Cyberbullying and the School System

Today in the New York Times, reporter Jan Hoffman wrote a lengthy and direct article about the issue of online bullying and what role schools should play in these issues. The article is titled “Online Bullies Pull Schools Into The Fray”.

Since this bullying is happening online, but usually with classmates involved, it is a difficult subject to tie back to school control. In the article, Jan Hoffman discusses the difficulty schools have with the current bully trends:

Schools these days are confronted with complex questions on whether and how to deal with cyberbullying, an imprecise label for online activities ranging from barrages of teasing texts to sexually harassing group sites. The extent of the phenomenon is hard to quantify. But one 2010 study by the Cyberbullying Research Center, an organization founded by two criminologists who defined bullying as “willful and repeated harm” inflicted through phones and computers, said one in five middle-school students had been affected.

Affronted by cyberspace’s escalation of adolescent viciousness, many parents are looking to schools for justice, protection, even revenge. But many educators feel unprepared or unwilling to be prosecutors and judges.

Often, school district discipline codes say little about educators’ authority over student cellphones, home computers and off-campus speech. Reluctant to assert an authority they are not sure they have, educators can appear indifferent to parents frantic with worry, alarmed by recent adolescent suicides linked to bullying.

Whether resolving such conflicts should be the responsibility of the family, the police or the schools remains an open question, evolving along with definitions of cyberbullying itself.

The article cites current examples of issues happening to children today and the difficulty schools have in deciding how best to handle them. To read the entire article, click here.

Is He A Bully?

I just read and wanted to share a blog post I found on another site called “I Said, You Said“. This mother of a young boy is dealing with her son being accused of bullying on the first day of summer camp. In fact the victim’s mother took it as far as to call the police in.

What I found interesting is that this mother is seeing it from the perspective of surprise that her son is accused of bullying. In the article, she says:

It seems like you can’t open a newspaper or turn on the TV without reading or hearing a story about bullying. Well, yesterday my son was accused of being a bully, and I’m horrified.

My horror extends to two fronts. One, because I obviously think bullying is awful and don’t think any child should have to suffer through that torment. Secondly, I know my son well and he is no bully. There must be a misunderstanding. I’m sure all parents say that, but I really mean it! There has to be a mix-up.

According to witnesses at the scene, this is what happened: A boy named “John” approached my son and another boy. He wanted to play kickball with them but the game was already in process. “John” then took the ball he was holding in his hands and threw it at the boys. The other boy threw the ball off the field and into a nearby field. “John” took off his baseball hat and began hitting both boys. The boys backed away but “John” continued hitting them. Then, both boys picked up their pool towels and snapped them at “John”. At this point, a camp counselor stepped in and advised the boys to stop and they did.

She goes on to say later, the police arrive to question her son about the incident. It seems the boy is accusing her son of bullying him all school year as well. You can read the full article here. Now I have no idea of the case and truth, but the mother of this boy is surprised about the police being called. I personally think we are going to see more of a trend of police being involved in cases of accused bullying.

Right or wrong, bullying is now heavily in the news and people are trying to pass laws to prevent bullying now. As these new laws are attempting to be passed, it only makes sense that the police will become more involved in bullying incidents.

In the past, the idea of physical contact between kids would be called “Boys Being Boys” was accepted by society as the norm. But I believe those days are over now with a new trend to view physical violence among youth, particularly in bullying situations, as assault, the same as would be the case with adults.

As parents get informed either one way or the other that their children are accused as bullies, I would recommend to them to take it seriously and advise their children of the consequences of even being accused as a bully. I do believe that as laws try to be passed, physical violence between children can and will be prosecuted as assault, if for no other reason then to set precedent for future cases.

Deprogramming Bullies

Maia Szalavitz, a reporter with TIME magazine recently wrote an article for the magazine titled “How to Deprogram Bullies: Teaching Kindness 101”. This excellent article discusses a program called ROOTS OF EMPATHY (ROE), which helps teach children at an early age how to be empathetic to others.

In the article, it is explained how this program can help with bullying issues:

After a child has hurt someone, “we always think we should start with ‘How do you think so-and-so felt?'” Gordon says. “But you will be more successful if you start with ‘You must have felt very upset.'” The trick, she says, is to “help children describe how they felt, so that the next time this happens, they’ve got language. Now they can say, ‘I’m feeling like I did when I bit Johnny.'”

When children are able to understand their own feelings, they are closer to being able to understand that Johnny was also hurt and upset by being bitten. Empathy is based on our ability to mirror others’ emotions, and ROE helps children recognize and describe what they’re seeing.

You can read the full article here at TIME online. I believe that any approach that can help teach and reinforce the importance of sharing empathy with others can ultimately help in the battle to stop bullying.

As an aside, I overheard a conversation the other day where two people were talking about empathy in a different way. They were talking about a movie where someone killed 15 people and 1 dog. Their conversation was about how people watching the movie were making a big deal about the killing of the dog, but no one was upset about the people. I thought this was an interesting point about empathy. I know if an animal is injured or killed in a movie I react. If a character who is human and I haven’t invested any emotional time with is killed, I don’t really react. Do we feel bad because the dog is viewed as friendly and nice and we don’t view ourselves on first impression that way?

I don’t really have an answer here, just an observation about the value and empathy we share with humans vs. animals, which we innately feel we must care for. Please enjoy the TIME article and feel free to comment about the empathy point.

Are Antagonistic Relationships Healthy?

In a recent article from the New York Times, reporter Benedict Carey writes that new research shows that antagonistic relationships like those shared between a bully and the victim can actually enhance social and emotional development. The researchers do stipulate that the psychological impact of these relationships directly corresponds to the level of animosity and how youngsters respond to it.

Maurissa Abecassis, a psychologist at Colby-Sawyer College in New Hampshire explains in the article that:

Friendships provide a context in which children develop, but of course so do negative peer relations. We should expect that both types of relationships, as different as they are, present opportunities for growth.

The researchers are not saying that hostile relationships are good for youth, though. There is enough evidence of the damage they can do, to include mental abuse, physical abuse and in extreme cases, murder and suicide. In their study, researchers found that 15 to 40 percent of elementary school children are dealing with at least one hostile relationship. The percentage jumps to 48 to 70 percent in middle and high school.

While the study concludes that most youth are doing fine, even with these high statistics, they also find that there is a smaller group that suffer from something they call “Peer rejection”. This is when a smaller group of children is so different from their peers that they deal with a larger percentage of bullying. This is interesting, because, while I never considered myself far different from my peers, I definitely dealt with more bullying in elementary school.

None of this makes the suffering of those who confront hostility any easier. The article discusses how the hurt is even deeper when two children started as friends and then it turns to enemies. I certainly know this from my firsthand experience with Robert R., a friend who turned on me that I discuss in several personal stories on this site.

The study really says that only mildly antagonistic relationships have any social or emotional benefit. Melissa Witkow, a psychologist at Willamette University in Oregon, conducted another experiment on the same subject. She says:

You have several options, as I see it, when you become aware of someone else’s antipathy. You could be extra nice, and that might be good. But it could also be awkward or disappointing, and a waste of time. You could choose to ignore the person. Or you can engage. When someone dislikes you, it may be adaptive to dislike them back.”

She says in the study that people tend to prefer balance and that shared antagonism has the same reactive benefit as shared affection. The only problem I personally have with this in theory is that you may be asking a person who is not, by nature, an antagonistic person to become one. What I have found is that, when you ask people to do something outside of their natural emotional comfort zone, they tend to do it to the extreme due to the discomfort. So where someone who has it in their nature to be antagonistic might do it mildly, I find that those who it is not in their nature do it to the extreme end, not naturally knowing where to limit it. So, I’m not a fan of this, but understand the root of the study.

Part of the theoretical benefit of this learned behavior according to the study is that having an enemy as a young person can prepare you as an adult to be able to find and avoid false or unreliable friends, because, according to the article, betrayals as adults are more harmful.

Personally, I have seen many of these studies come out recently, where they ask victims of bullying to behave in a way that might not be comfortable to them. I’m not sure what to make of them. Should we change our natural behavior instinct in order to pacify a bully? Do we start to get to their level and “fight back” in order to make it stop?  I have personally never been a fan of this for the reason I stated above.

I do “get it” though, that you can change a bully’s behavior and suffer less by adapting to these tactics. But my question still remains, do the victims change or do we try to change the acceptance of bullying behavior as a society?

200,000 and Counting

I wanted to say thank you to those that read this blog site for helping it reach 200,000 hits in almost exactly three years since it started.

When I first started this site, I didn’t think that I would see it read by that many. It was a very personal crusade for me and while I had hoped there would be an interest in the subject, I really didn’t know where it was going to go. Over the last three years, I have found that I want to help others understand the issues of bullying as well as report on changes to bullying laws and policies.

With this milestone of 200k visits from people, it’s my hope that you receive good quality information from the site and visit to help either you or someone you know deal with bullying issues.

Again, thanks for reading and I appreciate all feedback that I get on this site, good and bad. Feel free to share your stories or your thoughts to create a site that shares differing views on the issue of bullying in the United States and the world.