I didn’t mean to imply that it wasn’t a bad thing. My point is that the standard discussion seems to be about detecting bullies, as if they were a type different than other people. Even when the similarity of bullying to regular behavior is acknowledged, I have heard appeals to magical categories along the lines of “how can we distinguish regular behavior from bullying”, as if they were different in kind.
The flawed question of asking how to detect bullies prevents people from having to admit that their own normal children may contribute to social problems, as does pretending that normal social grouping is perfectly fine, zero percent bad, and unrelated to bullying.
It’s also an anti-consequentialist focus on behavior rather than its effects.
I think the current debate around bullying is designed to make participants feel self-righteous and as if they were doing something, but not asking the right questions and not able to trade the benefits and lack of costs to the participants for benefits for children.
Bullying is an act of repeated aggressive behavior in order to intentionally hurt another person, physically or mentally. Bullying is characterized by an individual behaving in a certain way to gain power over another person.[14]
Norwegian researcher Dan Olweus defines bullying as when a person is
“exposed, repeatedly and over time, to negative actions on the part of one or more other persons.” He defines negative action as “when a person intentionally inflicts injury or discomfort upon another person, through physical contact, through words or in other ways”.[15]
and
What is Bullying?
Bullying is a widespread and serious problem that can happen anywhere. It is not a phase children have to go through, it is not “just messing around”, and it is not something to grow out of. Bullying can cause serious and lasting harm.
Although definitions of bullying vary, most agree that bullying involves:
Imbalance of Power: people who bully use their power to control or harm and the people being bullied may have a hard time defending themselves
Intent to Cause Harm: actions done by accident are not bullying; the person bullying has a goal to cause harm
Repetition: incidents of bullying happen to the same the person over and over by the same person or group
Types of Bullying
Bullying can take many forms. Examples include:
Verbal: name-calling, teasing
Social:spreading rumors, leaving people out on purpose, breaking up friendships
Physical: hitting, punching, shoving
Cyberbullying: using the Internet, mobile phones or other digital technologies to harm others
An act of bullying may fit into more than one of these groups.
I think power struggles and subgroup formation are part of a normal social dynamic, and these things have negative consequences in a normal social dynamic. I think society has only noticed the most harmful such behavior and is overreacting to the worst behavior and underreacting to most bad behavior. The best social dynamic would still have people getting emotionally hurt as described above, though far less often and intensely.
That’s an interesting angle, but I think the worst dominance-establishing behavior does enough damage that trying to snip that tail off the bell curve could be worth the trouble. Moving the center of the bell curve towards decency is also a worthy project, but perhaps more difficult.
the worst dominance-establishing behavior does enough damage that trying to snip that tail off the bell curve could be worth the trouble.
That’s not how the project is perceived by people involved in it, at least that’s what I presume granted the media they emanate. They don’t talk about, and I am guessing they don’t think about, what causes normal dominance behavior to progress into the most affecting kind, and the focus is on getting normal people to report rather than change their social behavior.
Quoting the first three paragraphs of the front page NYT article from August 30, which I didn’t see when I wrote anything above:
Under a new state law in New Jersey, lunch-line bullies in the East Hanover schools can be reported to the police by their classmates this fall through anonymous tips to the Crimestoppers hot line.
In Elizabeth, children, including kindergartners, will spend six class periods learning, among other things, the difference between telling and tattling.
And at North Hunterdon High School, students will be told that there is no such thing as an innocent bystander when it comes to bullying: if they see it, they have a responsibility to try to stop it.
So the focus seems to be convincing normal people to report, rather than suggesting that they are doing anything at all wrong or that they might, by increasing the severity of normal behavior they are already doing, become targets under the new law. There is no push for introspection nor for considering the feelings of others, the worst people are asked to consider of themselves is that they had not been reporting the bad behavior of others often enough—a small sin.
Does anyone have a guess as to when the first article about the use of this law (taking effect September 1) to bully someone will be written?
Delusional descriptions of a problem generally can’t be justified by claims that the description is targeted at the worst behavior or designed to get the most return out of a small investment because an accurate picture of reality is usually the first step to implementing any strategy well, regardless of its resources and scope.
It looks as though I was thinking about anti-bullying programs the way I think they ought to be done, and you had the specific example in mind of how current anti-bullying programs are being described..
I’ve read an account of a school—Great Walstead, a British boarding school in the 60s—which really didn’t have bullying. The head of the school wanted his students to do well, and hated bullying—it wasn’t a pasted-on anti-bullying program. (This is from Frank Schaeffer’s Crazy for God, a memoir which is mostly about growing up in a family which was at the top of the early Religious Right—the description of the boarding school is a minor episode.)
The fascinating thing is that high quality only comes from cluefulness at the top of the hierarchy, and it’s hard to transmit clues.
It seems to me that the anti-bullying programs you describe are an effort to mechanize a process which requires consciousness. Even so, they may be of some use if they limit overt violence. One of the things which is hard on victims is for them to be injured publicly, and for everyone to behave as though it doesn’t matter.
An account from fiction of consciousness-based top-down anti-bullying: One student starts calling another “Stinky”, and an upperclassman shuts it down by saying “nicknames should be endurable”. (Sorry, cite forgotten.)
I don’t think bullying is qualitatively different from normal social interaction, merely quantitatively different.
Sometimes quantity has a quality all its own.
I didn’t mean to imply that it wasn’t a bad thing. My point is that the standard discussion seems to be about detecting bullies, as if they were a type different than other people. Even when the similarity of bullying to regular behavior is acknowledged, I have heard appeals to magical categories along the lines of “how can we distinguish regular behavior from bullying”, as if they were different in kind.
The flawed question of asking how to detect bullies prevents people from having to admit that their own normal children may contribute to social problems, as does pretending that normal social grouping is perfectly fine, zero percent bad, and unrelated to bullying.
It’s also an anti-consequentialist focus on behavior rather than its effects.
I think the current debate around bullying is designed to make participants feel self-righteous and as if they were doing something, but not asking the right questions and not able to trade the benefits and lack of costs to the participants for benefits for children.
Could you expand on your idea that there’s no well-defined difference between bullying and normal social behavior?
Definitions from wikipedia and http://www.stopbullying.gov, with emphasis added:
and
I think power struggles and subgroup formation are part of a normal social dynamic, and these things have negative consequences in a normal social dynamic. I think society has only noticed the most harmful such behavior and is overreacting to the worst behavior and underreacting to most bad behavior. The best social dynamic would still have people getting emotionally hurt as described above, though far less often and intensely.
That’s an interesting angle, but I think the worst dominance-establishing behavior does enough damage that trying to snip that tail off the bell curve could be worth the trouble. Moving the center of the bell curve towards decency is also a worthy project, but perhaps more difficult.
That’s not how the project is perceived by people involved in it, at least that’s what I presume granted the media they emanate. They don’t talk about, and I am guessing they don’t think about, what causes normal dominance behavior to progress into the most affecting kind, and the focus is on getting normal people to report rather than change their social behavior.
Quoting the first three paragraphs of the front page NYT article from August 30, which I didn’t see when I wrote anything above:
So the focus seems to be convincing normal people to report, rather than suggesting that they are doing anything at all wrong or that they might, by increasing the severity of normal behavior they are already doing, become targets under the new law. There is no push for introspection nor for considering the feelings of others, the worst people are asked to consider of themselves is that they had not been reporting the bad behavior of others often enough—a small sin.
Does anyone have a guess as to when the first article about the use of this law (taking effect September 1) to bully someone will be written?
Delusional descriptions of a problem generally can’t be justified by claims that the description is targeted at the worst behavior or designed to get the most return out of a small investment because an accurate picture of reality is usually the first step to implementing any strategy well, regardless of its resources and scope.
It looks as though I was thinking about anti-bullying programs the way I think they ought to be done, and you had the specific example in mind of how current anti-bullying programs are being described..
Anti-bullying programs don’t seem to have done a lot of good.
I’ve read an account of a school—Great Walstead, a British boarding school in the 60s—which really didn’t have bullying. The head of the school wanted his students to do well, and hated bullying—it wasn’t a pasted-on anti-bullying program. (This is from Frank Schaeffer’s Crazy for God, a memoir which is mostly about growing up in a family which was at the top of the early Religious Right—the description of the boarding school is a minor episode.)
That all makes sense.
The fascinating thing is that high quality only comes from cluefulness at the top of the hierarchy, and it’s hard to transmit clues.
It seems to me that the anti-bullying programs you describe are an effort to mechanize a process which requires consciousness. Even so, they may be of some use if they limit overt violence. One of the things which is hard on victims is for them to be injured publicly, and for everyone to behave as though it doesn’t matter.
An account from fiction of consciousness-based top-down anti-bullying: One student starts calling another “Stinky”, and an upperclassman shuts it down by saying “nicknames should be endurable”. (Sorry, cite forgotten.)