(Cyber)Bullying Reflections

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 7^th 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:

1. 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.
   
   
2. 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.
   
   
3. 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.
   
   
4. 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