So, this thing with Bullying...

[capri0mni]

There's much talk in our culture, at this particular moment in history about the phenomenon of bullying... And the general, distilled, cultural meme that seems to be coming out of all this talk is:

"Children are, by nature, horrible, and cruel, and they need to have their broken, dysfunctional, compassion modules repaired by adults who know better."

And... that makes me very uncomfortable. Because? Frankly?

The vast majority of all the times in my life that I, personally, have been bullied, especially because of my disability and the difference that engenders (there's a part of my mind that is shouting "EVERY SINGLE TIME!!!" But I'm trying to stay away from extremes), has been at the hands of adults. On the whole, I have consistently (that part of my brain is shouting "ALWAYS!") felt much safer in the company of children, and respected as an actual human being.

And ...

On the one hand, I believe and respect the stories of people who have been bullied and harassed by children. And on the other hand, I want to respect and believe the stories my own memory is telling me about my life... without just dismissing my life experience as some "strange luck."

I sincerely doubt that I was visited by a fairy godmother in the Neonatal Unit of Strong Memorial Hospital and blessed (or cursed) me with a "backwards bully spell," after all.

Also, I think explaining bullying behavior by simplifying it to "Children are horrible little bundles of id and cruelty," is likely to miss the forces in the culture (at the adult level) that encourage bullying, so that the children who are so inclined will learn how it's done...

I've been puzzling my way through some hypotheses on how to reconcile my experiences with those of others... haven't gotten there yet.

But... yeah... that's kind of been circling through my mind, of late. So if you see a bunch of posts about this from me, that's why...

Comments

[paigeturner]

I was horribly bullied, as a child, by children. I'm not going to say that adults didn't allow it or enable it, but...yeah. It was children who made me want to kill myself. It was children who made me cut myself.

That's not to say, of course, that your experiences aren't just as valid. Hey - for me it was other kids; for you it was people who should have been fucking looking out for you.

We don't have to pick between the two, yanno?

[capri0mni]

yanno?

*Nods*

I do... the thing is: I'm trying to work out, in my head, the common denominator in all bullying so I can make sense of my experience as one part of a shared experience with those who were bullied by people their own age and younger.

'Cause Bullying is bullying, regardless of the age of the perpetrators... The thing is, when it's adults (such as teachers or camp administrators) they can disguise their acts until the name "official policy."

[spiralsheep]

the common denominator in all bullying

Human beings.

Specifically, I would speculate, the human beings who (consciously or otherwise) believe they're involved in a zero-sum game with winners and losers (where that "game" has prizes of social advantage).

[capri0mni]

Yeah... Kind of hard to stop people from being human beings (sometimes, I'm with Diogenes, and wish people could be dogs instead, but..).

Now, even though I believe that people bully, and not just children, I also think maybe that the way our schools are organized inadvertently encourage bullying behavior -- like sticking mold in a Petri dish under a heat lamp (which is why I get so frustrated by what I've glimpsed of anti-bullying programs in schools).

And yeah, I think the zero-sum game mentality is a big part of that.

[pebblerocker]

I was annoyed by a couple of articles I read which were trying to shame adults into not being jerks to each other by positioning that behaviour as an essential part of children's behaviour but something adults should stop doing when they grow up.

It's not my experience that all children are like that and it's incredibly offensive to suggest that they are, or that it's a built-in part of child personalities. As a child I knew some horrible children and a lot of wonderful ones, and I observed that children from a low-peer-pressure environment, those who formed strong relationships with people of all ages, tended to be the nice ones, and the children who were most immersed in single-age-group culture tended to want to push their power politics on anyone they met.

Please do post your further musings, I'm interested in the subject!

[capri0mni]

by positioning [bullying] as an essential part of children's behavior but something adults should stop doing when they grow up.

*nod* And not just should as "ought to do" but should as "probably will do, in the natural course of things" (right? as in: "Based on the weather report, it should rain some time in the next few days.[?]").

Yeah... from what I've experienced, some people are bullies, and some people (I think most, even) are not. It's not that children grow out of being bullies, when they're adults, but they just grow into the social code behavior that makes their bullying more subtle.

And yes, bullying may be most intense during childhood and adolescence, and when the victims grow to adulthood, they find themselves free from that, and have adult associates who wouldn't come close to the level of cruelty as can be practiced on the proverbial "playground."

However, I think the latter phenomenon isn't due to adults being generally nicer than children, as a whole, but the former victims, which are now adults, have more freedom to choose their social group, and can (usually) find ways to weed out the bullies from their social circle.

--- that was clumsily written...

I observed that children ... who formed strong relationships with people of all ages, tended to be the nice ones, and the children who were most immersed in single-age-group culture tended to want to push their power politics on anyone they met.

Interesting! The summer camp administrator who was my biggest bully (who kicked me out of camp because I skipped a therapy lesson she had scheduled for me -- and it was an arts camp, not a therapy camp), wrote a letter to my mother with a long list of things my mother must make me do so I grow into an acceptable person... including forbidding me from interacting with younger children, and older adults, and should force me to interact only with teens my age...

Yeah... Mother saw so much red at that, it was tipping toward purple...

[jesse_the_k]

Boo administrator, Yay mom. Yipes that sounds particularly horrifying; admin had power over you, and (in my mind) should therefore ethically think harder before issuing ukases like that list.

[capri0mni]

Oh, believe me... when I my energy levels and mood is strong enough, that whole tragic saga will be a post on its own...

[pebblerocker]

And not just should as "ought to do" but should as "probably will do, in the natural course of things"

The slant of the article I'm thinking of (can I find a link? I can!) was that most people probably will grow out of being children and turn into actual human beings, but there are a subgroup who keep behaving like horrible, cruel eight-year-olds [that set containing all eight-year-olds] and ought to stop. (Because they're making the community look bad. That article was misguided in several ways.)

Your camp administrator, wow. I've had authorities in my life who wanted to push the same sort of idea on me: that nobody can grow into a normal, well-adjusted member of adult society unless they spend their entire childhood rigidly segregated into groups of only those who were born in the same calendar yeear, interacting with nobody else except a few scarce adults whom they are encouraged to view as adversaries. After 12 or more years in that system, they will be perfectly prepared to interact with wider society, a result which no other upbringing can achieve!

Possible definition of bullying: that behaviour towards others resulting from a great fear and loathing of human variation.

[capri0mni]

Possible definition of bullying: that behaviour towards others resulting from a great fear and loathing of human variation.

Well, that certainly points to clarifying the motivation... But I also think a discussion of the actual behavior should be part of the solution (some people "bullying" only means physically beating someone up, for example).

[spiralsheep]

I observed that children from a low-peer-pressure environment, those who formed strong relationships with people of all ages, tended to be the nice ones, and the children who were most immersed in single-age-group culture tended to want to push their power politics on anyone they met.

Interesting.

Anecdata: the worst bully in my class at primary school (5-11ish) was a girl who, I discovered as we went along, was exactly like her mother (a bigot who hated and feared anyone even marginally different from her, presumably because of a deep-seated insecure need to be In The Right and therefore also Judge, Jury, And Executioner at all times). Maybe, taking your point into account, if my peer'd had a wider range of adult role models....

[lilysea]

a) This was interesting, thank you. ^_^

b) This popped up on my feed, just after your post... must be fate.

http://davehingsburger.blogspot.com.au/2012/10/jennifer-livingston-bullies-beware.html

"Jennifer Livingston: Bullies Beware

I received a number of emails each sending me a video link, I followed the links and watched this moment, which occurred on television and I'm not kind of in love with the courage and forthright way that Jennifer Livingstone dealt with what happened to her. Please watch and comment..."

[capri0mni]

Heh. I already subscribe to "Rolling around in my head" -- I bet this entry will be at the top of my subscription page after I post this reply. ;-)

(I started thinking about this entry after Dave's blog post a couple days ago, about being bullied by school children in an art gallery)...

[jesse_the_k]

That post of Dave's was particularly illuminating, because I've never heard about the reality that children can bully adults (without physical damage). But as a visibly different person, oh it's certainly part of my reality.

[capri0mni]

*nod*

And there was an interesting insight in his follow-up post "A teacher teaches," when it was revealed: that everyone agrees that bullying is bad, but almost nobody agrees what bullying is.

I didn't reply to that post, because, frankly, it hurt too much. As I said, most of my remembered experience with bullying is that it came from adults, whereas children have usually made me feel at home. So to see children described as scary and cruel as a category kind of felt like an attack on "my tribe."

Now, I've been stared at and pointed at by very young children, but I don't consider that bullying ... because they're just expressing curiosity about something they've never seen before. However, when (perhaps) well-meaning adults yell at (and in one case actually spanking) the children in public for pointing and staring, that I do consider bullying, because it telegraphs the message that disabled people must be treated as invisible.

Again, it all comes back to definitions...

[megaptera]

Yeah, see... it's not children who are horrible little bundles of id and cruelty, it's humans. IF they aren't set on a different path early enough. Okay, some of them can be set on that path later, but it usually takes something like seeing the aftermath of their destruction, i.e. someone who has been ruined or killed by their bullying.

I wish I could meet some of them as adults and see what they're like now. I can't bring myself to think the sugary thought that they've learned the error of their ways and regret what they did to me and that other kid whose name I didn't even know and blah blah. The alternative just seems more plausible, you know?

Anyways. Adult bullying is easier to overlook as 'normal' behaviour, a lot of the time. When kids beat each other up or incessantly bombard each other with sexual harassment, those are things that would actually be illegal if they were adults. So adults recognize it when they see it (if they don't turn a blind eye). For adults to stop adult bullying? They'd have to take a good long hard look at their own behaviour, rather than just pointing fingers at the strange, alien children whose minds are still malleable and who can be saved from their own sins.

I'm sure plenty of adults who would try to discourage their own children from beating up other kids are still themselves clique leaders/followers, manipulative control freaks, and emotional poisoners at work. They just refuse to see what it is.

I got to replying to this, and it got long enough to justify being its own entry.

[capri0mni]

... it's not children who are horrible little bundles of id and cruelty, it's humans. IF they aren't set on a different path early enough.

I think where you and I disagree (if we really disagree at all), is that I believe bullying is the learned behavior, and kindness and tolerance are the default.

They'd have to take a good long hard look at their own behaviour, rather than just pointing fingers at the strange, alien children whose minds are still malleable and who can be saved from their own sins.

Which is why I get so frustrated with the current run of anti-bullying campaigns I've seen. The kids who are bullies have learned that it's a successful technique for creating a personal comfort zone from what they've seen modeled in their own homes 23/7.

And then, the authorities think sitting them down and lecturing them for one hour a week is enough to teach them something different (shaming the bullies for shaming other kids).

The worst example of this cultural disconnect that I've seen was a pair of LiveJournal ads I saw together in a sidebar at dot_gimp_snark: one ad was for a bully-survivor support group community, the other, right below it, was for LJ's ONTD! communities (where sharing ugly gossip about celebrities was encouraged); the hypocrisy in that juxtaposition made me a little sick to my stomach.

--
I originally started this reply with what I thought would be a quick possible explanation of my feelings about who the bullies really are, and why its backwards from the dominant cultural meme. When it was creeping toward three hundred words, and looked like it could go on a good bit more, I decided it really needed to be its own post.