Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
I Was Bullied … And I’m Better For It
You may have seen images floating around the internet lately from a photographer name Rich Johnson that try to demonstrate the harm that words can cause by visualizing them as physical wounds on the bodies of people. These have quickly become the go-to pictures on articles about bullying, such as this piece on CNN calling for it to be prohibited by law. These visuals hit close to home for me on two fronts. First, I went to high school with Rich and shared an apartment with him in college. Second, I have more firsthand knowledge on the topic of bullying than any human being would care to admit.
People generally fall into one of two camps when the conversation turns to bullying. The first group insists that there is an epidemic, and usually suggest that it requires a legal remedy, while the second doesn’t see verbal abuse as a form of bullying at all.
Though anti-bullying laws strike me as the ultimate example of a blunt instrument being used where a scalpel is needed, there is a tendency on the right to dismiss concerns about verbal bullying out of hand. While the anti-bullying crusade gets a whole lot wrong, the greater point Rich’s project makes about the scars words can leave is spot on.
At our earliest opportunity, we should retire the nursery rhyme of “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” It is a saying as at odds with reality as any in the English language. Arming children with it before sending them off to school is about as useful as sending the army into battle with swim noodles. Any child who finds themselves on the receiving end of systemic harassment will tell you this cliche is manifestly false. Its sole purpose is identifying for a bullied child which adults are not taking their troubles seriously.
I don’t think back fondly on my childhood for numerous reasons, the primary one being a dark cloud that hung over me nearly every day of my life from the ages of 7 to 14. Each day as I boarded the school bus, I hoped and prayed that it would be the day when everyone forgot I was there. In retrospect, it is difficult to tell what it was about me that made me such an easy target. Perhaps the other kids simply smelled fear on me like animals in the jungle. Perhaps I was just socially awkward. Whatever the reason, I was quickly identified as being low in the pecking order, even after I transferred from one school to another.
My average day consisted of being insulted on the bus, insulted in class, and insulted on the playground. This was my life day in and day out for years. There was seldom any common theme to the abuse. I looked wrong, dressed wrong, said something wrong, or did something wrong, and those around me would make me the butt of their jokes. Any specific example I could try to convey would seem petty and insignificant to you, just as it did to my teachers and my mother.
In truth, the specific words are completely irrelevant to how hurtful verbal abuse is, as evidenced by the common use of insults among friends as terms of endearment. Ultimately, verbal bullying tells a child the same thing no matter which words are employed: You are separate; you are lesser; you are not welcome here. Isolation and a sense of devaluation as a human being are the results. This message was hammered home to me by my classmates every day.
At first, I reacted to such harassment with violence. Someone would push me too far and a brawl would ensue. The Catholic school uniform provided handy weapons in such fights, as I quickly discovered that grabbing the other kid’s tie or jacket enabled you to pull them to the pavement quite effectively (The playground at the Catholic school I attended in first and second grade was literally a parking lot). The satisfaction of having stood up for myself was always short-lived however, as school administrators had very little tolerance for such shenanigans.
A call to my mother always followed, which in turn led to talks in her office after she had returned home from work. Explaining that you were being made fun of buys you little sympathy from your mother when the real world difficulties of keeping a roof over your head and putting food on the table occupy almost all of her time and energy. Getting kicked out of school while she was breaking her back to support the family alone was not an option and I was disciplined accordingly. A combination of punishment and guilt for what I was putting her through caused me stop fighting. As you can imagine, this didn’t lead to a reduction in my being bullied.
Her primary piece of advice was to tell a teacher when it was happening, so that they could put a stop to it — a suggestion that caused far more grief than it solved. It turns out that people don’t like it when you tell on them and make you pay for it tenfold rather than backing off. Most of the time, however, teachers and administrators proved themselves unwilling to take any steps to help in the first place. I don’t care to recount the number of times I sat being harassed in an otherwise silent classroom, while the teachers sat at their desks doing nothing about it.
The feeling of powerlessness that comes from being told that you can’t stick up for yourself — especially when no one else is willing to stick up for you either — is maddening. For years, my bus ride home and the first hour or so of my afternoon were occupied by thoughts of suicide. Not merely idle thoughts: I was considering methods. It wasn’t a cry for help, as I didn’t tell anyone. I was past the point of thinking there was anyone willing or able to help. I was just looking for a way out. What prevented me from going through with it is a mystery to me to this day.
The unrelenting nature of the bullying was truly astonishing to behold. You might think that children would eventually tire of it and move onto some other form of amusement. And they might if such abuse were truly driven by their desire to amuse themselves.
If you want to study how not to socialize children, then simply examine nearly any traditional American school. The separation of children by age insures that their primary influences in social behavior will be other children who are equally socially undeveloped. What emerges is a cultural hierarchy similar to that of a clan of hyenas. The most dominant among them abuse those who are lower in the social order, constantly reinforcing their position. Tearing down other children helps to elevate you in the eyes of your peers. Abuse in this culture travels uniformly down the chain. Those at the top are almost never on the receiving end of bullying, and those at the bottom rarely ever dish it out.
The dynamic changes entirely when children are not in school. I had many friends growing up who resided far higher up the chain than I — and we got along great when not in school. Once back in the jungle of the classroom, however, the best I could hope for was that they wouldn’t join others when it came time for my daily verbal beat down. The hope was often in vain.
The nightmare ended my freshmen year in high school. I would love to say that my peers grew up, but that wasn’t the case. What changed was the fracturing of the popularity hierarchy by a combination of mixing age groups across classes, as well as the addition of students who had attended different middle and elementary schools.
Cliques formed in place of the old hierarchy. You found your place among them for rational reasons, such as common interests. It was suddenly irrelevant if student A and B mocked you with their friends, as you were equally likely to mock them among your own group. Anything negative you received from one person was counterbalanced by friends who gave you something positive. For the first time, there were some people’s opinions that mattered to me and others that didn’t. The dark cloud lifted and living became fun again.
I harbored a rather deep resentment for a great many of those classmates for years. Interacting with them always felt strange. They’d be making small talk and all I could think was “You nearly drove me to kill myself and yet here you are, acting like nothing ever happened.”
This changed as I watched many of them develop into adulthood. I was surprised at first to observe that those who had dished out so much abuse in their youth seemed to have little in the way of skills to cope with criticism and insults. They crumbled under even mild disparagement, unsure how to handle it. It wasn’t long before I realized that, in the end, I had gotten the better deal.
I developed a mental toughness that isn’t present in many people I knew growing up. As a result, I am incredibly comfortable in my own skin. I feel no pressure to change any aspect of myself for the purpose of appeasing others, or fitting in with any culture. Meanwhile, I’ve seen friends who I respect put their tail between their legs at the first signs of disapproval from others because they can’t stand the thought of being disliked or insulted. They live for the approval of others. It is one of the saddest things I have ever seen.
Free speech is being challenged on college campuses across the country and you need look no further than this inability to handle criticism as the reason. If you are waiting for the money quote of this piece then here it is: Not enough people are bullied in their youth. As a result, the thick skin that is required for a robust culture of free speech has never formed, and adults in their early twenties run to college administrators demanding action be taken to protect them from harmful speech, much as I ran to teachers to protect me when I was nine years old.
They would benefit from the same lesson I had to learn as a child: Deal with it.
Obviously, there are levels of bullying that have to be addressed. As I mentioned earlier, I was on the brink of suicide for years. In the CNN piece, Mark O’Mara points us to the tragic consequences of severe instances of bullying, which he sees as a justification for government action.
I got involved in the conversation about bullying after a young Central Florida girl, Rebecca Sedwick, leapt to her death from a water tower in an abandoned industrial plant on September 9, 2013. She had been aggressively bullied by other girls. After one of the girls commented about the suicide on Facebook — essentially admitting to the bullying and showing no remorse — Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd arrested her. The charges were soon dropped, however, as bullying is not a crime.
Last year I proposed a bill in Florida that would have defined bullying and made it illegal. A similar bill drafted by Florida state Sen. David Simmons was introduced, but unfortunately died in appropriations. Nonetheless, over the next year I’ll be campaigning for the bill to be reintroduced, and I’ll work to rally support for the bill so we can get a sensible law on the books to protect children who are victims of bullying.
As someone who has lived through the type of hell O’Mara is citing here, reading the story of Rebecca Sedwick reveals that almost none of the adults who looked at this case have even scratched the surface of what she was likely going through. That’s a good indicator that their solutions will fail to address the real problems.
According to Judd, the girl was upset that Rebecca had once dated her current boyfriend and began bullying and harassing her more than a year ago when they were both students at a Florida middle school.
In addition to sending harassing messages over the Internet, the girl physically attacked Rebecca at least once, Judd said. She also recruited the girl’s former best friend — the 12-year-old charged Monday — to bully her, Judd said.
This explanation describes the situation entirely too neatly to actually cover the entire story. Children are not driven to suicide by the abuse of a pair of classmates who won’t leave them alone. They are driven to that point by systemic harassment by numerous people, which is never counterbalanced by positive interactions with any of their other peers. If they want to know who was culpable for her death, there are likely dozens of classmates who contributed to the problem. Arresting those who bully overtly would likely do little more than ensure that all future bullying is done covertly.
If zero-tolerance laws for violence in schools teach us anything, it’s that a one-size-fits-all approach to discipline is doomed to failure. Not all schoolyard insults are bullying, and treating them as such will only lead to an environment where children who are behaving like children find themselves randomly expelled from school for being the one who got caught doing what everyone else does. O’Mara acknowledges this in his piece.
Those who oppose laws against bullying raise valid concerns. We don’t want to outlaw childhood. We don’t want to criminally punish kids for being kids. We don’t want to make it illegal to call people names. Who would judge these things anyway?
The same people who expel kids from school for chewing their Pop-Tart into the shape of a gun. O’Mara’s faith in the common sense of school administrators seems misplaced.
To the extent that real systemic bullying exists, it has to be tackled on an individual level. Teachers have to proactively look for it and stamp it out on their own. It thrives in the dark, when the adults who are nominally supervising aren’t paying attention or don’t care. These aren’t things that can be corrected legislatively.
Rich was always talented, and the images he has created are powerful. They are being used, however, in efforts to push legislation that will do more harm than good, and leave us with the illusion that the problem is being solved. In reality, I fear it will only leave us softer and more prone to claiming the status of victim. I dissent.
Can you name a way of learning to cope with adversity besides coping with adversity?
There’s plenty of adversity in life even without the man-made variety.
The best society would be some unattainable utopia. I merely suggest that unchallenged children turn into unchallenged adults, and there are negative consequences to them and society as a result.
Almost all adversity in the first world is man made.
Let’s end this point of contention on this note.
If a parent or teacher sees bullying, they should put a stop to it, because you are only seeing a fraction of what is actually happening. Your never going to stop all of it, so stop any of it that you can.
But the lessons you should be passing on to your kids as they deal with this type of thing shouldn’t be that they are a helpless victim, who is just powerless in the face of their unfair treatment.
My real problem with bullying laws is that they often seem designed as an excuse to punish kids who won’t comply with politically correct decrees concerning homosexuality, transgenderedness etc. Of course I would not allow my child to torment another child for such reasons (or any reasons) but I worry that, as in other areas of society, anything shy of enthused celebration would be classified as bullying. However, I think parents should keep an eye out for situations like Frank’s. I’d homeschool a kid for a few years if it were that bad.
I’m not sure this is how they’re being designed, but it’s certainly how they’re often used. What percentage of their use that constitutes I have no idea.
That’s not what I argued. Of course one doesn’t really know what adversity feels like until it happens, but we certainly can do the bulk of the work of coping before any adversity ever hits. We identify what’s really important and remind ourselves of it often, we train and discipline ourselves to that end, we build up a store of confidence that can be called upon when needed, we develop faith enough to walk in the valley of shadow yet fear no evil. We can do all of that without being bullied or without hitting the rock bottom of drug addiction or going to war; the thing about hitting rock bottom is that too many people never get up again.
I never suggested that everyone should go through what I went through, or hit rock bottom. But you don’t develop calluses on your hands until they’ve blistered up numerous times from using them.
True, but what I’m arguing is that you can use your hands well without blistering or callouses. Callouses deaden feeling. Is that a desirable end?
Daughter S was bullied verbally, and sometimes physically, on a daily basis from 1st through 8th grades. Our town is small; the kids in the class are mostly the same every year. Her fourth grade teacher was her only ally. Daughter S could put a colored post-it note on her work when it was handed in, and that way Mrs. M would know she needed help. In middle school she was the one who was punished, having her schedule rearranged to remove her from the bully’s presence. The locker room was the worst, because she was pushed around. The teacher was male and could not witness it. She had one friend stick up for her. The biggest problem was the parents of the bullies. They refused to believe their little darlings would do such a thing and thus the school administration could do nothing. And all this with one of the most celebrated anti-bullying programs in the country. Give me a break! She asked to go to boarding school, which we were able to make possible. There her differences were admired and thought really interesting. The other kids may not have quite gotten the horse thing, but “national champion” they could understand. She blossomed and is now a confident, poised college student, treats her mother terribly (she’s still a teenager, after all), and is a great friend to many. Not a day goes by that I do not thank God I was able to extricate her from our local schools. Don’t get me wrong; the students on our get a great education, but if you don’t conform you are in for a difficult time.
I think it’s in the design. That’s based, first of all, on the timing. Why suddenly now are we intensely interested in something that’s happened forever? But secondly, there are often debates about the definition of bullying, and here in Minnesota, the Democrats fought hard for a definition that considered the “bullied” person’s perceptions/feelings (anything that makes for “a hostile environment”), not the “bully’s” intent. Now, I realize that bullying is hard to define. But I think it should be uncontroversial that malicious intent is part of it. If the words and actions in question were not intended to do injury to anyone (either physical or emotional), it wasn’t bullying.
I don’t know why Democrats would want to fight that so hard except because they want to use the legislation to punish good-faith dissenters from their social agenda.
Also, I understand and agree with the point that if we never risk anything then we’ll never gain anything. The thing is that with abuse, even mild abuse, there is no chance of gain. The only options are nil effect or negative effect.
Callouses, like the new windows installed after someone breaks the old ones, are only the silver lining to a situation we would have been better off not experiencing at all.
On the “callouses” question, I think it might be helpful to think in terms of what healthy adults do. That is, a healthy adult can deal with some level of adversity. But it’s possible to get into such an unpleasant social situation (at work, in the neighborhood, in one’s church etc) that it’s worth making a life change to avoid it. Changing jobs, moving, or switching parishes are fairly drastic steps, which you shouldn’t take just to avoid one or two annoying people or because you had a tiff with a friend. But there’s no law of the universe that all horrible social situations should be endured indefinitely. You haven’t made an ironclad commitment to your apartment building. If you’re really miserable, make changes.
For kids too, parents should (if possible) be willing to consider the possibility that their present situation is sufficiently awful to justify a serious change. Switching schools or homeschooling are worth considering (again, if possible) if that prevents your child from feeling that his life is wretched. I appreciate that homeschooling might seem worrisome if part of the problem is that your child has social adjustment issues; taking him out of school won’t help to address those. Still, if things are that awful for him, it’s probably better to stop the bleeding and look for other, more moderate ways of helping your kid develop social skills, with perhaps a goal of going back to school in a few years and hoping things might go better.
If you want a robust culture of free speech, than yes, thick skin is a desirable end. Otherwise you will have large numbers of people running to the government for redress whenever they don’t like what you have to say.
Glad to see switching schools worked for someone. Sure as heck didn’t work for me.
Rachel Lu: My real problem with bullying laws is that they often seem designed as an excuse to punish kids who won’t comply with politically correct decrees concerning homosexuality, transgenderedness etc.
Yes, I have thought the same thing. As much as I dislike the bullying itself, I’m uneasy with the activism against it, too. When it first got to be a noticeable movement, maybe four years ago, I assumed it was entirely about normalizing homosexuality. The public service ads and the celebrities speaking out seemed disproportionately to be dealing with this one aspect.
I’m sure things are different now than in the ’80s, but it very rarely had any sexual overtones to it back then, and I bet that that’s still true today. (Interestingly, two off-and-on friends who picked on me back in elementary school turned out gay after college.) What is different today is that there is a vocal, organized homosexual movement, and they’re jumping on this topic, even if their group is in the minority of kids bullied. Not inherently bad, since I don’t want anybody picked on, but their approach goes too far and tries to normalize immorality.
Bullying was the impetus for the Declaration of Independence, so it ain’t all bad.
We have Freedom of speech. We ain’t guaranteed Freedom from hurt feelings and bad days. I’m one Who’ll be keeping “sticks and stones….” alive.
I just don’t recommend reciting it to children who are going through this. Beyond worthless, and actually counter productive.
Yep but may I add we should encourage the student body to police their own, as did Bob Laing’s cousin in tandem with cheerleaders!
Well, it wasn’t “beyond worthless” or “counter productive” for all the years of My schooling.
My biggest regret from my childhood years was occasionally being, not the bullied, but the bully.
The pudgy kid with the buzzcut. The kid with the wild kinky hair and big glasses that were always crooked and smudged. The kid who always got the lowest test score. The kid who obviously had never been to a dentist. All of these got my snarky attention, and I do recall their hurt and helpless expressions. But I was so self-centered as a 7th and 8th grader that it didn’t faze me. Teasing, to the point of achieving an emotional reaction, was sport.
In my later years, I matured and did much in my chosen career of education to watch over and help these types of kids. I’ve tried, in the grand scheme of things, to set things right. But those whom I persecuted directly– I lost track of them, though the ugliness of my actions surely remain on their hearts and mine.
I would say that it is impossible to eliminate abuse and that therefore even the best society will have some level of abuse which (being the best society) will, at worst, be only moderate.
Words can hurt. It is manifestly true. A child suffering under severe bullying will recognize this saying as being false, and in term determine you don’t take their problem seriously. That is why I call it counter productive. It only further isolates them.
Only if You give an s about that person.
Do you have kids, Jimmy? If you saw someone berating your kid just because it makes them feel good, would you let them continue and tell your kid later that she should just shrug it off? Or would you tell the bully to behave?
Those aren’t the only choices Frank: thick skin or intrusive government. You’re saying that people need to be protected from injury and it will happen either through government proscription or through not caring what people say. Neither sounds particularly robust to me. Sometimes we need to hear and accept unpleasant things; other times it really does cross a serious line (e.g. fraud, defamation, incitement, threats). Both a coddling government and thick skin decrease our ability to identify which is which, where everything crosses a line or nothing does, where genuine exchange is sterile or avoided altogether. Deadened feeling can certainly be handy in some circumstances (the silver lining), but it’s undeniably a loss of important function that usually indicates that damage has been done.
This is a bit of a false middle line of argumentation. I don’t argue in favor of fraud, defamation or threats. Calluses may reduce feeling slightly, but they do little to hamper any fine motor skills. Similarly, your argument that thick skin renders a person unable to distinguish between different levels of harshness in speech doesn’t seem a practical problem to me.
Many people cannot handle even minimally critical or offensive comments. The solution is they toughen up. Describing it as a silver lining, as opposed to a necessary component of a healthy adult seems to under value it significantly.
I’d run for office, win, then propose and have pass My Own “Anti-Bullying” bill making Parents responsible for the actions of Their jackass kids. And start prosecuting.