Youth culture scholars Danah Boyd and Alice Marwick have a thought-provoking op-ed in today’s New York Times, one that challenges a lot of the assumptions teachers and parents bring to bullying discussions.
High school students, they’ve found, rarely use the word bullying to describe even the most obvious examples of such behavior. Instead, they — particularly girls — dismiss it as “drama.”
Dismissing a conflict that’s really hurting their feelings as drama lets teenagers demonstrate that they don’t care about such petty concerns. They can save face while feeling superior to those tormenting them by dismissing them as desperate for attention. Or, if they’re the instigators, the word drama lets teenagers feel that they’re participating in something innocuous or even funny, rather than having to admit that they’ve hurt someone’s feelings. Drama allows them to distance themselves from painful situations.
Adults want to help teenagers recognize the hurt that is taking place, which often means owning up to victimhood. But this can have serious consequences. To recognize oneself as a victim — or perpetrator — requires serious emotional, psychological and social support, an infrastructure unavailable to many teenagers. And when teenagers like Jamey do ask for help, they’re often let down.
No student wants to be identified as a victim. And so…
Antibullying efforts cannot be successful if they make teenagers feel victimized without providing them the support to go from a position of victimization to one of empowerment. When teenagers acknowledge that they’re being bullied, adults need to provide programs similar to those that help victims of abuse. And they must recognize that emotional recovery is a long and difficult process.
Boyd and Marwick highlight a fundamental contradiction in anti-bullying campaigns. Adult rhetoric treats bullying as serious business, but adults in positions of power in such environments rarely exercise that power in ways that back up that rhetoric.
Adults: think back to the worst example of bullying you experienced or witnessed in high school. Now imagine that behavior taking place in a workplace, an adult social setting, a college classroom. Imagine how it would be addressed in such a context. The gap between what you imagine and what you saw in high school is the gap between society’s rhetoric on bullying and students’ reality. And in most cases that gap is vast.
studentactivism.net 
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October 24, 2011 at 12:40 pm
melisa piekarski
This to me is very sad. My child was harassed verbally,physically and sexually her 1st. year of middle school. Superior Middle school handled it very poorly or not at all. Daily a child should not have to suffer or be tormented also they should not have to resort to violence themselves.
Schools ignore bullying and its seems to be viewed as a natural part of growing that must be kept a secret. To me thats a huge pile of BS.
The emotional scars can be very deep and bullying can shape part of who we are as adults. Kids need a safe haven a place they can go to talk,to vent and to be helped with solutions. I in no way think anti-bullying programs make kids victims,if they can work on goals for self esteem and knowing a adult validates them that can be a enormous changing factor for young adult.
Im happy the kids my daughter hangs out with are kind and they help each other and when they are at our home i make it a safe haven,they know they can turn to my husband and myself if they need to talk about anything good and not so good. Sadly we have been talking about bullying and physical injuries to the point of blood and my childs head being smashed into another friends head. causing concussions.
Were grownups its our job to protect our kid because if we don’t,in some schools were just throwing them to the wolves.
This will forever be a issue, from what i have been seeing the bullies are coming from homes where they are beaten and bullied themselves. And hurting others is their way of getting some control back. These kids need help but there is none.
so we as parents need to just put our blinders on and hope that our kids are okay when they graduate and can be members of this wonderful society.
When i see the lack of care schools and parents provide i can fully see why kid get to the point of such loss of hope and desperation they turn to extreme violence and killing their bully.
By the way the bully who harasses my child and her friend carries Knives and lighters to school. But im being told by other ADULT TO NOT REPORT IT< BECAUSE IT COULD CAUSE MORE PROBLEMS!!!!! The system is screwed, It just does not work and never will unless people step up to the plate and fix it. I was able to fix it last year for my daughter because i would not stop. I had to seek out outside sources and threaten with attorneys. Well im out of here, i have a police officer to call.
October 24, 2011 at 1:16 pm
Shora
Halfway through college, and I’m still getting over some of the crap that went on in middle school. The fact is teachers and such are terrible at handling bullying, and when I was in middle and high schools, how they handled it was only getting worse. With “Zero Tolerance” programs, innocuous and playful behavior was (and maybe still is?) getting punished while letting truly hurtful behavior slide.
I don’t know what the solution is, but what schools are doing now isn’t working.
December 18, 2013 at 5:42 pm
Nunc Cognosco Ex Parte 7 | Garner Goings On
[…] know first hand that Anti-Bullying programs don’t work. I also know from first hand experience, as well as second hand parental observation, that Youth […]