Aggressive Anti-Bullying Crusade Gathers Steam
What exactly is “bullying?” I once thought I knew, but that was long, long ago and far, far away. I could never be quite precise, but I wouldn’t have thought that the idea comprehended activity like eye-rolling, “teasing” or criticizing politicians online.
Well, get ready, because as CEI’s Hans Bader argues here, there’s a whole host of eager anti-bullying enforcers who haven’t yet found any limits to “bullying,” and they aim to protect us from a purported epidemic that’s sweeping the country.
Most of what Bader describes comes from the K-12 context, although even there, he indicates that some major concerns have arisen with respect to freedom of speech and freedom of the press.
But you just know that it can’t be very long before the anti-bullying bullies show up on college campuses already awash in sensitivity training, speech and harassment codes, kangaroo-court judicial procedures, anonymous accusations and knee-jerk administrations eager to jump in head first. You can easily imagine how the “anti-bullying” surge is likely to play out in this environment.
Whenever I read a story about a student committing suicide because of bullying, it’s hard not to think that something tragic has occurred. Even if the incidence is decreasing — I hope that’s true — it happens far too often not to be very unsettling.
Others may be exploiting the bullying problem, but just wishing it would go away probably won’t cut it.
It has the same effect on me, Jonathan – I can’t see any other.
I think the point here is that there’s got to be a useful distinction between the real thing and the examples described in Hans Bader’s article. Whenever anything is defined vaguely and with such latitude, the door is wide open for all kinds of mischief.
Professors extorting sexual favors from students in exchange for good grades is sexual harassment; arguing in a classroom that the observable differences between men and women are mainly biological, not social, shouldn’t be, but has been, rated as such on some campuses. I fear that the same broad brush awaits us with regard to “bullying.”
I think part of the problem may be that people who oppose things like this all too often don’t acknowledge the real problem, and offer constructive steps. A good example may be the famous anti-discrimination laws, where it seems that anti-discrimination almost immediately transmogrified into reverse discrimination. Part of the reason — I can only speculate — may be that the opponents of the laws stonewalled, backing discrimination to the bitter end. Creating the opening for the perverters of those laws. Did Goldwaterism make it just about impossible for Republicans and conservatives, and even liberals who had fought for race neutrality? That is just a guess. Something similar here may be at work — what are reasonable people doing to deal with bullying? If the answer is not very much, they cede the high ground to the fanatics. It’s happened over and over, it seems.
I’m responding to your post of January 25, Jonathan.
I actually don’t think the affirmative action analogy works here, since the possibility of the 1964 Civil Rights Act mandating racial quotas was debated when the bill was in Congress. One of its sponsors, Sen. Hubert Humphrey responded to critics by famously offering to eat the page on which anyone could show him language that justified fear of racial quotas. But almost as soon as the bill became law in 1964, the new EEOC which it had erected began to do exactly what the critics anticipated and issued directives requiring racial proportionalism in the workforce. “Goldwaterism” had little relevance, since the “affirmative action” debate at the time was conducted among people who called themselves “liberals,” such as Daniel P. Moynihan and Hubert Humphrey, who later complained that the intention of the Civil Rights Act had been color-neutrality, not race quotas.
What’s worrisome about the “anti-bullying” crusade is that it comes to college campuses already awash with nannyish micromanagers ready to jump in with little or no evidence, only a strong a priori assumption that “harassment,” etc., is everywhere, just as they learned at that recent half-day workshop. Witness, for example the “racial incident” at Williams college that I noted here recently. I haven’t received any new information, but it suspiciously resembles other incidents of recent years that turned out to be hoaxes.
There are certainly genuine instances of bullying that we’d all agree should be dealt with forthrightly, but from where I sit, there’s nothing like an “epidemic” sweeping the country – unless, of course, you define “bullying” as broadly and vaguely as other forms of “harassment” have been. And if your salary depends on protecting students from “bullying,” you’ve got a strong incentive to find plenty of it, don’t you?
The idea that bullying is to blame for a host of problems stems from the self-serving apologia of Bob Bechtel, Class of 1955, Swarthmore College. who murdered a fellow student. He became a college professor, and he blamed “bullying” from fellow students for his committing murder. It was not an excuse of any sort, but showed only that he still did not accept responsibility for his crime. So the “bullying” excuse for crimes should be rejected.
It is hard to see administrations being level-headed about bullying, considering their eager overreaction towards sexual harassment and their urge to re-classify literally anything one can possibly imagine as being a form of it. It’s almost as if they fear common sense and make up these vast, sweeping rules to avoid having to use it. Is bullying a serious, often tragic problem? Of course it is, in many cases. Is rolling your eyes at someone the same thing as beating them senseless in the hallway? Apparently so, according to some of the hyper-legislative zealots.
Schools need to take the issue of bullying seriously. Stop thinking of it as simply meeting a criteria or another legislative overreaching demand. Creating an atmosphere of safety and zero tolerance, where bullying is simply understood as unacceptable, is critical to the long lasting change and ensuring youth security and well being. Assemblies with staff will not accomplish this. It’s about culture change.
Parents need to know that children and adolescents are not safe just because they are home. If they have access to the internet (on cell phones or computers), unsupervised, they are as much at risk as if they were hanging out outside the home. Children who isolate are are greater risk for self injurious behavior and suicide. Talk to your children and adolescents and more importantly, LISTEN. Long car rides are often the best place to get them to talk. anti-bullying
Thanks for commenting, but you seem not to have read my post. Give it a try again, and let me know what you think then.
“Zero tolerance” usually means zero sense. Very few situations warrant a zero tolerance policy. The definition of bullying is so amorphous that trying to attach a zero tolerance policy to it is simply impossible. Eye rolling, criticizing homosexuals, teasing, sending text messages that may be taken as “hurtful”, and a host of other actions are all considered bullying. There’s even a school in West Berlin, NJ that requires children to invite all members of their class to their birthday parties (http://www.btwpschools.org/berlin/JFK/Announcements/JFK%20Student%20Handbook.pdf).
The only thing a zero tolerance policy does here is increase the likelihood of bullying by making it laughably easy to accuse somebody else of it.