What is a bully? A bully--ooh! Bully. Noun. A blustering, quarrelsome, over-bearing person
who habitually badgers and intimidates smaller or weaker people. Bully, verb, to act in a
loudly arrogant and overbearing way. Adjective, bully, fine, excellent, very good. Okay, you
know what dictionary you, you are just confusing the situation.
So on last week's Ask Cristen video 'Cutter for Attention' which was all about self-harming
and what to do if you know a friend is self-harming, Dulce Gonzalez said, 'I do not believe anti-bullying
campaigns work. On the contrary when one of my friends took her life the bullying I received
did not diminish. In fact it got so much worse.' To which I ask can bullying ever be prevented?
There has been so much academic attention paid to these anti-bullying campaigns, how
bullying works, what to do about bullies, how to respond to bullies. As statistics popping
up around my head will tell you, it is still quite prevalent and ever more complicated
by the existence of the internet and social media and anonymous texting applications that
allow people to harass people more than ever before. And that hallmark of adolescent bullying
behavior of it happening when adults are not looking is obviously a reason why cyber-bullying
thrives. Yes adults are on the internet, our parents are on facebook but there are so many
other places that we can go where adults are not looking and even if adults were looking
things can be anonymous so they wouldn't even know that we were bullying to begin with.
The two things that jumped out to me that do seem to be legitimately affected on a peer
level basis are empathy and impulse control. Teaching them how to put themselves in the
other person's shoes or even more broadly teaching them how these instances of every
day bullying behavior are reflective of historic examples of social injustice and marginalization.
That kind of empathy work has been shown to be effective and it usually is also effective
when kids collectively stand up to bullying and I have a feeling that some kids are rolling
their eyes right now because they've probably been told this by a million teachers but there
was an astounding statistic that I ran across which found that if a kid is being bullied,
if their peers in that moment confront the bully, tell that bully to stop, instantaneously
the behavior evaporates. The scary thing is, what I do not have a ready answer for is well
what do you do when you flip those numbers, when it's a group of people ganging up on
one person which it seems like is where cyber-bullying really becomes so destructive. When you have
peer pressure involved to bully, things get far more complicated in terms of uprooting
it, in terms of kids being able to resist the temptation to do that. In those kinds
of situations a deep understanding of empathy and also deriving one's self-esteem from a
healthy place and not just from a place of what other peers are saying about you is going
to be key however that's a lot to expect of kids. Maybe it's just a question of what do
we do as adults to help build that bridge, to help give them those tools. There are also
some more practical things that can be done from a more technological side to deal with
this impulse control factor. There's been some interesting work on apps that will delay
social media posts or prompt you with a message if it detects via algorithms certain harassing
language and say hey, we're going to wait thirty seconds before you post this because
do you really want to post this? Speaking of cyber-bullying there was some really interesting
research that came out of a team at MIT that analyzed all of these YouTube comments and
social media posts that had been previously flagged by either moderators or users for
either bullying behavior. They highlighted these six categories of bullying speech online:
Appearance, intelligence, race, ethnicity, sexuality, social acceptance and rejection.
Those are the boxes that bullies will usually drop one of us into because it's easy. The
more you read about the more it blows your mind that it is so persistent, it's so easy
to be mean and maybe that's it. Maybe that's the thing, maybe that's why bullying is so
hard to uproot because it's so much easier sometimes, especially when you're younger
to be mean than it is to be nice. Even in adulthood it's so much easier to be mean.
Another thing too about these bully prevention programs is that they're usually so reactionary
and also usually focused on teaching kids how to bully-proof themselves. Apples and
oranges warning here, really reminiscent of a lot of sexual assault prevention curriculum
that is focused on how do prevent your own victimization. Which makes the situation seem
so much more helpless because well how am I supposed to preemptively prevent someone
else who I have no control over for doing something to me that I have not in any way
brought upon myself? Maybe one way to prevent bullying is to rethink how we prevent bullying.
And I just want to say though one more thing. If you are a victim of bullying, bullying
is not about you. That bully is merely looking for some kind of power dynamic to exploit
but that does not mean that there is anything at all wrong with you or that needs fixing.
Now I want to know your ideas on how to change the world and I say how to change the world
because imagine if we lived in a world without bullying. It can be a lot harder to be a good
human versus a rotten human but the effort, totally worth it. Let me know in the comments
below and be sure to ask me your questions so I don't just keep asking myself questions
and rambling.