Back to School Night is a September tradition. We squeeze our adult bodies into little desks, wave awkwardly at neighbors in the hallways, and march around the school to learn about homework rules and cafeteria food. This Back to School Night was different. At Jonah's school, the principal showed up on the classroom TVs to describe the new anti-bullying laws in New Jersey. (Here's an NPR chat about it.)
The principal was grim. He gave a twenty minute presentation on the new law, which takes an extremely hard-line on bullying. If a student is caught picking on another student, because of some perceived physical, sexual, ethnic, or neurological difference, the bully will have a permanent mark on his record. Schools are legally required to monitor this behavior, which can happen outside of school grounds or even on the Internet.
Jonah attended school presentations on the topic. His school is particularly sensitive about bullying, because the Rutgers boy who killed himself after being mocked for being gay, had attended Jonah's middle school.
At Ian's school, the principal of his special needs school was also alarmed. She viewed this law, which was clearly designed to help kids with neurological differences, as a potential landmine for our kids. Kids with neurological differences have no social filter and think nothing of going up to people to inform that they are overweight. Could their innocent social blunders be construed as acts of bullying?
The principals of both schools saw this law as a bureaucratic nightmare.
Will this law be effective? Could it be challenged by Free Speech advocates? Won't smart, mean kids inflict pain in very subtle ways that wouldn't be picked up by this law? The silent treatment is a very effective method of bullying.
Can good character be taught in schools without a draconian law? Clearly good character is important, not only for protecting weak kids, but also for the future success of all kids.
Apt. 11d 
I see lots of potential problems. Everybody in my school would have been sent away for homophobia before they got to long division.
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No, I don’t think you can legislate niceness with draconian anti-bullying laws. I’m less sure about whether draconian/zero-tolerance laws will actually improve the climate or not.
What’s the empirical evidence on draconian drug and weapons laws? have they made schools less vulnerable to drugs & weapons? Those laws have been around for a while, and so we should have the data on how frequently naive violations (i.e. false positives, like ibuprofen, toy water guns) get caught v how much the activity is driven further underground in a way that makes it even more difficult to regulate v decreasing drug use/weapons in the schools.
The bullying equation seems harder to balance with draconian laws, because it’s more difficult to define what bullying is (v what a drug is), because it’s easier for bullying to be underground, and a major enforcement mechanism of anti-bullying is encouraging reporting and dialog. Both those characteristics seem to increase the possibility that there will be more false positives (naive & neuro-atypical versions) and that reporting will decrease, increasing bullying.
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I’ve been following an incident in my kids’ school where one child is being teased for being small. I think the behavior is bullying and something should be done about it. The first step has been to encourage the child to stand up for themselves, and I hear that’s worked, at least sometimes. The next step would be to encourage reporting (by bystanders and parents). Would I report if I thought that reporting this level of bullying would result in the “bully” (a 10 year old making bad choices) having a permanent blot on his record that would change his chances of admittance to high schools/colleges? Probably not.
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My sister’s daughter has several neurological challenges, one being she has absolutely no empathy. She is 10 years old and she’s a bully and my sister and her husband know this. They do all that they can to help; talk with parents of the children their daughter has picked on, outlawed any kind of mobile device (she’ll use it to harass others), counseling with a pediatric psychiatrist, incentives, etc. She’s still a bully.
She’s “special needs” but she doesn’t bully because she’s clueless — she knows she’s harassing others — but she doesn’t care. How do you fix that one?
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Law school.
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Ha! My sister’s a lawyer.
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Laura,
It sounds like you now have the lever for dealing with your bus issues.
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I have two pretty contradictory thougths on this one.
First, there is no way to enforce a law this tough. Kids will be kids. They say and do incredibly stupid things.
That being said, there is a major problem with bullying out there. I’ve become convinced a good chunk of the problem can be explained by parents. Everyone thinks their child is a victim, very few seem to want to contemplate that their child might also be capable of this behavior. Our town is holding seminars on “Bully Proofing Your Child” not “Making Sure Your Child isn’t a Bully.”
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“Everyone thinks their child is a victim, very few seem to want to contemplate that their child might also be capable of this behavior. Our town is holding seminars on “Bully Proofing Your Child” not “Making Sure Your Child isn’t a Bully.””
That is a very interesting point.
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MaryAA and MH win the internet today; second place goes to a friend who observed, “Goblins dig Bowie, fyi.”
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Massachusetts has a new anti-bullying law. The state already had an anti-hazing law on the books.
It seems some administrators haven’t gotten the message, as Swampscott High officials allowed seniors to harass freshmen at the start of school:
http://www.itemlive.com/articles/2011/09/14/news/news01.txt
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Current bullying theory really does recognize the bully and victim are defined by acts, and not by the person.
http://rosalindwiseman.com/
For a bunch of info.
I’d argue that most of the research-based bullying initiative (and I know, not all are, and I’m probably getting a skewed view from my school) are aimed at teaching bystanders how to intervene, rather than merely advising how to “bully proof” your own child.
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It’s a bad idea that will probably go into the dustbin with other zero tolerance policies.
Teachers need training in this area as well as parents. There was a specific type of teacher in my high school that would ignore bullying: the kind that is living out their unfulfilled adolescent dreams of popularity through their profession choice. Since most of the bullying was from the popular kids towards everyone else this type of teacher would always ignore it as a way of currying favor with the “in” crowd. I don’t know how common that is but teachers definitely need to be reminded that, no, they are not these kids’ pals and they need to step in when necessary.
Kids today seem much more accepting of difference than when I was in school. There’s been a lot of improvement from simple increased exposure, education, and information. That’s not to say that bullying no longer exists but that the general trend seems positive. Why mess with that?
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Joanne Jacobs has picked up on this post. She says, “I don’t think anti-bullying campaigns should stress the motivation for bullying. It doesn’t matter if the victim is singled out because he’s different or because he’s convenient.”
http://www.joannejacobs.com/2011/09/be-nice-or-else/
I think there’s a lot to what JJ says. It would be easy for administration to get tangled up in questions of motivation, whereas the crucial question is, is a child in danger, and what do we do to fix that? It would be a very sad waste of resources if Laura’s administration went deep down this rabbit hole, while at the same time not fixing the bus issue.
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I boy in our kids’ NJ Elementary school has already been formally disciplined for the common bullying tactic of making fun of another kids’ name because of what it rhymes with, with no obvious “discriminatory category” intent. (on the level of “Pinker’s a stinker!” or “Stan the Garbage Can!”)
I was impressed that this was happening in the early grades, so that maybe new norms will be created by the time they get older.
Meanwhile, I don’t really know what “a permanent mark on his record” means. I was by no means a bully as a child, but there was an incident in fifth grade that was probably rightfully considered “bullying” by myself and a friend (the friend did 95% of the bullying, but I was more part of the problem then part of the solution) and I was sent home for three days. I assume that went on my “permanent record,” whatever that means. Did the colleges I applied to see it? I can’t imagine they did, or if they did that they cared.
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I’m guessing a 5th grade suspension wouldn’t appear on your college record, but it probably would be reported on your 6th grade private school application.
The reason that it does matter, somewhat, that victims are often outsiders is that part of the anti-bullying initiative is to tell people they can’t bully someone because they are weird. In our counselors example, yes, a student should not pick their nose, and that is an issue that needs to be addressed, but not by bullying the nose-picker. That’s a change from old social norms, where social ostracism and censure (i.e. bullying) was considered a reasonable means of altering non-social behavior.
We have expanded what shouldn’t be considered non-social behavior (i.e. being gay, though apparently not in rural Minnesota, and I’ll have to accept that my social milieu is not representative of the entire nation). But, part of anti-bullying it’s not a tool in the arsenal of modifying your peers’ behavior (be they nose pickers or boyfriend stealers or kids who refuse to participate in “spirit” day).
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“It would be a very sad waste of resources if Laura’s administration went deep down this rabbit hole, while at the same time not fixing the bus issue.”
I think this, and have always thought that the rules for behavior should concentrate on those situations where one person’s behavior interferes with another’s, and that the motive for the behavior shouldn’t play a big role in the response.
But, I have neurotypical children, who can be trained to produce appropriate behavior in most circumstances. Presumably the bus-offendor (and the mean girl above) are having significant difficulty altering their behavior in spite of incentives. Those are the difficult decisions.
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The kid on Ian’s bus isn’t a bully. He’s not high functioning enough to be a bully. A bully is a reasonable person who leverages a power situation to make another kid feel bad about himself/herself. The kid on Ian’s bus cannot control his anger and frustrations, he has a very low IQ, and he’s lashing out at whoever is near him.
That said, my kid should not be getting off a bus with a bloody hand from scratch marks. I could deal with this situation with administrators, I’m just figuring out a new bureaucracy. Driving him back and forth is the easiest solution at the moment.
While I applaud the spirit of this law, I seriously doubt that it will do much good with real bullies.
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The other week, when I came home, my son started talking about how he had to protect himself from bullies and then, when I was resting on the chair, he started pushing my hand into my chest while say, “Why are you hitting yourself?”
After that, I feel much better about the stupid superhero TV shows as opposed to the ones that are supposed to teach a useful lesson.
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While I applaud the spirit of this law, I seriously doubt that it will do much good with real bullies.
I agree, but I wouldn’t be surprised if, over the course of 12 or 13 years of enforcement, you end up with fewer “real bullies.”
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The “silent treatment” is not bullying. Ostracizing, perhaps, but not bullying. Unless you want to redefine the term.
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“Presumably the bus-offendor (and the mean girl above) are having significant difficulty altering their behavior in spite of incentives. Those are the difficult decisions.”
Not to pathologize everything, but a lot of psychological conditions exist on a spectrum from mild to severe. So while we can look at the emotionally disturbed kid or the unempathetic girl and we easily recognize that they have genuine psychological problems, but a lot of the problem kids we’re talking about (especially the incorrigibles) may have equally real, if more subtle psychological issues. A lot of recent progress in psychology (for instance in autism) has come in recognizing what the milder end of a spectrum looks like. As my guy Ross Grene (“The Explosive Child” and “Lost at School”)says, you don’t need to have a diagnosis to have a problem. You just need a problem to have a problem.
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I’ve got 99 problems, but a diagnosis isn’t one of them.
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“As my guy Ross Grene (“The Explosive Child” and “Lost at School”)says, you don’t need to have a diagnosis to have a problem. You just need a problem to have a problem. ”
Oh I agree wholeheartedly. I think all human behaviors exist on a spectrum, from empathy to ethics to greed to lying to bullying to . . . . And, I think that spectrum interacts with incentives. So, say, a person somewhere in the middle of the road on the human characteristic of behaving unethically in order to feed their greed, may not do it to keep the 20 lying on the ground in the labelled wallet, but might do it, if that 20 meant something important to them, or if it was 200,000.
The problem with recognizing this reality is that it’s difficult to decide, as a society, where we protect with the law, where we accommodate, and where we just extoll people to be kind.
Ignoring the gray makes it easier to have b/w solutions.
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“I agree, but I wouldn’t be surprised if, over the course of 12 or 13 years of enforcement, you end up with fewer “real bullies.””
I don’t rule out the possibility, but I’d ask at what cost of collateral damage (i.e. girls strip-searched to find ibuprofen)?
But it does occur to me that schools are freaking out because they don’t want to have to apply the law intelligently, not because it can’t be. Disapproval of “Stan the garbage can” clearly expressed, by authority, and through teaching, by peers might indeed produce more niceness. Kicking a kid (with no diagnosis) but issues understanding appropriate behavior might actually produce an underclass of bullies without an education (an extreme, I know).
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Here’s a bullying story from the farm.
When I was a girl growing up on a cattle ranch, one of the cows had a fine, pointy set of horns (probably the only one in the herd). The cow abused her position and her horns, lording it over her horn-less fellow cows and endangering their safety. Finally, my dad had had enough and he sawed the horns off. From that day forward, the cow’s bullying days were done. She was a totally new cow.
There’s a moral in there, somewhere.
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I’ve often thought that schools don’t do enough to stigmatize bullies. Saying that someone is a “mean girl” doesn’t really convey the full gravity of the situation — I’ve often wondered what would happen if the mean cheerleader’s mom (who was probably a mean cheerleader herself and now is a mean mom) was called into the principal’s office and told “We’ve decided that your daughter’s relational aggression problem goes far enough beyond the norm that it requires special treatment. From now on, she’s going to be in a special Emotionally Disturbed class for people with this emotional issue, and when she applies to college her transcript will note that she was in an Emotionally Disturbed class” . Perhaps if the bully’s parents were told that this behavior will be reflected on transcripts and reported to colleges, it would change. It’s easy for a mean mom to joke about how her son or daughter was suspended for picking on a kid in the cafeteria — but if the kid was put in a special class? labelled on a transcript? maybe not so much.
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I’m conflicted about this. I’ve found, unfortunately, that many children who are bullied themselves often are willing (or even very likely) to bully anyone they feel is weaker than themselves, or have certain anti-social personality traits which make them a target for bullying, in part because it prevents them from developing normal friendship bonds with other kids, which then makes them an easy targe. This was my experience in school, and also my experience working with children of various ages in the US school system.
I am slightly biased on the issue of bullying as well because at various points in my life, people have attempted to bully me, only to have it fail miserably and backfire in their face. I am simply un-bulliable, and I’m not sure why, but in part it’s because I simply have never given a shit what others thought of me, but I was also really friendly to everyone, even the kids to whom it was social suicide to be friendly too (this was through intense socialization on the part of my parents and elementary school teachers, not because I am innately a better person than most people). I’ve found that, after-school special style, being generally across the board friendly and acting like you don’t give a shit usually makes you far more popular than being a mean girl or boy does, even if it takes awhile for people to catch on to that.
Of course, drawing on Nietzsche, magnanimity is the virtue of the strong, and I imagine if you’re picked on from very early on for things that you’re self conscious about (I got picked on because of my name and ethnic background, which I like, the way I speak, which I also like, and for being a nerd, which I was fine with), it’s hard not to become resentful, and my whole “just rise above it and be kind but firm, even to your bullies” comes from being fairly popular and charismatic most of the time and the target of bullying some of the time.
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Of course, drawing on Nietzsche…
That’s how I got hundreds of dollars of library fines.
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