, because I could not prove who the thief was. But finally I said, “enough was enough” and decided to take action.”
Over the weekend, he took some of his father’s chocolate laxatives medically prescribed for his grandfather for constipation.
The next Monday, he brought in the chocolate to school, and he made a small announcement but loud enough for the whole class to hear that he had a large bar of chocolate to share with his friends.
At recess, he left the bar in the usual place and went to wash his hands. Upon his return, sure enough, the chocolate bar had gone missing.
After recess, seven students spent the rest of the day running to and from the toilet. Among them was the class bully: Sabri.
“After the third trip to the toilet, my Pendidikan Moral teacher started getting suspicious and told them they couldn’t keep going to the toilet,” Hisham said.
They had to wait till the end of the period to go. Some of them even pooped in their pants a little because they couldn’t hold it in. Meanwhile, Hisham was enjoying the effect this was having on his classmates who stole his chocolate.
Later that day, he overheard Sabri saying to the others that they shouldn’t have eaten the chocolate.
“That’s when I knew it was Sabri. He stole my chocolate, and he had decided to share his ill-gotten gains with his friends.”
The teachers never understood and did find the cause of this outbreak of food poisoning amongst the students, but nobody ever touched Hisham’s food or belongings after that.
Bully Revenge Story #3: “Pick on somebody your own size.”
Image: A girl taking Taekwondo lessons.
I had a close friend named Nidhi who was the only Indian girl in our Chinese school, SRJK (C) Kong Hwa.
This one boy, Ken-Yap, had learned some disgusting racial slurs and loved to taunt her with them. He would do this at the bus stop because we couldn’t walk away.
He would make Nidhi cry, but she always told me not to do anything around her because she was scared of things getting out of hand. Whenever he made her cry, he’d call her a crybaby.
But even through tears, she always held me back from doing what I wanted: To punch him square in the nose.
I’m from an “aggressive” family: I have four older brothers, all of whom study Tae Kwon Do or Karate. Even at 7, I had been studying martial arts with my brothers since I was old enough to crawl. My siblings and I would literally brawl and train in the garden.
I know how to throw a punch. So my desire to just beat this guy up was intense.
I like loopholes, so I had to wait until Nidhi was absent from school. Ken-Yap was there and singing the same tune of racial slurs and other uninventive insults.
He was playing it up for all it was worth because of a crowd of disinterested older kids waiting for the bus.
The time was finally right: I waited until he completed a verse and was giggling with one of his friends. I just walked up to him, smiled sweetly and then let my right fist do the talking.
The full force of my fist turned his nose into a fountain of blood.
He started blubbering immediately, with tears streaming down his face.
The disinterested crowd immediately noticed that a girl had just made him cry, and they turned on him immediately, calling him names and taunting him for being a crybaby.
I held up my blood-speckled fist and stepped forward with a sweet little psycho smile plastered to my face. He ran away crying while everyone else continued laughing.
He never bullied anyone after that.
Bully Revenge Story #4: WWE Wrestling Body Slam
Image gif: Two boys fighting in school.
Chihuahuas: They’re small, yappy, irritating, and dumb enough to believe they can fight and defeat everything. Bullies have much in common with Chihuahuas, including “doing something stupid” and pushing things too far.
My son was a pretty big, but somewhat chubby kid in standard 6 when he had to deal with one of these human-chihuahuas crossbreeds.
Every day, his tormentor would keep poking him in the back of the head and neck, first with a finger, then with a pencil or pen.
My son had told me about this and showed me his neck: There were small puncture-like wounds from where he had been repeatedly poked.
The ink stains and blood on the shirt’s collar made it clear this was not the first time it had happened.
I had sent several emails about this to the school all year, but I was told the teacher would handle it.
But apparently, it had not. Because one day, I was called to the school, and the teacher told me: “Your son has attacked a fellow student.”
I spoke to my son privately and asked him what happened. My son told me the whole story:
“I was eating my recess snack when my classmate started poking me again. It was so painful I ran out of the classroom, but he kept following me and continued yapping at me, until I picked him up and body slammed him into the ground. Then I returned to class, sat down, and continued eating.”
My son knew exactly what was coming: Detention. But he felt this would all be worth it if it would get his classmate to stop tormenting him.
Of course, the school administrators threatened to assign detention and suspend my son for defending himself.
I retorted: “What has the school done? My son had spoken up to his teacher and me, and I had sent multiple emails. He had been the victim for a year and finally lashed out in self-defence and frustration. What was being done about the other child this whole time?”
The school representatives stayed silent.
I made it clear that I would take my son home and then call my family lawyers, the PTA, New Straits Times, Berita Harian, and Sin Chew Daily and post to every social media platform I can find unless the situation was resolved.
Hearing this, they dropped the case against my son. They had to explain to the other child’s parents what happened, and we were let go.
It turns out… some teachers and school administrators are like chihuahuas too.
Kindness, compassion, and “gentle correction” do not work with bullies. To stop a bully cold, one must give them a taste of their own medicine.
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