Here in Massachusetts we’re getting continuous media coverage of the fallout from Phoebe Prince’s suicidal response to her schoolmates’ chronic bullying. We’ve got details on the alleged perpetrators, statements by their lawyers, columnists weighing in on which adults to blame, and updates on the impending Massachusetts Anti-Bullying Legislation. The whole story is sickening, and not in a must-look-at-car-crash kind of way. I want to stick my fingers in my ears and go “La, La, La, I don’t hear anything.” This is not because I don’t care.
Discussions of bullying are rising like flood water at my kids’ school. Some people take the “kids these days are just more evil” approach to bullying-related tragedies. I understand why this idea is comforting. If social media has turned kids into a new kind of monster, then us parents can play the easy role of fumbling by-standers, mouths all a-gape.
Yes, cyber-threats are new, but girl-on-girl soft (and hard) bullying goes back a long way. There’s always been a lot of scholarly interest in those 16th-century pamphlets about snarky “gossips,” the women who encourage wives to talk trash about their husbands and spend too much of their money. But evident in the earliest literature is also the terrible consequences of women cutting down other women.
I started to think about Tamora and Lavinia in Shakespeare’s early tragedy Titus Andronicus. In retaliation for crimes committed by Lavinia’s father, Tamora terrorizes the innocent teenager and instructs her sons to rape her (which they do, happily).
Tamora’s bullying is good news when you’re teaching a class on Shakespeare (who doesn’t love a titillating plot?). But it’s seriously bad news if you’re a parent. It creates some kind of cosmic thread between the incidents you hear about from your kids (these girls ganged up on that girl, called her a [blank], etc., etc.) and the darkest expressions of girl on girl bullying.
I’m hoping that my kids will have nothing to do with this bullying stuff. The problem is, when your own kids are not involved in bullying, you think about the bullies and the bullied in the same way you think about the families who get lice: you’re sympathetic, but you don’t want to sleep in their bed. One of the hardest things to swallow about bullying is how much it exposes the parental “turn the other way” survival mechanism. Most people would choose to keep these plots fictional as long as possible.
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The school authorities need to be held liable, though. They have the coercive force of government behind them in compelling the kids to go to school and they should have tortious liability when they turn a blind eye and deaf ear to obvious bullying.
I was hearing about a Dr. Phil show where a girl, obviously lying through her teeth, only claimed to have huffed about "20 times". Yeah right. Make it more like 200.
The parents stunned me by claiming that they had no clue that their child was huffing. She had to have been in one of two states for the most part, after becoming addicted to huffing: intoxicated or withdrawing. Huffing works that way!
That oblivious behavior has to stop.
Tragically, there are some who are permanently damaged or even destroyed by this process. There should be better resources for those victims, they should never feel they are alone, and be allowed to lose hope. I think we're seeing the naked, animal side of human (or maybe just primate) nature. Only when we own up to our ability for cruelty to each other will we be able to effectively address the problem.
You're right. What's being done by "authorities" is strictly CYA.
I sympathize with the impulse to hold school authorities responsible, and do not doubt that school districts will be sued (they have deeper pockets than individual families). But such suits only make things worse by further distracting school districts from their mission: you know, that education thing, as opposed to the mission that has been foisted on them since the mid-1970s, namely standing in for the tatters of a social safety net. Bullying won't go away, but its effects might be ameliorated if we governed ourselves like a civilized society instead of like, well, barbarians.
Yes, similiar behaviors will be encountered in the adult world and perhaps we have to be "toughened up" for that, but adolescents are only just learning their coping behaviors and may need some help. Additionally, in school and neighborhood situations children may be vicitimized by the same bullies for years on end. Phoebe Prince had no place to escape to, so she decided to end it all.
Turning a blind eye is not the responsible thing to do. Parents of the bullied and the bullies must take responsibility. I can't believe that Phoebe's parents didn't know what was going on!
I think it's modern technology -- my friends with teenage daughters say Facebook etc., causes more heartache in a day than lunch table politics caused in a year in our time. The anonymity, and physical distance from the victim encourage treatment that they would be ashamed to dish out in person. The success of this behaviour emboldens the perpetrator and escalates the conflict, bringing it into the real world at a far nastier level.
Teenagers are sensitive, self-involved, thoughtless and easily bruised. Giving one a Facebook account is either like giving her an emotional AK47 or painting a target on her forehead. I say all social networking sites, Twitter, etc, should be restricted to over 18's. Especially for girls.
I think it's modern technology -- my friends with teenage daughters say Facebook etc., causes more heartache in a day than lunch table politics caused in a year in our time. The anonymity, and physical distance from the victim encourage treatment that they would be ashamed to dish out in person. The success of this behaviour emboldens the perpetrator and escalates the conflict, bringing it into the real world at a far nastier level.
Teenagers are sensitive, self-involved, thoughtless and easily bruised. Giving one a Facebook account is either like giving her an emotional AK47 or painting a target on her forehead. I say all social networking sites, Twitter, etc, should be restricted to over 18's. Especially for girls.
I think it's modern technology -- my friends with teenage daughters say Facebook etc., causes more heartache in a day than lunch table politics caused in a year in our time. The anonymity, and physical distance from the victim encourage treatment that they would be ashamed to dish out in person. The success of this behaviour emboldens the perpetrator and escalates the conflict, bringing it into the real world at a far nastier level.
Teenagers are sensitive, self-involved, thoughtless and easily bruised. Giving one a Facebook account is either like giving her an emotional AK47 or painting a target on her forehead. I say all social networking sites, Twitter, etc, should be restricted to over 18's. Especially for girls.
Also, people forget that bullies are most likely to believe themselves to be VICTIMS (just look at how UK/US/Israel defends their psychopathic sadism against tiny nations). A bully always feels JUSTIFIED in doing what he/she is doing, based on some perceived or inflated slight or injustice.
The only cure for a bully is a hard fist in the face. Unfortunately, our misguided policies are designed to punish true self-defense, a loophole bullies are usually great at exploiting. If this young woman in Mass. had beaten the living crap out of one of those sociopaths you can be DAMN sure the school authorities would have sat up and taken notice--and punished Miss Prince, NOT the bullies.
It took a lot of therapy to make me see why I had allowed so much physical abuse from a former SO. It was behavior I had learned from my own siblings, who teased the "family fat freak" under the guise that "(I'm) so big (I) can take it." After that, it was no wonder why I allowed that to happen from school bullies, then much later on to allow it from future (alleged) SOs.
One of the best books I ever read on the subject was "Such a Pretty Face: Being Fat in America." I had even learned to eroticize rejection, thinking that whoever was doing this was at least paying attention to me, and so this was "the best I could do" and thus should allow it to happen.
It took a lot of therapy for me to realize that abuse, on any level and from anyone, is never OK. I for one think this tragedy finally woke up a lot of people--perhaps the families most of all. Maybe more violence happens at home than we're willing to admit.
More than anything, I think this terrible episode shows how we as Americans really have removed all boundaries, and that anything really does go nowadays.
Teachers and parents need to understand that insecurity, fear, and social pressure can and will make any kid take on the bully role at some point. That seems to be developmentally to be expected.
But what we should also expect is schools and systems that actively counter bullying. That intervene immediately in social groups where problems are beginning, separate kids from peers who are causing trouble, and create opportunities for kids to be forced into socializing, in a controlled environment, outside their self-chosen peer groups (project work, mentoring pairs, assigned lunch seating are examples off the top of my head.) Staff or trained volunteers should be monitoring hallways and school grounds.
And teachers should be trained how to recognize and respond. Some of the worst bullying in my high school was encouraged by a couple of teachers who were power-mad and pathetic creatures themselves. Teachers need to be held to the highest standards, to themselves treat students with respect and never contempt (and demand the same in return.) As long as we accept bullying as something that "just happens," it will happen.
I decided my girls should become martial artists, which they did, and this enabled them both to defend themselves physically when they needed to. Actually, most bullies steered clear of them because they knew the girls were martial artists. However, this does not protect against the mean girls' comments. That is much tougher, and those scars go deep and last a long time.
At least now, kids know what a mean girl is, and how to express their disapproval of these behaviors. I have to say, I have seen some bullying from surprising sources here on OS recently. Not pretty. And we are adults!
To EllenMP and others who'd turn a blind eye to this sort of thing--just because YOU didn't suffer bullying doesn't mean it doesn't exist, or that it's not horrible for those who do.
It is, in fact, what teenagers and even young children do naturally, and no one's trying to excuse it that way. But it does occur in the natural world, in other primate species, and even in other mammalian species. Heck, just take a puppy to a new dog park to see how it works.
But we are human, and as a species should be cultivating some sort of self-awareness within our children, too. Just because someone's an easy target doesn't mean that they should be a target.
In fact, usually it's the opposite. I can still remember the very few times a peer or teacher stepped in to "save" me from bullies during my childhood. That feeling of relief and gratitude has stayed with me for years.
And I can also remember having to sit through an entire day of school wearing my P.E. clothes because some no-doubt-not-a-real-problem kids decided to take a piss into my locker while I was working out. And then getting a detention because I was too embarassed to explain why I wasn't wearing my "dress code" clothes, and also having to cart my clothes around in a plastic garbage bag all day, reeking of piss.
I didn't commit suicide, but that kind of thing does leave scars. I pride myself on being relatively well-adjusted now as an adult, but I can't say the same for my 14-year-old self.
There are plenty of worse things being done to kids out there, even as we speak. Denial isn't going to fix any of it.
Parental bullying may or may not be the obvious harrassment that we tend to define as bullying. For example, children who are disrespected by overly controlling parents often have an urge to bully others. That was me. I had parents who often disrespected me and were overly controlling. I was not allowed to make many decisions about my own life such as whether or not I wanted to take violin and piano lessons. I had to take them. Period. I had to clean the house every Saturday. Period. Etc., etc. And although I didn't go out of my way to bully other children, I can think of a few instances when I did bully that are very upsetting to me now, not only because of the pain I caused, but because I was an unhappy child demonstrating my frustration and unhappiness very clearly, and showing, too, that there was something very negative and unhealthy about my parents' treatment of me....
Adults were incompetent to do anything. Teachers, Counselors, Principals, Parents: all epic fails. They felt us children should be acting like adults and couldn't understand why children do the things they do.
Bullying seems to be in kids' blood. These bullies were undoubtedly abused in one form or another at home and took it out on other kids at school. Thus the abused becomes the abuser, and very early at that.
I hated it. HATED IT. I hated school because of it. I hated my teachers because of it. I hated my parents because of it. I hated myself because of it.
I may very well dislike people in general - as a 35-year-old - because of it.
I cannot say how wide spread this deplorable problem is. I know it doesn't go away just because the bullies leave high school - sometimes they grow into reasonably decent people, sometimes they just develop more inventive ways of bullying.
Folks of all ages strike out in anger of all flavors (physical, verbal, etc) because of their own sense of inadequacy, hurt, anger, fear, cowardice.
There is no reason for any child to be bullied and I am ashamed that too little is being done to prevent this.
"EllenMP, I went to high school in the United States. Specifically, University City, Missouri. A suburb which was at the time mostly intellectual and Jewish (now mostly black and impoverished), full of New Left kids who protested the War in Vietnam, but who didn't notice or care that kids were being beaten bloody in their own hallways. "
U City mostly black and impoverished these days? I realise I've not lived there for 20 years now but what about Joe Edwards and the Loop or WU or the revival on the other side of Delmar? Maybe it would take U City becoming more like the North Side before I'd be willing to call it black and impoverished.
And I have to agree with you on the assessment of teenagers. I even went to an all-girls catholic out in Webster. Nothing more bitchy than a whole school full of girls. Ironic that the biggest bully was (as a counterpoint to your football player) a black girl who one day went too far and we had a full-on cat fight with fists in the halls. She disappeared from school after that and I was left with the mostly harmless amateurs until graduation. I think she transferred to St. Joe's. :)
I tremble at trying to imagine high school with facebook when, already, my 3yo will come to me at pre-school and say, "X said he didn't like my dress." which I counter with "Who cares as long as you like it. Please yourself, not others, when it comes to how you look." It starts early.