Mean Girls, Bully Boys: Why Can't We All Just Get Along?

Most People Know What Bullying's Like

Teens might not know this, but most adults can remember a time where they were ridiculed, picked on or ostracized — or when they did this to someone else — or watched silently as it was done to someone else.

That horrible feeling as a flush rises until your whole face feels like it was set afire … the sick sensation in the pit of your stomach when you realize people are making fun of you behind your back … the twisted thrill of watching someone squirm from embarrassment, accompanied by a guilty tweak that your mother taught you better …

... The mute helplessness of not having the guts to intervene while someone else’s self-esteem is squashed like a bug … the deadened conscience as empathy takes a beating along with the victim

This is the emotional collateral damage from bullying, one of the worst problems plaguing American teens — and experts say parents and teachers need to remember what it was like and take it seriously.

In 2006, a spat over a soda escalated to a bench-clearing cafeteria fight that sent a dozen McKinney High School girls to jail. This was a spectacular occurrence framing the kind of emotions that can run high among young people. However, the most damaging incidences of violence happen every day in every school in the form of bullying.

A School Where Something's Being Done About Bullying

At Barbara Bush Middle School in the Carrollton-Farmers Branch school district, antibullying is more than a program — it’s an attitude.

Teachers and students became stars on the Dr. Phil show, when, as part of a middle-school study the TV-advice guru did, his son Jay McGraw spent the day at the school and did a seminar on bullying and its effects on kids who were bullied and on those who do the bullying.

“The Phil McGraw organization wrote a nonbullying pledge, and it hangs proudly in our front hallway,” says Principal Lynda Opitz, who is careful not to describe antibullying as a “program.” “It has to become a philosophy and it has to be the culture of your building. We do a lot of talking with our staff about what bullying looks like and what it sounds like. We ask our staff to take bullying seriously. We make an effort to … make a bigger presence in the areas where kids hang out.”

Adjusting supervision practices means the school has cut down on times when students are sent somewhere there are no adults. Whole classrooms of students are now escorted down to the cafeteria for lunch.

“We’ve cut down on the times kids have an opportunity to be blatant. They don’t act like that in front of grown-ups, they only do it to kids when there’s no one around, when ‘there’s no one in the hallway with me so I can talk to you however I want to,’” Opitz says.

As the school year opens, incoming students get a legal seminar on bullying. “We talk to them very frankly about it, not only from the viewpoint that it’s not nice and people don’t like it — but it’s against the law,” she says. “We walk them very carefully through the district code of conduct book section on harassment, [and explain] that it’s not just sexual, it’s verbal and physical.”

“It’s something we have zero tolerance for. We go about the business of investigating seriously when kids report bullying. Normally, when kids are confronted, they will apologize and drop it. But when we deal with the same child repeatedly, we up the consequences. After we have tried to mediate, we work with the principal and the parents. We will bring in the child, the parent, the victim and the other parents. It’s really tough to sit across a table and tell a victim’s mom, ‘Here’s what I’ve been doing to your child.’”

Opitz says she hasn’t had to take the intervention to the next step, which would be sending the bully home in expulsion — although she would do it if necessary, because “we can’t have a situation where a kid feels unsafe.”

“It’s not a program,” she stresses again. “It’s about a foundation and a philosophy and it’s about everyday work. Bullying is part of the social misinteraction that occurs among kids at this age, and if we ever lose our vigilance, it will crop up again.”

Among the many reasons for bullying, Opitz sees middle school as a time when a larger student body and a “bigger pond” gives kids a greater sense of autonomy. The kids aren’t under the watchful eye of just one teacher all day, with someone bigger and stronger to put a stop to misbehavior.

“They’re beginning to flex some of their social interaction muscles — some politely, some not. They’re beginning to play with power, and bullying is the ultimate abuse of power,” she says. “If you don’t cultivate an atmosphere where it’s not okay, then pretty soon it’s just okay to treat people that way.”

Stephanie, 14, is a talented teen. She is a soprano in the choir, plays violin in symphonic orchestra and piano, and she plans on being a voice major with a minor in piano in college.

Stephanie also knows firsthand how painful life can be on the lower rungs of the pecking order. She is an eighth grader at Barbara Bush Middle School and a former bullying victim.

“There’s so much drama between girls,” she says, recalling how miserable school life was when she first transferred from San Antonio. “At first, I felt really alone. At my old school, I was friends with everyone. I moved here and people were singling me out and judging me about everything in the world. There was never anything open, they were just secretive — spreading rumors, not coming up to me face to face and talking about it. I got really down on myself — I was thinking of trying to kill myself and I didn’t feel good about myself.”

Thanks to the prevailing antibullying attitude at school, Inmon was able to face her victimizers. “I went to Ms. Opitz to get it straightened out. After I got to Ms. Opitz, I made good with the girls. I made friends with one of the people and now she’s my ultimate best friend,” she says.

Conner, 13, is also an eighth grader at BBMS. He’s into band and voice and he’s a talented dancer — ballet, tap and jazz — but few of his classmates knew that. When they decided to single him out, the excuse they found was his voice. He was one of the younger members of the class, and before he hit puberty, his voice was high.

“I witness people calling me a girl or gay and making fun of me about it. And since I don’t like sports, they’ve made fun of me not being the ‘right’ kind of boy … They do it so they could get better social status and to try to make an impression [with their peers.] Before, it used to really bother me, but now, I’m pretty used to it, and I just blow it off and not let it get to me. But if they keep on doing it, I get really angry. If my friends are there, they’ll tell me, ‘Don’t let it get to you’ — they stick up for me a lot,” he says.

As soon as he reported the harassment to Linda Opitz, she made plans to confront his bullies and give them a chance to demonstrate they understand the pain their actions cause and to show remorse. “I’m going to call the parents should this persist or should there be retaliation and the punishment will get much more severe,” says Opitz.

Interviewed for this article, Stephanie and Connor were glad to get a chance to share their stories. If it could help other kids, that would be great — besides, they say, “We finally got to vent.”

Getting the Message Out About Bullying

From fifth grade to the end of high school, Jodee Blanco was bullied. That’s not the only word she uses, though. “I was the school outcast. I was shunned, rejected, tormented — simply for being different, like so many kids,” she recalls.

She overcame her horrific memories, eventually becoming a celebrity publicist for such well-known entertainment figures as Jim Carrey.

After two students opened fire on their classmate at Columbine High School in April, 1999, killing 12 fellow students and a teacher before killing themselves, the nation’s attention focused intensely on the outcasts who executed the tragedy. Blanco saw it as a call to action.

“My primary message to kids is that ‘It’s not just joking around.’ Bullying damages you for life,” she says. “Columbine had nothing to do with the availability of guns. It had to do with a faulty school system that allows bullying to flourish and a faulty parenting system that doesn’t teach enough empathy in the home.”

Blanco wrote a memoir of her experience as a victim of bullying. http://jodeeblanco.com/ Please Stop Laughing At Me went straight to the New York Times bestseller list. Soon after, she started working with kids, parents and teachers with an antibullying message, doing seminars in school districts across America.

If bullying were an iceberg, the innocuous bully would be the tip of the iceberg. He’s the schoolyard menace who steals everyone’s lunch money. This kind of bully is innocuous because he’s the outcast, Blanco says. Everyone recognizes him as the bully. More dangerous, Blanco says, is the part of the “bullying iceberg” adults don’t see. This is the group of kids from the “cool” crowd who adults love and kids want to emulate — the group that make their victims’ lives a living hell.

Bullying isn’t just about the mean things you do; it can be about the nice things you never do. It’s what Jodee Blanco calls “aggressive exclusion.” It can include treating a student like they’re invisible, or inviting almost everyone to a party except for one, or rolling your eyes when you see the student in the halls or when the kid says something.

“These things may do far more damage than overt forms of bullying, because they force the victim to questions ‘What’s wrong with me?’”

Blanco says that, in almost all cases, victims of bullying are ‘old souls trapped in young bodies.’ They are more mature intellectually and emotionally; they need to fit in, but they have an adult sense of compassion. When the moment of truth arrives where they have to make fun of someone else to fit in themselves, they can’t do it because they have a grown-up sense of compassion.

“If you have a sensitive, adult-like kid, you can bet that kid is getting ostracized at school. Sensitivity and compassion are wonderful as an adult, but for a kid, it’s the kiss of death,” Blanco says. Her primary message to the victims of bullying? “You get singled out because of everything that’s right about you.”

For more articles by J. Louise Larson about bullying, check out these links:

http://raisingthinkers.blogspot.com/2008/02/mean-girls-and-bully-boys-cyberspace.html
http://raisingthinkers.blogspot.com/2008/02/mean-girls-and-bully-boys-if-your-child.html

- J. Louise Larson http://raisingthinkers.blogspot.com/