Students can be mean and nasty to one another, producing all kinds of negative consequences. But I’m growing increasingly concerned with the anti-bullying movement, a well-intentioned cause adopted by many to address a hyped-up phenomenon that, despite what the media and some “experts” profess, isn’t nearly as clear-cut.
Some of that complexity emerges for me when I come across an interesting YouTube video posted by YourTango, a news site that focuses on family, marriage and relationship issues.
I don’t mean to suggest that bullying isn’t a big problem. Several weeks ago, I wrote about my own childhood bully, who tormented me at sleep-away camp. Now, years later, too many kids are still scared of social situations, fearful of being teased and ridiculed. Nobody wants students to experience torment, and I’m immensely grateful for educators, parents and professionals who work tirelessly to promote support and awareness.
I’m especially thankful to Sameer Hinduja, an internationally respected authority who codirects the Cyberbullying Research Center. Yet even with the explosion of technology and social networking, he has not seen a rampant increase in bullying, online or offline. “It’s not affecting a majority of kids, it’s affecting a minority of kids,” he told me in January, while noting that it is important to avoid trivializing or dismissing legitimate experiences.
After chatting with Hinduja, I began to wonder whether because of media searching for drama, profit-seeking litigators, or any combination of factors, society has exaggerated an already serious problem. Dr Susan Eva Porter, recent author of Bully Nation: Why America’s Approach to Childhood Aggression is Bad for Everyone would seem to agree:
“The explosion we’re seeing in bullying is due to our expanded definition of it, not to a shift in behavior, and this fact alone should serve to calm us all down. We are not facing an elevated threat—a new demon simply isn’t there,” she writes.
Bullying: a damaging, non-useful term
I recently spoke with Porter, who has a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute. She tells me that America’s definition of bullying has become “so bloated” and “so large” that it’s impossible to completely wrap one’s head around.
As an example, Porter says, she recently spoke with a high school principal about an exchange he had with a distraught mother, demanding that the administration punish students who, in an act of “bullying,” made fun of her daughter’s earrings.
“We clearly have gotten to a state where any time a child feels distressed at the hands of another child, they have been taught by this anti‑bullying movement that they might want to consider that they’ve been bullied because they shouldn’t have to feel this discomfort,” Porter says.
More and more, the anti-bullying movement reinforces the notion that it’s never normal to feel discomfort, and that students should seek help whenever bad feelings arise. But discomfort is a very big part of life, and we fail children by not affording them adequate opportunity to resolve their own problems.
Once kids grow up, how will they cope with humiliation, meanness and adversity, all of which will inevitably arise? I hope not by asking the person in charge to mediate interoffice conflicts about fashion accessories. Instead, teachers must encourage students to maintain a greater sense of self-worth and confidence—no matter what derogatory remarks are directed at them.
Adults do children no favors by always protecting them from adversity, and we must be more judicious when we in fact decide to intervene. Certainly, we must be careful not to go too far in either direction, especially with dissuading hurt kids from legitimately asking for help. This could certainly worsen already fragile situations.
All the same, it’s damaging to always associate another’s expression of dislike with bullying. It’s unrealistic to expect everybody to get along—life simply doesn’t work that way, and it’s unfair to hold children to higher societal expectations than adults. But that still doesn’t stop adults from spuriously using the term “bully” to label antagonistic behavior, however moderate.
“We now have a definition of bullying that is so unwieldy,” Porter says, as I shake my head in agreement, “I have to say it’s really useless because every interview I have given somebody has asked me, and it’s a great question, ‘What is bullying?’ The fact that we can’t answer it and yet the country is consumed by it right there shows us that we’ve really veered off track, that we’re chasing something that is never going to be caught, that we’re really in the midst of something, that we need to get our heads out of the sand because if we can’t even define it, how can we even do anything about it?”
Porter also notes that statistics on bullying aren’t at all consistent or reliable, and I ask her why this is the case. “Kids are self‑reporting. They’re asked to self‑report about incidences that take place weeks, months, or even years in the past, which is phenomenal to me,” she says. “We are asking children to report on did anybody tease you? Were you ever left out of something in the past five years? I mean, it’s crazy. It’s crazy.”
I can’t help but wonder if these studies are riddled with false results by mistakenly encouraging students to associate social discomfort with bullying. I also question whether each instance of teasing or social exclusion—while unkind and maybe even cruel—should constitute bullying.
I have this in mind when I stumble across stopbullying.gov, a federal government website managed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, that defines a myriad of bullying actions, including . . .
- Leaving someone out on purpose
- Telling other children not to be friends with someone
- Spreading rumors about someone
- Embarrassing someone in public
- Name-calling
- Teasing
- Making mean or rude hand gestures
I disapprove of these behaviors, and it’s admirable to strive to foster amicable, respectful relationships. But the federal government shouldn’t assert any claim of moral supremacy—as if in this hot-tempered political climate, politicians on both sides of the aisle make sincere efforts to avoid name-calling, teasing, rumors, and social exclusion. It’s difficult to claim that every politician is a bully with no good intentions. The reality isn’t that clear-cut, and we must rethink how easily we use the term “bully” to label children, who, for whatever reasons, decide not to sit next to John at lunch, or not to invite Sally to a birthday party.
Adults are failing to give children responsibility for managing their own reactions, Porter tells me. “We are inadvertently giving kids this idea that there shouldn’t be conflict, that you can’t really have your preferences that everybody has to come to your birthday party,” Porter says. “Everybody doesn’t have to come to your birthday party. Everybody shouldn’t come to your birthday party.”
Bullying and suicide: a misunderstood connection
This is an extremely delicate issue to consider, made all the more so by horrific, heart-rending stories of student suicides, reportedly prompted by bullying. Nothing in this world is more tragic than a young person’s taking his or her own life, and I can’t possibly imagine the pain parents must endure upon burying their own child.
All the same, in a rush to make sense of these suicides—which, despite national media coverage, thankfully remain quite rare—on the whole, journalists have abandoned their responsibility to tell the whole story.
Several months ago, I interviewed Emily Bazalon, senior editor for Slate, and among the most informed and respected authorities on bullying. In a recently released book, Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy, Bazelon provides a detailed account of the 2010 suicide of fifteen-year-old Phoebe Prince.
Police conducted a thorough investigation, revealing “a tragic story, filled with warning signs, missed opportunities, and flashes of cruelty,” Bazelon writes. Much more than just bullying contributed to Prince’s death, but “prosecutors decided to reduce all of the complexity to one clean narrative: Pheobe Prince was bullied to death.”
News outlets didn’t even attempt to clarify matters, instead latching onto an incomplete narrative: “This was sensational stuff, media candy,” Bazalon writes. “In screaming headlines and TV segments, the conflicts Phoebe had been embroiled in were rendered as a one-way set of attacks by a vicious pack against one innocent victim. The notion of ‘bullycide’ took hold, and it didn’t matter how much complexity it obscured.”
I’m troubled by ABC’s coverage of Phoebe Prince’s suicide, and not only because this segment (shown below) tells of a tragic loss of life.
In 2:29 minutes, we hear only that nine of Prince’s classmates stand accused of harassment and bullying, and that the administrators at South Hadley High School in Massachusetts are equally to blame. “This should never have happened, and they should have done something about it, and I think they should be brought up on charges as well,” says an unidentified woman, clearly referring to the administration.
But why not then also scrutinize Prince’s family? After three months of harassing text messages and threats, and the cluelessness of administrators to handle this dilemma effectively, why didn’t Prince’s mother remove her from school? Perhaps she failed to notice how bad and how quickly the situation had deteriorated—but at the very least, doesn’t this also hint at an important element, which, in some way, could have contributed to Prince’s taking her own life?
I also understand the media’s desire to deflect blame from Prince, portraying her as a helpless victim. I’ve covered only one suicide in my short journalism career, and the last thing I wanted to do was speak about the victim’s own shortcomings and mistakes leading up to the suicide. I couldn’t sleep well for several nights, thinking that I had somehow desecrated the memory of a young man, tragically taken from this world. But I found solace in having told the truth, that this student made a series of grave mistakes leading up to his death. I’m glad that Porter agrees with me.
“It’s very interesting that we’re letting the kid who committed suicide off the hook for doing a really stupid, impulsive thing, but we’re not letting the kids who may have said a mean thing off the hook for doing a stupid, impulsive thing,” Porter says.
As I chat with Porter, I’m reminded of my conversation with Hinduja, whom I also asked about the media’s misleading the public into believing that cyberbullying has reached pandemic proportions. “I would say that the media likes to focus on a lot of these suicides that have happened because of cyberbullying,” Hinduja says. “At least that’s how they attempt to paint it, even though first off, the suicides that do happen, they’re so rare—they’re incredibly, incredibly rare.”
Hinduja and other experts have studied such cases, which almost always tend to have more serious underlying issues: “There’s not a direct relationship between bullied online and then committing suicide,” he says.
Bully and victim: the problem with labeling
A detailed August 17, 2010 Slate article by Bazelon, “Was Phoebe Prince Once a Bully,” also outlines a much more complex narrative of events—indirectly filling holes in how media outlets covered this tragedy. Bazelon writes,
I argued that the series of unusual felony charges brought against the six teens represent prosecutorial overreach, given that Phoebe had mental health troubles before the bullying began, that she was caught up in conflicts that other South Hadley kids saw as “normal girl drama,” and that the bullying, while wrong, was not the “relentless” three-month campaign the district attorney described.
Bazelon goes on to explain how Prince had left her previous school in Ireland after a cutting incident, and that she had continued to cut herself at South Hadley. Nowhere, though, does ABC’s coverage of Prince suggest that events are still unfolding—or that the teen’s suicide may have been prompted by anything other than bullying.
Equally important, Bazelon calls into question the cookie-cutter villain-victim narrative, which, in a rush to make sense of events, journalists mistakenly follow. At her former school, Bazelon reveals, Prince acted horribly toward another girl, calling her nasty names and making horrible posts on Bebo, a social networking site.
This doesn’t justify how teens horribly mistreated Prince at South Hadley, but as Bazelon says, “it does add yet another layer of complexity to her story, one that speaks to the universality and fluidity of kids’ bad behavior.”
I speak with Porter about labeling somebody a “bully,” which creates a fixed, damaging perspective.
“Certainly, we victimize children when we call them bullies, absolutely,” Porter tells me. “What we’re calling bullying now is, for the most part—and I really mean we’ve gotten so out‑of‑hand in our culture—for the most part, it’s kids expressing an average, normal level of aggression that some other kid is taking issue with. That’s the dynamic we’re seeing. It’s not that we’re breeding these kids who have horrible parents and then they go to school and they act horribly. That may happen, as well, but anybody can be a bully, anybody can be a victim, given the way we’re thinking about it now. Everybody has aggression and everybody feels hurt.”
I also ask about the negative effects of labeling somebody a “victim,” especially when the term doesn’t exactly apply.
“A label in itself creates a fixed mindset, which is bad. But the label ‘victim’ is really bad,” she says. “Not only is it a self‑fulfilling prophecy as any kind of pejorative label can be, but what it does is give them a sense of power in their pain. Therefore, they possibly and probably will seek out situations where they feel pain because they’ll get attention, because they identify with it, because that’s what they expect.”
A better way to approach student aggression
We need to rethink how we approach and respond to childhood aggression. Porter tells me about her GRIT approach, which stands for growth mindset (eliminating labels), responding (taking a short delay before intervening), intervention (being judicious and wise upon taking action) and teaching (specifically, teaching resilience).
“I really believe that we have to intervene all the time with kids,” she says. “But we have to choose our battles. We have to think about why we’re intervening. We have to intervene with intelligence. More than anything else, I believe the litmus test is before we intervene, we have to ask ourselves, ‘Do we have the best interest of every child at heart as we intervene?’”
I’m also proud to support a number of terrific anti-bullying websites, which offer a plethora of helpful advice on how to manage aggressive behavior. I enjoyed scrolling throughTeensAgainstBullying.org, which in one article informs visitors that “peer intervention is the most effective way to prevent bullying in schools.” In fact, I’m hugely supportive of trained peer counselors, who intercede to help disputing parties come to quicker and more peaceful resolutions.
I also like the inviting feel of KidsAgainstBullying.org, which provides a great forum for kids to share stories and ideas. I’m especially fond of one piece of advice, which encourages children to attempt resolving their own issues: “If you see someone being bullied, you could ask them to sit with you at lunch and talk to them about how they feel,” writes Hannah. “Afterwards you could slip them a kind note in their locker and then help them get the bully leave them along. They will for sure feel a whole lot better!”
As I think of the most helpful advice for adults, I’m reminded of what Hinduja told me during our talk.
We need to offer support and guidance to not only victims, but aggressors as well. “We need to remember that hurt people hurt people, and understand that they’re struggling with their own stuff,” he says. “And how can we rally around them? How can we meet their specific needs, and if we do maybe they will stop coping in a negative way, in a maladaptive way and then hurt other people with their words and actions.”
Interview transcript
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