Both the movie and the two personal experiences brought home again the fact that most children who suffer abuse at the hands of their classmates do so in silence. The 12-year-old in the movie tries to tough it out and finally does with some help from an adult.

My childhood torture wasn't actually all that bad, just nasty enough to make me understand what it's like. But I never told anyone about it. My grandchild never told me, never told anyone else and suffered through most of a school year in silence before finally being transferred to another school and some kind of more normal childhood.

It's amazing to discover how cruel children can be to one another. But then considering how cruel adults can be to one another—and often are—I suppose this should not be surprising. My sense is that boys are worse than girls are when it comes to bullying their classmates, especially when they are somehow different than the rest of the class.

Part of this, I think, is because boys tend to travel naturally in groups or gangs and they tend to behave as the leader of the pack behaves. The leader, like male nonhuman species, gets where he is by either defeating or intimidating those of smaller size gangs. Since leaders want to show how tough they are, they tend to pick on the small, the weak and the peculiar.

In my own childhood experience that wasn't quite what happened. I had to walk six blocks to grammar school down a street where a large family of Catholic kids lived. (In my town Catholic children went to parochial school for the first six grades, and we considered them different because of this.)

The largest of the children sometimes came out on his front porch and shouted insults at me, not because I was a Protestant, but probably because I went to a public school. Just as I thought he was different because he went to a parochial school, so he thought the reverse. His shouts usually gave me a good scare and I looked for ways to get past his house by taking another street.

In later life when we both went to junior high school and were in the same grade, we circled around one another warily for a while and ended up being friends.

I also was in terror of a boy who lived down the street from me in a larger and fancier house. I don't think he was much older than I was, but he had a loud voice, he was large for his age and he liked to make a lot of noise. He tended to dominate our block.

I never became his friend, I'm sorry to say. He had an unhappy upbringing, drank a lot when he was able to do so and died at an early age after an unfortunate and unhappy marriage. I don't know that I gloated over this, but I have to confess it did give me some brief pleasure to realize I had outlasted him.

It's not possible for every boy to be the leader of a gang, just as it is impossible for every girl to be beautiful. Most of us are neither. We are somewhere back in the pack. But we do need to watch for those who are at the far rear of the pack, for they have special qualities that make them different. They are as good as we are, maybe even better.

They are a special few. Albert Einstein, for instance, didn't talk when he was a child until his mother served him soup that burned his tongue. Then he told her it was too hot.

"Why didn't you say something before?" his mother asked.

"There wasn't anything about which I had to talk," he is supposed to have replied.

So we need to keep an eye on the silent and the sad among kids. They may well be those who are suffering abuse but are too proud to tell anyone about it. Instead they are simply trying to join us in the middle of the pack—they may even have the skills, knowledge and understanding to be better leaders than the bullies who are beating up on them.