School bullies earn more than their victims in adult life, research by the University of Essex says. Or, at least, so say the headlines. What the academics actually found out was more nuanced. Out of a sample of people born in 1970, those whom teachers had deemed “aggressive” at the age of 10 earned, aged 46, on average 4 per cent more than those kids described as worried, anxious or fussy. Meanwhile, the 10-year-olds who’d done best in tests earned 6 per cent more. So, while it may pay to be aggressive, it pays more to be clever.
The researchers have emphasised that they are not suggesting that parents encourage their kids to indulge in playground persecution as a means to future high earnings. This is a relief. If a huge sociological study hailed bog-washing the speccy kid as a suitable strategy for achieving adult affluence, we couldn’t really call ourselves a civilised society any longer, could we? In any case, having everyone secretly despise you aged 10 isn’t a price worth paying for a lousy extra 4 per cent on your pay packet 36 years later.
We like to think bullies do not prosper beyond the peculiar confines of a school environment and, anecdotally, I think that’s right. There were a great many bullies at my secondary school, 1975-1982, not least among the teaching staff.
Some of the lesser bullies, the more occasional bullies, have done well since, and some haven’t. Some channelled their love of a ruck into rugby, boxing or the military and then later calmed down. But of those lads who comprised the school premier league (or rather, the first division, as it then still was) of intimidation, oppression and an extraordinarily rapid recourse to savage violence, they have all failed spectacularly as adults.
There was one boy who revelled in the title “Cock of the East Block”, which meant he was considered the hardest customer in one half of the school. Anxious to maintain his status, he approached my friend Chris, who he’d heard was quite tasty, and unceremoniously kicked him in the crotch. We were 14.
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Four years later, the former Cock of the East Block was in HMP Hull, having grown impatient queueing for a nightclub in town and, endeavouring to speed things up, walked to the entrance and stabbed the bouncer.
Another utter psycho would strut around with his shirt off in winter attacking anyone who gave him a funny look, an offence upon which he ruled as judge, jury and executioner. He has spent decades in and out of various jails as well.
Another one, who used to carry a hammer in the side pocket of his three-button Oxford bags, trousers he would often drop to expose himself to girls in the first year, is now on the sex offenders register. A fourth hard man went to sea, at the fag end of Hull’s trawling days, and was lost overboard in suspicious circumstances, having presumably met his match on deck.
That’s just the ones I know about, but safe to say, I don’t think any of those once ferocious sadists are leading happy, affluent lives as contented 60-year-olds. Their many victims should be consoled that justice has a habit of being done.
What my ‘resting face’ says
Gillian Anderson, who has played Margaret Thatcher and now Emily Maitlis, says she gets offered roles as clever women because she has “resting intellectual face, like I’m thinking about Proust, instead of dinner”.
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She’s probably right, people make all sorts of assumptions based on your appearance. Often, such assumptions are not complimentary. Witness “resting bitch face”, a phrase that feminists have now managed to subvert, but which, all the same, isn’t very polite.
I don’t know what my “resting” face is. I guess it depends on circumstances. Catatonic face? Stressed face? Fury face? I must have an especially ambiguous default, because the two most frequent mistaken assumptions strangers make are radically different: some ping me as an easy-going, happy-go-lucky guy; others see barely suppressed anger. Neither is accurate. Particularly the first one.
