[The following is an excerpt from an article that was published in The Star.]

By ALYCIA LIM and PRIYA KULASAGARAN

VICTIMS of bullying often think that their tormentors are sociopaths who mete out punishment purely for fun. For business consultant Imran Shah, however, being a bully was a means of saving his own skin.

At the start of Form 1, he was beaten up by his seniors. To counter that, he befriended them and eventually became a bully himself.

Recollecting his first month in secondary school, Imran, 35, says: "It was like being a giraffe in a lion's pen. You either had to learn to run really fast or try and adapt."

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Some of the students from Imran's former school reportedly had connections with notorious gangs in the area. Many of his schoolmates came from rough neighbourhoods and troubled backgrounds.

"Having your home raided by the police or watching your older brother being hauled off in handcuffs were things to be proud of," he remembers.

While his parents repeatedly encouraged him to focus on his studies, he never viewed school as a place for scholarly pursuits.

"When someone tells you at morning assembly that he's going to break your face in, how do you concentrate in class the rest of the day?"

To counteract the pressures of school and home, Imran aligned himself to a school gang, and found a sense of belonging.

"We were in a 'problem' school to begin with. There was no one we could really talk to at home, because our parents were very conservative and exercised a lot of restraint. So we rebelled. We had to act tough because we thought that was the way to survive. But deep down inside, we just felt lost."

On hindsight, Imran realises that targetting fellow students was his way of venting his frustrations. He knew no other way to release his angst.

When asked what became of his friends from school, Imran says many of them have turned over a new leaf and are now successful individuals.

"The irony is, the boys we used to pick on the most are now loan sharks and petty thugs. I can't help but feel that maybe we had such a drastic impact on them, they just snapped and went downhill from there."

She was 'queen bee' in primary school

Mandy Goh, 24, says she never laid a hand on her victims; instead, she used the power of manipulation to make her classmates feel miserable.

"I was the queen bee of primary school," recalls Mandy, who went to an all-girls school.

"For some reason, the other girls would hang on my every word. I would tell them to pull pranks on teachers and skip classes. They knew they'd get into trouble, but they would do these things anyway, just to get my approval."

Mandy would dictate who deserved to be her friend and who should spend the school year being an outcast. There were no requisites for either category and everyone was fair game.

"I would just wake up one day and deem a girl 'uncool'. This meant that no one should speak to or play with her. I could virtually make someone invisible."

Unlike Imran, Mandy cannot explain why she used her popularity to torment fellow schoolmates. But she sees the folly of that now. "Looking back, I feel really guilty because I know I made some poor child's school-going years a real nightmare. I honestly don't know why I did it. My justification then was that if I stopped doing it, someone else was bound to do so."