Coming into college, the possibility of bullying and mean girls never even crossed my mind. I was so wrong. In my first year of college, I encountered more drama and meanness than I've ever experienced in middle or high school. Between floormates, roommates, and classmates, cliques and gossip quickly became a huge problem.
Going to a small college probably has a lot to do with the bullying problem. Most people know each other's names, and we see the same people every day, so we get to know people quickly. Add in the fact that we were all first-years, desperate for friends and acceptance, and it was a recipe for disaster.
Coming to a Catholic college that is known for its good attitude and kind people, I was shocked to encounter homophobic people, racist people, compulsive liars, and even aggression. The amount of drunken arguments and drama that took place were ridiculous. We felt the need to party and drink to even be able to tolerate one another. But even when we drank, some of us felt pressured to do things to our toxic friends, and then we were shamed the next day. One of us even experienced sexual assault and the next day was humiliated and made fun of for it.
My best friend and I experienced extreme blows to our self-esteem. At meals and while hanging out, mean comments were passively thrown out at us, and we were forced to laugh it off. I remember a time when one of us was humiliated in front of the entire dining hall, and no one apologized for it afterward. There were so many different group texts. One with all of us, and then plenty of different ones with different combinations of us so that the excluded one could be talked about in private.
The biggest problem is that we didn't do anything about it. With the toxic people in my life -- the bullies -- I felt like everyone else accepted and tolerated that behavior because we never stood up to the meanness. It wasn't until the end of the year when I realized that I wasn't alone. In trying earlier to fight the homophobia and blatant ignorance and sexism on our floor, I felt the RAs and the Student Life office brushed it off as girl drama. In their defense, we never told them how bad it was for fear of embarrassment, not being believed, and the sheer fear of retaliation.
We see bullying as a K-12 thing; something that kind of just goes away as college comes, but that is not the case. Forty-two percent of students in a recent study reported seeing another student bullied by somebody. Bullying can lead to depression, lack of motivation, anxiety, and even suicidal or self-harming behaviors.
Bullying happens in the adult world, too. Colleges should work more on mental health advocacy, especially bullying and the way college students and adults treat each other. I'm lucky that I had friends to back me when it was finally time to put my foot down, but many people don't have that opportunity or support. College, in the words of one of my professors, is a kind of social boot camp, and it is so easy to fall into this problem while living and almost exclusively interacting with young adults. It's important to keep the conversation going instead of pretending that once high school is over, bullying just disappears.
