InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "it was love to me"

megpie71 (megpie71) wrote,
@ 2009-05-08 09:33:00

Current mood:

contemplative

The more things change...
I spotted the headline and summary of this article sitting in my RSS ticker, and I wandered over to have a look:

Elite school's horrific cyber-bullying case
Two adolescent girls have been forced to leave one of Sydney's elite private schools because of cyber-bullying.

My first thought on seeing it was "I wonder whether the ones who were forced to leave were the victims or the aggressors", because let's face it, the usual pattern when any kind of bullying, harassment, standover tactics or outright aggressive behaviour occurs in a school setting is that the victims are the ones who move on. This one is one of those rare cases where the people who did the bullying are being expelled.

I read through the article and the accompanying comments, and the ones which hit hardest were the last couple - the ones from other girls who knew both the bullies and the victims. The ones which said that it was just all part of the whole school scene, and that having these anonymous aggressors mentioned in the media and being called "feral" by "randoms" was just plain nasty. Those made me really sad, because it speaks of a widespread acceptance of the way the social and political framework of the schoolyard is based on and supported by this sort of harassment and viciousness. It speaks of a lack of comprehension that there is any other way of handling social interactions between peers. It made me sad, but now it's making me angry.

It makes me angry, because I was one of the kids at the bottom of the social ladder. I spent my entire term at primary school and high school being effectively shat on from a height by my ostensible peers for the social crime of being different. My school experience was so marked by this harassment I wound up having a breakdown at university level because it wasn't present. I still haven't got over the anger I felt at realising the only reason I was bullied in my final years at high school was because the actions of my harassers were dismissed as being "kids will be kids".

So I say this: let the bullies face the full legal consequences of their actions. Make the schools legally responsible for ensuring kids know their actions have consequences - and if that means assault charges for kids who get into physical fights, or defamation charges for kids who perform cyber-bullying actions, then so be it. I realise it will take effectively an alteration of the entire schoolyard culture - first there's got to be a way of finding out what bullying is happening, then there has to be a way of preventing out-of-school retaliation for things like "dobbing" (ie telling a teacher you're being bullied); there also has to be a way of dealing with the provocateurs who tease a kid into striking out physically, or the ones who prod and prod and prod until someone lashes back. It means actually examining the culture which is being presented in a school, and it means the teachers all have to be conscious of their own internalised prejudices and preferences. It means pulling the whole thing to pieces and effectively rebuilding from scratch, and it means everyone in society has to be willing to support the effort, or it will fall apart.

First and foremost, we have to accept that while very young children cannot be expected to magically "know" the social boundaries, teenagers are not very young children. They are young adults, people who will soon be expected to take on adult responsibilities. There isn't a magic switch which is thrown at age eighteen, instantly turning a person from a child into an adult. By year eight and nine (ages thirteen to fourteen in Australian schools) teenagers are old enough to know what the social limits are - and they should be expected to behave within those limits, rather than pushing the edges of them to the point where they're committing crimes. Libel, slander and defamation are crimes in our society ("who steals my purse steals trash... But he that filches from me my good name/Robs me of that which not enriches him/And makes me poor indeed"), as are assault and battery, theft and similar. Maybe one of the earliest lessons at high school needs to be the nature of what our legal system defines as a crime - and what counts as one.

The failure in this case wasn't just with the two girls who were expelled. It wasn't just with their parents. It was with the school as well, for allowing their students to commit criminal actions (either with malice aforethought, or because they were bored) without pointing out where the limits of the law lay.

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aikonamika
2009-05-08 03:24 am UTC (link)

I was teased pretty badly throughout elementary school, and the first year and a half of middle school (the really annoying part was that it was four different schools as my family moved around). The biggest problem was at my middle school, where the guy's parents were major investors in the new building that my small private school had recently acquired and were rebuilding to fit a school as opposed to a business. They were investors, and they were the designers. Like hell they wanted to do anything that would offend the kid's parents.

The one thing that saved me was because my mother refused to let the school get away with it. She kept after them, and pulled out the magic word of "harassment," and they realized that she was perfectly willing to get them into trouble. They made the guy stop his bullshit, which helped me grow a spine in return.

I was even luckier during high school - I went to a Quaker school then, and though there was still some element of bullying, it was a hell of a lot less common than other places, and the faculty were quick to step in if they caught a whiff of it. It helped that it was a tiny school (my senior year there were 170 students, including the middle school) and it was partially a bording school, so the faculty mostly lived right there on the campus. Combine the close proximity with the Quaker values, and the campus life there was particularly charmed. The one bully who went after me was stuck with only verbal bullying at points when the teacher wasn't around and that stopped quickly when I finally lost it in the middle of class and yelled at him before storming out.

That teacher actually apologized to me for not catching it sooner.

Unfortunately, situations like my high school are ridiculously rare, and the students that do get to live at places like that live rather charmed lives. I was still seperated for "being different," but considering how weird and out there a lot of people were, it was usually my own choice so that I could spend time with other people who were "different."

...and wow, that is probably rather random and incoherant. I apologize. I saw your post and felt that I needed to say something, because it's a topic that has affected my life in a major way (including the fact that it's made me scared of physical contact unless I completely trust the person or I'm the one in control of it [or both]).

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megpie71
2009-05-08 06:05 pm UTC (link)

Don't worry about the incoherence, and no need to apologise. Writing the actual post took a couple of hours for me, because I had to trim out all the bits where my own incoherence took over. Memories of bullying aren't pleasant at the best of times, and I often feel the consequences of bullying are overlooked by society at large. Too often it's written off as "kids being kids", particularly at the upper primary and high school levels, where what it actually resembles is a group of young adults getting away with outright criminal behaviour because they know it will be overlooked or tolerated.

In many ways, the popular use of the internet is extremely important in the matrix of dealing with the bullying problem. For one thing, it's a place where the victims of bullying can speak out and let their side of the story be heard, including things like the long-term consequences of bullying (you're not the only person who has suffered long-term effects). For another, it's instructive in showing the way bullying behaviours aren't just "kids being kids" - they're humans being humans, and they crop up in any circumstance where the bully thinks they can get away with it (flaming, trolling, cyber-stalking, cyber-harassment etc) no matter what the age of the bully might be. It offers a forum for bullying behaviours which is much broader than most previous fora, and thus brings bullying behaviours to a much wider audience, many of whom are well equipped to name and shame it for what it is. It raises the awareness of how bullying works in a social sense (effectively it's about locking people out of the social matrix of a culture, making them non-persons, and if possible completely destroying them). It also makes it possible for people to look at bullying on a global scale, and point out things about the culture of bullying which is endemic to so many Western cultural processes.

When I can say something about a culture of bullying in a school in New South Wales, referring to my experience of the culture of bullying in a school in Western Australia some twenty years earlier, and get empathetic responses from people who went to schools in the United States of America and underwent the culture of bullying there, it's a sign that schoolyard bullying is bigger than just "kids being kids".

I'm hopeful that in the long term, we're standing at the door to a new epoch, one where bully-style behaviour is regarded as a social solecism of the greatest degree; where it's treated as being the crime it is. I'm hopeful that the sort of consciousness-raising we're doing here, where we're realising just how widespread bullying behaviour is, and just how much it *did* hurt us as kids and is still hurting us as adults, will be the beginning of something better for the kids of the future.

The avalanche has started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote.

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	raisedbymoogles 2009-05-08 03:33 pm UTC (link)
	Ah, memories. (Reply to this)

aikonamika
2009-06-09 03:40 pm UTC (link)

My dad just sent me this article from the NY Times Health section, and I immediately remembered this post and thought you'd like to read it.

From The New York Times:

18 AND UNDER: At Last, Facing Down Bullies (and Their Enablers)
By PERRI KLASS, M.D.

Doctors, parents, schools, children — everyone has a stake when bullies are involved....

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/09/health/09klas.html

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