The anthropologist danah boyd points out a problem with some well-meaning efforts to prevent bullying:
Bill Watterson
I attend conferences and hear from parents and journalists who are talking about the bullying pandemic. And then I talk with teenagers about their social dramas, producing the interactions that adults identify as bullying. I hear from well-meaning adults about how they want to create interventions to help teenagers with bullying. And then I hear teens complain about the assemblies and messaging that they're forced to listen to that don't even begin to resonate with them. Whenever I talk to folks about bullying, I'm forced to confront the fact that adults and teens are talking past one another….
When I first started interviewing teenagers about bullying, they would dismiss my questions. "Bullying is so middle/elementary school," they'd say. "There's no bullying problem at my school," they'd say. And then, as our interview would continue, I'd hear about all sorts of interactions that sounded like bullying. I quickly realized that we were speaking different languages. They'd be talking about "starting drama" or "getting into fights" or "getting into my business" or "being mean." They didn't see rumors or gossip as bullying, regardless of whether or not it happened online. And girls didn't see fighting over boys or ostracizing one another because of boys as bullying. They didn't even see producing fight videos as bullying.
Part of the problem, boyd adds, is that a lot of "bullying" is mutual. Many times "one person thinks that they're not at fault and that they're simply a victim of bullying. But those who are engaged in the bullying see it entirely differently. They blame the person and see what they're doing as retaliation. None of this is communicated, of course, so things can quickly spiral out of control without anyone really knowing where it all began." Obviously this isn't the only sort of bullying that goes on, but it's common, and the current campaign misses it entirely.
boyd doesn't offer any suggestions as to what would diminish bullying. I don't have any proposals either, though I suspect that the culture of student-on-student abuse is baked into the very structure of many schools. I do feel fairly confident that the problem hasn't been invented that a student assembly can solve. Unless the problem is no more complicated than "How many kids can we fit into this gymnasium?"
Update: Several commenters are taking the kids' side in the dueling definitions. That's fine -- I don't want to get hung up on semantics -- but it also underlines the takeaway lesson of boyd's post: the disconnect between those student assemblies and the students' lives.
Once you've identified that communication gap, where do you go from there? Commenter "minor miner mimer" writes:
Learning to cope is a critical part of adolescence. Obviously, schools should prevent violence and property damage and punishment should be meted out when appropriate, but kids, like adults, will figure most things by themselves.
I agree. Solutions and survival strategies are far more likely to emerge from the students themselves than to be handed down from on high. But that hardly means that grown-ups -- particularly parents -- shouldn't pay attention to what the kids are doing, reinforce the good ideas, and dole out advice when it's appropriate.
And maybe adults should think about the ways they might be piling on the problems they say they want to diminish. Cliquishness, status hierarchies, and the like tend to be more intense at schools than in less collectivist settings. In a better world, administrators would spend more time thinking about why that might be so and less time grandstanding at feel-good assemblies.
