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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.
When the brouhaha over the Psychology Today “Why Black Women Are Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women” article broke, I wrote a quick blogpost pointing out some of author Satoshi Kanazawa’s most ludicrous, obvious mistakes. But now someone with a bit more competency has gone back to look at the actual data Kanazawa used, and discovered that the problems with his “study” go much deeper.
Much, much deeper.
Basically, Kanazawa completely misrepresented the data. His source material just flatly doesn’t say what he says it says.
Here’s the deal. Kanazawa drew his conclusions on the relative attractiveness of black women from the “Add Health” study, a long-term survey of American adolescents. He claimed that the study showed — proved — that black women were less attractive than women of other races. But that’s not the case.
The attractiveness “data” is itself suspect, for one thing. It consists of the subjective judgments of interviewers who were asked to rate their interviewees’ appearance. There’s no effort in the numbers to control for the interviewers’ (unstated) ethnicity, no protocol for their judgments, no reason to believe that their conclusions are in any way representative. It’s just their opinion, and different interviewers reached dramatically different conclusions about the same interviewees’ attractiveness.
Let me underscore that last bit. According to a review of the original data, most of the difference in attractiveness between individuals in the study can be explained by different interviewers “grading” the same interviewee differently.
But it gets worse.
This study is, as I noted above, a study of American adolescents, tracked through early adulthood. And though Kanazawa portrayed his article as a study of the attractiveness of adults, the samples he used included children as young as twelve. He based the majority of his conclusions on data on the youngest two groups, who had an average age of just sixteen.
Still with me? It gets even worse.
Kanazawa admitted that the supposed difference in attractiveness was less in “Wave III” than in “Wave I” and “Wave II,” though he actively concealed the fact that Waves I and II weren’t adults at all. (He labeled the relevant charts “Wave I: Men,” “Wave II: Men,” “Wave I: Women,” and “Wave II: Women,” even though the vast majority of those subjects were teenagers and pre-teens.)
What he didn’t admit was that there’s a Wave IV.
Wave IV, it turns out, is the only wave composed entirely of adults. And an analysis of the Wave IV data shows that it doesn’t support Kanazawa’s thesis.
At all.
In Wave IV there is no difference between the perceived attractiveness of the black women and that of the other ethnic groups examined.
None.
At all.
And again, I want to underscore something. Wave IV is composed of the same interviewees as the previous waves. So what the data really shows is that some (presumptively white) interviewers thought that the black adolescent girls in the study were a little less cute than the white, Asian, or Native American girls.
But when interviewers went back and spoke to the same women as adults, that “attractiveness gap” disappeared. Completely.
This isn’t just shoddy statistics. This isn’t just crap reporting. This isn’t just incompetence. It’s scholarly malfeasance.
It’s fraud.
“The job of an actor is to play a role. The job of a cheerleader is to cheer.”
— Eugene Volokh on Doe v. Silsbee Independent School District
• • •
The Doe case, as most of my readers probably know, involves a high school cheerleader in Texas, identified in court papers as “HS,” who was kicked off her squad for refusing to cheer for her alleged rapist. She had accused the player a few months earlier, but he had remained on the school basketball team. It was school tradition for the cheerleading squad to cheer from the sidelines when players attempted foul shots, but HS refused in the case of this player — standing silently with her arms crossed. After a warning, she was removed from the squad. (The player in question pled guilty to an assault charge some time afterward.)
HS sued the school for taking her off the squad, and lost. She appealed, and lost again. Last week her final appeal was rejected.
Eugene Volokh, a constitutional lawyer I respect, thinks the courts got this one right. If this lawsuit had prevailed, he says, “cheerleaders would be free to refuse to cheer for any reason that they think sufficient.” They could refuse to cheer for teams with gay or undocumented immigrant players, or those who “belong to a reprehensible religion, or refuse to properly support our military.”
I think HS was right to refuse to cheer her attacker, and I think the school was deeply wrong in how it handled the case. (For one blogger’s assessment of just how wrong they were, read this.) Whether by dropping her assailant from the team or suspending the practice of sideline cheers or just letting her sit those particular cheers out, the school should have found a way to accommodate HS’s reasonable desire not to cheer the name of a person who had recently sexually assaulted her.
But they didn’t. And given that they didn’t, I think the courts did the only thing they could. I just don’t see a way to craft a rule that would allow HS to refuse to cheer that wouldn’t also protect a cheerleader who shouted “slut” at a single mother on an opposing team, or an actor who changed the lines of a school play to give it a particular religious message, or a football player who wrote “I HATE FAGS” on his jersey, big enough to be seen from the stands.
It’s possible, as some commenters at Volokh’s blog suggest, that HS might have had other legal remedies. It’s been suggested that she might have had — and might still have — grounds for a lawsuit on equal protection claim, or for infliction of emotional distress. I’m not in a position to evaluate those suggestions. But as a matter of First Amendment law, I think the courts got this one right.
By the way, one other element of this case is worth mentioning — that the appeals court ruled HS’s lawsuit “frivolous,” and ordered her family to pay $45,000 in legal fees to the school district. It’s my understanding that the district has the option of waiving the collection of that judgment, and I hope they do so.
Update | The ACS Blog reaches a different First Amendment conclusion than I did, and it does so by addressing a question Volokh took as a given — whether cheerleaders are “agents” of the school, and speaking on the school’s behalf when they perform as cheerleaders. Their position is that so long as a cheerleader’s symbolic protest doesn’t substantially disrupt the school’s functioning, it’s protected speech.
I’m going to have to chew on this one. It’s not obvious to me that students have a blanket First Amendment right to Sharpie messages onto their uniforms while cheering or playing sports, or to shout obnoxious comments at opposing teams while on the field. I’m attracted to the pro-speech side of the argument — as always — but I’m not sure where I come down on this particular issue.
What do y’all think?
Nine high school students burst into a room in which the Tucson, Arizona school board was scheduled to meet last night, chaining themselves into the very seats that the board members were scheduled to occupy. Their action forced the cancellation of the meeting, which has yet to be rescheduled.
The students were protesting a planned resolution that would remove ethnic studies from the core curriculum in Tucson schools. That resolution was drafted in response to HB 2281, a new state law intended to remove ethnic studies from the Tucson school district entirely. The board is divided on the resolution, which opponents call a capitulation to HB 2281.
A Mississippi student is suing her high school after a cheerleading coach demanded her Facebook password, then used it to access and disseminate private email.
According to the lawsuit the coach, Tommie Hill, told the Pearl High School cheerleading squad that they would all have to give her their Facebook passwords. Several squad members responded by deleting their accounts from their cell phones, but sophomore Mandi Jackson complied with the request.
The suit claims that Hill accessed Jackson’s account later that day, and forwarded Jackson’s private Facebook messages to at least four other school officials. The officials then “publicly reprimanded … and humiliated” Jackson, suspended her from cheerleader training, and banned her from other school events.
Jackson’s attorney, Rita Nahlik Silin, told the Student Press Law Center that Hill’s actions were “a blatant violation of her right to privacy, her right to free speech, her right to free association and her right to due process. It’s egregious to me,” she said, “that a 14-year-old girl is essentially told you can’t speak your mind, can’t publish anything, can’t be honest or have an open discussion with someone without someone else essentially eavesdropping.”
As Lee Baker of the Citizen Media Law Project notes, this incident reflects a not-uncommon belief on the part of authority figures that “they have the right to invade others’ privacy and eavesdrop on private or semi-private conversations merely because these conversations take place online.” In Baker’s words, “asking for a student’s Facebook password in order to read private messages is akin to asking the student’s permission to install a wiretap on his or her phone.”
studentactivism.net 
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