The Lunch Thief

My first experience of bullying came before I had a word for it.

I was about six years old, living in Ghana. Every day I went to school with my lunch, and every day someone took it.

I remember the feeling more clearly than the details. It wasn't quite fear. It was confusion first, and then a helplessness that sits heavily on a small child. I hadn't argued with this person. I hadn't taken anything from them. There was no history between us that I could point to. And yet they had decided that what belonged to me could become theirs, and that there was nothing I could do about it.

For a while, they were right.

I didn't know what to do. And nobody else seemed to be doing anything either. It is a peculiar thing, as a child, to be wronged and to watch the world carry on as though nothing is happening.

Then one day I mentioned it to my older cousin, who was at the same school. He mentioned it to his parents, who I was staying with at the time.

That changed everything.

They were not prepared to accept it. The adults intervened, the bully was confronted, and the behaviour stopped.

Just like that.

Something that had felt permanent to me, part of the shape of every school day, simply ended. And I remember asking myself afterwards:

Why would somebody do that when I hadn't done anything to them?

It strikes me now that not long before, after I had been suspended from kindergarten, my mother had told me that if someone hit me, I should hit them back. She meant it as a lesson in self-respect, and I have carried it in one form or another ever since. But the lunch thief never hit me. They simply took. And what ended it was not retaliation. It was a six-year-old saying something out loud to someone who would listen, and adults with authority deciding that it would not continue.

At six, I didn't have the language for power, intimidation or exploitation. But I understood something important. Someone had found a situation in which they believed they could take from me without consequence. And the moment someone with authority stepped in, they stopped.

I have never really forgotten that.

Years later, I would recognise the same pattern in a very different place.

Bullying is not unique to surgery. But surgery has certain ingredients that can make it particularly difficult to challenge. There is hierarchy everywhere you look: consultants and registrars, trainers and trainees, fellows and students. There are people who write your assessments, people who shape your opportunities, and people whose opinion of you can travel further than you ever will.

Hierarchy itself is not the problem. Medicine needs it for good reasons. Someone has to take responsibility. Experience matters. Patients need decisions to be made, and made by the right person.

The problem comes when hierarchy becomes permission.

When someone decides that being senior entitles them to be unkind. When someone else is expected to tolerate it because they are junior. When influence over a career is used without any expectation of accountability.

That is the point at which hierarchy stops being structure and becomes power.