RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Gabriella Gomes, 24, is in nursing school. But she says she didn’t always enjoy being a student when she was younger because she was bullied.
For years, she says her childhood peers teased her for being intelligent. She says they also made fun of her body type because she was not as thin as the other girls. Students were verbally aggressive, calling her names such as “whale.” Sometimes, the words escalated to actions.
“Once, they stole my snack, saying I was too fat to eat it,” she says.
Gomes says she developed an eating disorder as a result of this bullying. She began to eat compulsively and then throw up her food or take a laxative in order to try to lose weight. In addition to bulimia, she also struggled with depression.
Gomes says that even though many years have passed, she still suffers from a sleep disorder and anxiety, which she attributes to her classmates’ bullying during formative years.
“I took some medicine to combat a sleep disorder that I got from the anxiety I developed,” she says.
Former victims of bullying say the harassment they endured as children still haunts them as adults. Psychologists say that bullying can affect victims physically, emotionally and academically. Schools have begun to implement anti-bullying prevention and response strategies. Meanwhile, local and international organizations have been building research on the issue. Various states and municipalities have passed anti-bullying laws, and federal legislation is under consideration.
About 70 percent of more than 5,000 students surveyed said that they had witnessed an act of bullying, according to a 2009 study of bullying in Brazilian schools by Plan, an international nongovernmental organization. About one-third of male students and one-quarter of female students reported being bullied at least once.
Some former victims of bullying say they have been able to overcome it as they’ve grown up. Aline Pitt, 21, says it used to bother her when her peers used to call her a “chatterbox” while in school. But she says that, with time, she was able to stop worrying about it.
But many former victims say that the harassment they endured as children still affects them today.
Waleschka Santos, 35, is a businesswoman. She says that her schoolmates used to bully her when she was 12 because of her curly hair. She says they used to compare her to the characters of a cartoon popular in Brazil in the 1980s featuring players of the Harlem Globetrotters from New York.
“They called me ‘Globetrotter,’ and I used to cry of [anger] and shame, without anybody seeing it of course,” she says.
As her long curly hair was the reason for the abuse, today she keeps her hair short.
Hair was also a painful subject for Mireille Haddad, 31, a teacher, when she was a child. Haddad, who moved to Brazil two years ago, grew up in Canada, showing how bullying is not a phenomenon unique to Brazil.
“I was bullied,” she says. “It hurt very much. I was teased for being ‘hairy,’ I guess from my Arabic roots. I guess I had more hair on my legs than other girls.”
She says the bullying she endured about her body hair still affects her today.
“I still get self-conscious about it today,” she says.
Tiago Barros, 26, an engineering student, says his classmates bullied him when he was younger because he had a back problem and was also the shortest in his class. They used to call him “widgeon,” he says.
“I suffered a lot in those days,” he says. “Bullying must be banished from society.”
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