Bullies and Abusers Aren’t Strangers
With love for my readers: please read this disclaimer before continuing.
This reflection explores themes of harm, accountability, and the ways our responses to others can shape their experiences. It is not meant to place the responsibility for someone's harmful behavior on their parents or to suggest that every situation can be prevented through better parenting. Rather, it invites us to reflect on the role we each play in how we respond to harm and support those affected by it.
Content Warning: Mentions of bullying, emotional abuse, controlling behavior, and domestic violence, including verbal and physical abuse.
Now, let's begin.
Some people have a reputation for being good people. Adults love them, and their friends trust them, and they often carry themselves in a way that makes others feel like they know exactly who this person is. Until you meet someone who has a very different story to tell.
To someone else, that same person might be the reason school, work, and social gatherings feel unbearable. They might be the target of jokes disguised as humor, where that friendly teasing becomes another word for planned insults. Eventually, the victim becomes a person that everyone laughs at while they insist nobody meant any harm. But when the bullying finally comes to light, I've seen those conversations quickly turn into a defense. And a lot of those defending often say this:
"They were probably playing around."
"You need to learn how to have thick skin."
"They've always been good to me."
After hearing people say some obnoxious (but predictable) things to defend someone, I often wonder what happens when the adults responsible for teaching a child right from wrong, become more concerned with defending who they believe their child to be, instead of addressing what that child has actually done?
October sheds light on both Domestic Violence Awareness and Bullying Prevention. Although these are distinct issues, I think there's a connection worth examining, especially when we understand cruelty and accountability. A child who bullies another student will not necessarily grow into an abusive adult, and domestic violence has no single cause. But the behaviors we keep excusing, and the boundaries we teach our children to disregard, can eventually reinforce lessons that shape how people treat one another.
I feel as though the problem lies in teaching our children that hurting someone is less important than the consequences they might face for it. With the instinct to protect your child from harm, a parent who dismisses their child's cruelty is doing quite the opposite. They unknowingly teach their child that being loved means being defended, even in moments when their actions are morally or ethically wrong. They see apologies as optional, and that those who complain or speak their truth are the problem. They also see that admitting fault for their wrongdoing is far worse than the emotional turmoil they've caused in another's life.
Believe it or not, children pay attention to what adults do when the truth gets uncomfortable. They watch how they handle situations — especially the ones where they wouldn't know what to do if put in that position. They pick out whose feelings are supposed to matter, whose anger gets accommodated, and eventually, they see who gets pushed or is expected to move on for the sake of keeping everyone else happy. A 2020 longitudinal study following 5,279 adolescents and young adults found an association between bullying others during their adolescent years and a greater risk of perpetrating intimate partner violence in young adulthood. The researchers examined how behaviors in peer relationships may relate to later dating relationships. Obviously, this does NOT mean that every bully becomes an abusive partner, or that bullying alone is the underlying cause of domestic violence. However, it DOES challenge the idea that the way we treat people when we're young has no bearing on the relationships we build later. It also reminds me of one of the first lessons we were taught growing up, one I see surprisingly little of in today's world: treat others how you want to be treated.
On something so fundamental, yet easily overlooked, we tend to categorize childhood as a separate chapter of someone's life. It has never made sense to me how emerging into adulthood at eighteen somehow gets translated to leaving every earlier lesson behind. But the ways we handle rejection, anger, embarrassment, and conflict are things we learn through experience. Somewhere inside every adult is the child who lived through everything that shaped the person they are. If someone repeatedly discovers that intimidation gets them what they want, and nobody helps them question that belief, where are they supposed to learn otherwise?
I've rarely seen cruelty exist in a vacuum. There's the person who delivers the insult, the room that laughs, the adults who wave it off, and the parent who insists that their child is being falsely accused. Others hear about a partner or friend's controlling behavior and brush it aside because they like that person, or because they've never experienced that behavior themselves. In both cases, someone else's pain becomes easy to dismiss when acknowledging it might require them to do something about it. These reactions teach two very different lessons. The person causing harm learns that they can get away with it, while the person being hurt learns that speaking up doesn't guarantee anyone will help, even when those same people preach the importance of doing so. By doing so, we discourage victims from speaking up every time we mistake neutrality for innocence.
Those lessons don't automatically determine who a person becomes. They do, however, raise an important question about what happens when people grow up without ever being expected to confront the harm they cause. What happens when the child who humiliated a classmate becomes an adult who belittles a partner? Or when they get so accustomed to being defended at home that they believe their anger entitles them to control someone else? Not every childhood bully becomes an abuser, but their behaviors can stem from similar beliefs about power and entitlement, especially when those beliefs go unchallenged.
Another layer to this is when the person causing harm is someone we know well. We tend to believe that knowing someone for a long time means knowing what they're capable of. We have years of memories to draw from, stories that confirm our understanding of their character, and experiences that make it difficult to imagine them behaving in ways that go against our recollection. When someone tells us that this person has hurt them, we're suddenly faced with two versions of someone we thought we understood. Rather than questioning whether our understanding was incomplete, we start questioning the person who has challenged it.
Domestic violence makes this contradiction particularly difficult to ignore. The person causing harm may be a devoted parent, a dependable friend, a beloved sibling, or someone who has spent years building a reputation for being generous and considerate. They're sometimes the first person to offer help when someone else is struggling. Their family may speak highly of them. Their friends may never have seen them lose their temper in a way that would make anyone uncomfortable.
None of those things tell us what happens inside their relationship.
We often imagine domestic violence as something that should be obvious to the people around it. We picture physical injuries, neighbors hearing arguments, and immediate red flags that you could notice from a mile away. But a relationship can look perfectly ordinary to everyone outside it. The person experiencing abuse may participate in all kinds of gatherings, but it doesn't translate to the life within the four walls of their home. They may also genuinely love their partner, which is one of the things that can be difficult for outsiders to understand. We tend to imagine that once someone recognizes they're being mistreated, their feelings for the person responsible should disappear. When they don't, we begin questioning whether the abuse could really be as serious as they say. But attachment never makes sense to the observer, only to the one attached. Victims can recognize that a relationship is hurting them and still remember the reasons they love them. They can be frightened of their abuser and still hope the relationship will return to what it once was, and a lot of them can acknowledge someone's wrong without being ready or able to leave them.
As they slowly build the courage to tell someone, they may already have spent months or years trying to make sense of these contradictions themselves. With endless rehearsals of what they want to say, some victims fear the judgement that follows afterwards, because unfortunately, they're commonly met with questions like these:
Why didn't you leave the first time?
Why did you go back?
Why didn't you tell anyone sooner?
These questions can sound reasonable when we ask them from a distance. We want to understand the situation, and we may genuinely believe that leaving is the most obvious solution. But leaving an abusive relationship can involve financial dependence, children, family expectations, isolation, threats, and fear of what might happen once the relationship ends. Even when someone wants to leave, they may need time to find somewhere safe to go and the resources to make that possible.
We also underestimate how difficult it can be to name what's happening while it's happening. Harm doesn't always come in forms that we can recognize, often making people even question their own judgment before understanding the full pattern of their abuser. Sometimes by the time they reach out for help, victims aren't looking for us to solve their entire situation, but rather someone to validate their experiences. Because victim-shaming comes in many forms, victims feel as though disclosure can change the way others see them.
This is where our own discomfort can get in the way. Humans, as emotional as we are, require logic, explanation, and a story that helps us piece things together. So, when someone tells us a piece of their story that doesn't seem to fit into ours, we see it as a threat to our realities. We forget that our reality isn't the only reality and that two things can be true at once. We sometimes even ask questions that sound less like curiosity and more like a search for inconsistencies. A lot of the time, the shift focuses on seeing if the survivor responded perfectly and how they could've handled an incident differently.
And this brings me back to the way we respond to bullying. When a child says that another student has been humiliating them, adults sometimes focus on whether the child is being too sensitive, whether the comments were intended as jokes, or whether they did something to provoke the behavior. The child who was hurt ends up having to establish that their pain is reasonable before anyone addresses what happened. The same instinct can follow us into adulthood. We search for the perfect victim and for incidents severe enough to justify our concern. We expect people to react in ways that make their experiences easy for us to understand. We want them to show how much they've been hurt, but when their reaction seems excessive, we accuse them of doing too much or dragging the situation out. Their pain becomes something they must present correctly before we consider taking it seriously.
Correcting a child who has bullied someone doesn't mean deciding they're a bad person forever. It means taking their behavior seriously enough to help them change it. When we treat every correction as an attack on our child, we make it harder for them to learn how to take responsibility. We cannot raise children expecting them to always please everyone or assuming nobody will ever have a reason to criticize them. What we can do is teach them that people can cause harm knowingly or unknowingly, that others have the right to speak about how they've been treated. We teach them that taking responsibility is part of becoming someone others can trust.
There's no guarantee that these lessons will prevent someone from becoming abusive. Parenting isn't a formula, and adult behavior is shaped by many factors. But teaching children to respect boundaries and recognize the impact of their actions gives them tools to build healthier relationships, whereas excusing cruelty gives them fewer reasons to question it. And of course, the responsibility doesn't end when someone becomes an adult. We may not be responsible for another person's choices, but we are responsible for the ways we respond to them.
The lesson we were taught as children still applies. Treat others how you want to be treated. That principle asks more of us than avoiding cruelty ourselves. Be considerate of what we tolerate and what we excuse. We can't raise good individuals without practicing what we preach. Otherwise, we risk teaching them the words while showing them, through our actions, that the lesson only matters when it's convenient.
National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-7233
Please reach out if you or someone you know is a victim of domestic violence, and we will do everything in our power to provide the correct resources.
© Rooh Sheesha 2026. All rights reserved.
Unless stated otherwise, everything shared — from words to visuals — is original. Please do not copy, repost, or reuse without permission.
Comments