As You Like It: Confronting the Bullies

Last week my class discussed the new anti-bullying law. Some of my students had kids who were enduring bullying hell; others had experienced it themselves. We came to the sad conclusion that at some time everyone has found themselves in the clutches of a bully. They agreed that the experience changed the way they felt about themselves. I had expected that conclusion. What I hadn’t expected was the epiphany.

We had been talking about the suicide of South Hadley teenager Phoebe Prince and what we thought her teachers and parents could have done to help her. We discussed how she must have felt — terrified, helpless, wondering why she had been chosen. As I listened to my students I suddenly flashed back to sixth grade when I woke up every morning dreading school. I’ve never suppressed that year and have spoken of it often. But it was only at that moment that I suddenly understood that I, too, had been bullied. All that year I too had wondered, “Why me?”

I had led a normal 9-year-old life in fifth grade. But sixth grade was a strange new country. Suddenly I was the odd one out. Suddenly I didn’t fit. Suddenly I was the one who everyone talked about behind their backs. They called me a snob — the ultimate sixth grade put-down — and wanted nothing to do with me. And the strange part was that the leader of this group was a former friend, Francine. None of it made sense. But then bullying rarely makes sense.

I remember the slam-book that was passed around at the end of that year. Someone bought a notebook, wrote everyone’s name on separate pages, then instructed us to write what we thought of our classmates. I remember opening it to my name and seeing a page full of slurs and put-downs. All except one line — my friend Doreen’s. She had written only good things. I don’t know why she made the defiant decision to remain my friend. Her loyalty saved me that year.

I graduated and went on to Winthrop Junior High School. No one in that seventh grade class knew me. I became one of the most popular kids in my class that year, but I never could believe it. I would wake up each morning with a sense of dread only to remember that school was now safe. I was always nervous that the kids would turn on me at any moment. I’ve held onto those dreadful memories for 50 years, yet I never understood that I had been bullied. Even worse is the fact that I’ve learned that even after years of anti-bullying programming in the schools, the problem not only persists but grows. I wonder if the new anti-bullying law will even help since it is already being challenged constitutionally.

Last Sunday the Boston Globe ran a series of articles about education. One of the pieces by Neil Swidey described the dismal ineffectiveness of years of anti-bullying programs.

None of the current anti-bullying programs have been successful in reducing actual bullying among American students in any meaningful way. Researchers from the University of Oregon, led by Kenneth Merrell, conducted a meta-analysis that examined the effectiveness of bullying intervention programs in the United States and Europe across a 25-year period. Their results could hardly have been more depressing. While they found that some programs produced modest improvements in students’ attitudes about bullying and in their feelings of social competence, they found none that demonstrated a significant reduction in bullying behavior. In fact, the researchers found that “the average teacher actually reported more bullying after intervention than before.”

Bullying may not be new, but technology has exacerbated the issue and made it more dangerous.

A generation ago, a seventh-grade girl might have dreaded walking into school, convinced that all of her classmates would have instantly heard about some embarrassment she had suffered. That was adolescent paranoia at work. Today her paranoia is justified. By the time she steps off the bus, everyone has been able to read the embarrassing details on somebody’s Facebook wall. Yet most bullying prevention programs are based on research and thinking formulated during the era before the Internet, says Elizabeth Englander, who directs the Massachusetts Aggression Reduction Center in Bridgewater.

Though we have seen that group programs and whole-school assemblies are failures, there is a ray of hope. Research has shown that one way of stopping bullies is to pay attention to their sidekicks, the friends who give them power, and the bystanders who say nothing fearing that they might be the next victim if they speak up.

When kids around the bully intervene, the bullying is much more likely to stop. So the real goal must be to boost those willingness-to-intervene levels among students. Doing it well would require a school staff acutely attuned to the social landscape in its corridors and willing to confront bullying head-on, with a focus on the ring of students most closely orbiting the bully.

You can’t do a few assemblies and workshops and solve the problem. It requires unceasing attention and a willingness of both adults and kids to intervene. It requires that every teacher make every student their responsibility. It means that no one can leave anyone at the less-than-tender mercies of those who are bigger or more aggressive. Careful attention must be paid or we are all bullies in the end.

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Posted by Joan Florek Schottenfeld on May 13 2010. Filed under As You Like It, Opinion. Both comments and pings are currently closed.