I confess to struggling with writing this week’s blog entry
on cyberbullying because I have such conflicting thoughts about bullying… and I’m
pretty sure that some people won’t like them.
Let me preface my comments by saying that I think bullying
is real, and it is a problem.
As
Faucher, Cassidy, & Jackson (2015) note in their overview of the research
on bullying in K-12 schools, higher education, and the workplace, there is
around a 30% prevalence rate for bullying behavior across sectors.
And the impact of bullying is substantial,
ranging from “physical and mental health impacts, as well as academic and
professional impacts stemming from absenteeism, concentration problems,
relational issues, and attitudinal changes” (Faucher, Cassidy, & Jackson,
2015, p. 118).
I experienced workplace bullying when I was 15. Each of my children has undergone a season of
bullying at the hands of a peer, my son in preschool and my daughter in 7th
grade. My daughter’s experience involved
some limited cyberbullying. I know firsthand
that it is real and that it has real consequences.
As an aside, Faucher, Cassidy, & Jackson (2015) note the
difficulty in distinguishing and differentiating behaviors between traditional
bullying and cyberbullying.
I do not
distinguish between them other than to note that, in my view, cyberbullying
denotes an expanded
arena for harassment from in-person-based harassment
at a specific location or locations (like school or the office) to ubiquitous
harassment everywhere a person goes thanks to the ready availability of digital
communication devices and the ubiquity of social media platforms in our lives.
Otherwise, I think bullying – in-person or cyber
– is correctly identified as “
repeated aggressive behaviors that are
intended to cause
harm to a victim with relatively less
power to
defend themselves” (Faucher, Cassidy, & Jackson, 2015, p. 112).
What this definition means, however, is that there are a lot
of behaviors that are not nice that are also not bullying. And here is where my thoughts often differ
from the mainstream in supporting popular anti-bullying/cyberbullying
campaigns. I think it is dangerous to
conflate incivility with bullying. Just
because someone is mean to you doesn’t mean they are a bully. They may simply be a person who doesn’t like
you (or doesn’t want to be around you right that moment), for whatever reason
(or no reason) or is in a snit for reasons entirely unrelated to you.
And I think an emphasis on being nice to everyone creates
the sort of culture we live in now where real, pervasive, systemic issues exist
but people feel comfortable glossing over them (or flat-out denying their existence)
because everyone has always been nice.
(Here’s a
blog post by Rachel Garlinghouse about why being nice
doesn’t mean you aren’t racist, for example.)
I loathe the “you can’t say you can’t play” mantra
of some elementary-level antibullying campaigns.
We do not all have to be nice or kind every
minute of every day to avoid bullying.
We do not all have to like each other or get along.
Pushing these sorts of “just be nice”
campaigns puts too much focus on surface behaviors that easily mask deeper,
systemic campaigns of exclusion of and harm to those who are less powerful.
My dislike of this phrase is grounded not only in my belief
that “just be nice” is not a solution to real bullying but also in my belief
that adults should not deny children their agency to navigate and solve
conflicts without adult intervention. If
we jump in with “you can’t say you can’t play” every time children have a
dispute on the playground, no matter how well-intentioned we are, we are denying
children the opportunity to develop critical skills.
In general, I think antibullying campaigns make adults feel
really good, but I see no evidence that antibullying campaigns reduce bullying.
(Even Faucher, Cassidy, and Jackson (2015)
offer no data on what works, just a summary of solutions proposed by participants
in the surveys summarized.) Anecdotally,
I have witnessed no substantial changes in children’s behavior over the time
period from when I was in middle school to now when I work in a middle school
library (and have middle-school-aged children) other than the expanded arena
for bullying created by easy access to technology and ubiquitous social media
that I note above.
This article by Izzy Kalman for Psychology Today
pretty much sums up my thoughts, and I also connect with these comments byChristopher Emdin, someone I immensely respect and whose book For White
Folks Who Teach in the Hood... and the Rest of Y'all Too: Reality Pedagogy and
Urban Education played a key role in my application to graduate school. While awareness is great, punishing
perpetrators and encouraging reporting and bystander action on behalf of the
bullied are ineffective or, worse, counterproductive (Kalman, 2018; Emdin, 2011). (I’ll note that a study in Finland indicated
that bystander intervention training showed some promise (Wolpert, 2016), but
Finland is a much smaller and far more homogeneous country than is the United States
(Central Intelligence Agency, 2020) so it will be interesting to see if the
same results occur here.)
So, do I think we should just throw kids to the bullying/cyberbullying
wolves and let them fend for themselves?
No.
* I think children cannot solve
bullying by themselves.
* I think adults cannot solve
bullying for children (or, frankly, for themselves, given the workplace stats).
What can we do? I
really think that the answer lies in a cultural shift, which no antibullying
campaign alone is going to solve. To
help bringing about that shift, I propose:
- Specifically defining what we mean by bullying
and cyberbullying. Drop the “be nice” mantra
and focus on PERSISTENT, HARMFUL, behaviors that reflect and/or perpetuate a
POWER IMBALANCE. Acknowledge that
technology broadens the scope of bullying from the traditional areas of school by
allowing the bully’s behaviors to follow the bullied anywhere. Specifically define what is permitted and what
is not. As Faucher, Cassidy, & Jackson (2015) encourage, creating policies
that “set the standard for behavior and actions,” that are clearly worded, clearly
communicated, and transparently enforced.
- BUT, as Kalman (2018) and Emdin (2011)
encourage, at least in the school setting, let’s focus on enforcement
mechanisms that improve the lives of both the bullied AND the bully. Speaking solely for the educational
environment in which I work (because I’m not sure that adult behavior is so
easily modifiable or that firing is an inappropriate consequence for bullying
by an adult), bullies do not arise in a vacuum and suspending them or expelling
them does not improve their lives and it may worsen their attacks on the bullied
child. Teaching bullies to do better may
improve their own lives as well as the lives of those they bully. Even with cyberbullying, restitution and
remediation may be a better answer than punitive action.
- Keeping it real.
As adults, we have got to acknowledge that antibullying campaigns that
make us feel good do not seem to make a difference for our students. Kids are not going to report bullying simply
because we ask them to do so because the risk of retaliation and escalation is
real. Punitive measures just make the lives
of everyone, even the bullies, worse.
And, despite all the amazing videos that schools pull together (check
out a sampling from the Cyberbullying Research Center here), sometimes the
shiny, successful kids who make those videos so impressive are also the ones
dishing out the pain to their peers because they are on top of the social power
pyramid in school (Wolpert, 2016). We
need to recognize that the kids adults are often inclined to like most are also
the kids who often have the power positions in schools and can wield that power
in nasty ways.
- Embedding education about our real
responsibilities to others (not just “be nice”) in all that we do. As Faucher, Cassidy, and Jackson (2015) note,
we have to “set the balance between the tensions between individual rights such
as freedom of expression and security of the person” as well as operationalize “broader
based policy values such as care and support” (p. 119). Part of this may be engaging in the types of
digital citizenship curricula suggested by Orech (2012) (though I note that the
example behaviors in the sidebar to the article are ones that I would call
uncivil but not bullying) and promoting learning during events like Digital Citizenship Week (going on now!) and Media Literacy Week (happening next week!). Part of it is modeling through our own
behaviors. How we treat others matters,
and we need to show the same care and attention for students who may be marginalized
and difficult as we do for the shiny, successful students who are easy to like. A very big part of it – and one that creates
a key opportunity for those of us in the library – is creating safe spaces for
all students to find refuge, to explore and learn, and to be themselves within
a challenging world (Elmborg, 2011).
This is what I have taken on as my personal challenge each day in the
library.
References
Central Intelligence
Agency. (2020, October 9). The World Factbook: Europe: Finland. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/fi.html
Common Sense Media. (2020). Digital citizenship week. https://www.commonsense.org/education/digital-citizenship-week
Cyberbullying
Research Center. (n.d.). Cyberbullying videos to use in presentations. https://cyberbullying.org/videos
Elmborg, J. K. (2011).
Libraries as the spaces between us: Recognizing and valuing the third space. Reference & User Services Quarterly,
50(4), 338-50. https://doi.org/10.5860.rusq.50n4.338
Emdin, C. (2011,
December 18). 5 reasons why current anti-bullying initiatives don’t work. HuffPost.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/5-reasons-why-antibullyin_b_1017810
Faucher, C.,
Cassidy, W., and Jackson, M. (2015). From the sandbox to the inbox: Comparing the
acts, impacts, and solutions of bullying in K-12, higher education, and the
workplace. Journal of Education and Training Studies, 3(6), 111-125.
DOI:10.11114/jets.v3i5.1033
Garlinghouse, R.
(2020, October 5). Being nice to people of color doesn’t mean you’re
anti-racist. ScaryMommy. https://www.scarymommy.com/being-nice-people-of-color-doesnt-mean-anti-racist/
Kalman, I. (2018,
October 24). If your anti-bullying program isn’t working, here’s why. Psychology
Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/resilience-bullying/201810/if-your-anti-bullying-program-isnt-working-heres-why
National Association for Media Literacy Education. (2020). Media Literacy Week 2020. https://medialiteracyweek.us/
Orech, J. (2012).
How it’s done: Incorporating digital citizenship into your everyday curriculum.
Tech & Learning, 33(1), 16-18.
Wolpert, S.
(2016, February 3). Successful anti-bullying campaign identified by UCLA.
University of California. https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/successful-anti-bullying-program-found-ucla
Zorgamazoo by Robert Paul Weston
