The Monsters We Create

I was talking to Marlen about recent happenings when I started to think about how we, as children, unwittingly create the monsters of tomorrow.
First example, her coworker - Tanya - was a classmate of mine in elementary and middle school. Most recently, she called my best friend - a sophisticated, practical and pretty girl - a nasty and ugly person. This made me think - always, children made fun of Tanya because she was overweight, un-hygenic and had a very large and ugly mole on her neck. They furthered it by accusing her of picking her nose and eating what she found. Basically, she's spent most of her life as the butt of jokes, hated and ridiculed. And now, she's a nasty girl, still dirty, who offers sexual favors for what she believes is respect, makes horribly mean comments to undeserving people and tells lies in order to make herself seem more popular. She dropped out of high school apparently, and spends her time selling shoes at the mall. Now, I still think badly of her, worse than I used to, in fact, but who can blame her for what she is? I feel it's partially my fault that she's the horrible person that she is because I stopped trying to defend her in middle school. Yes, in elementary school I was the defender of the nose-pickers (geez, what a horrible sounding title) - I used to chase away the kids making fun of Tanya and Trisha and yell things like, "No they don't!" So sure, I feel a bit bad that I didn't try to keep being her friend - if I did she might not be so nasty and might have actually graduated high school. On the other hand, I feel angry at her because she let herself become this monster, a self-degrading, mindless, pathetic sort of being whose Arab coworker calls "sharmuta."
Another recent event was a foreign exchange student mistaking my best friend for a prostitute. Now, it was, yet again, totally undeserved, as I saw her attire for the day was much more conservative than what I was wearing, and she wasn't loitering in any suggestive manner, unless waiting for the bus is suggestive... It did remind me of the movie, "Monster," where the main character was treated as a whore. Boys would ask her for sexual favors or even something as simple as lifting up her shirt, and they would thank her by throwing a few dollars in her face. And thus, she grew up expecting these sort of things and became a prostitute. Yet again, another girl was mistreated and grew up to be a whore.
When I think of it, do we grow up to be what people expect us to be? If anyone were to be mistreated for long enough, do they begin to degrade themselves in their own minds? Yet another reason for me to never have children - I don't want anyone under my responsibility to ever warp the life of another, nor do I want a child who will only ever be able to aspire to be a monster.