Legless and Frank
I'm so pleased that some folk here have started to speak up....I wasn't going to post this, but now...Fuck it...

I find many of the answers to this QoTW quite disturbing….It seems to be an opportunity to recall glory days of bullying the weakest.

Both when I was at school and when I was teaching there were plenty of weird kids.

Many of the real odd-balls were that way because they were being abused at home….

Louise….I sat next to her when I was seven. She resembled a Holocaust victim – shaved head, malnourished and covered in sores….Always had her head in a book. Sometimes I would chat to her – I was a bookworm too, but her appearance quite frankly scared me. She told me how her father and step-mother had just returned from a holiday in Florida…they’d been to Disneyland and all they had brought back for her was the free map. I remember feeling so angry on her behalf. I didn’t like her much, she was odd, but it wasn’t her fault. She left the school soon after, turned out she lived in a caravan in the garden with loads of cats, she was taken into care.

Tracy….I taught her for a while. Always smelled of pee when she arrived at school. None too bright and said that when she grew up she wanted to work in a chip shop. She had no friends because of her smell and the fact that she was seriously overweight. Turned out her older brother shared her bedroom and he used to pee on her each night. When her mother and grandfather came in to discuss matters the grandfather attempted to attack the headteacher. The mother later broke down and admitted Tracy and her brother were being abused by the grandfather, just as she had been.


And I'm not even going to get on to some of the attitudes I've seen towards people with disabilities...But I've known far better, kinder and gentler people who are classed as Mongs and Spacks by the so called Normal ones.
( chickenlady b3ta's very own Elizabeth Taylor, Wed 24 Jan 2007, 19:19, Reply)