Bullying

On Bullying; This Month's Philosopher's Cafe Reflections

By John Taylor; 21 October, 2005

Bullying is the best word I think for the violence most often
encountered in everyday life, the ubiquitous violence that we
nonetheless do not fear because we do not see it, it does not make
good scare headlines. Bullying is by far the most common cruelty we
can be victimized by and, yes, that we can perpetrate. Who can say
that they have never bullied, ever? Ah shore caint -- you see, I am
bullying right now, mocking the accent of southerners. A bully is
anyone with the upper hand who resorts to unnecessary compulsion or
violence of thought, word or deed, violence of commission or omission.
Bullies pick out those under their thumb, anyone they see as
vulnerable or beneath them; victims are at their mercy, or more
precisely their lack of mercy.

Our last philosopher's meeting on equality of the sexes at the library
in Wainfleet was an eye opener. We started strolling through the usual
ground, the relationships of men and women, the prejudices that men
often show against women, and vice versa, blah, blah, blah. I
mentioned that in my opinion the much politicized problem of violence
against women is a subset of the broader problem of violence and
tyranny, rule of ignorance, of violence and cruelty of human to human.
After hearing several examples of male chauvinism, to my surprise,
both of the other men present volunteered the information that they
had been forced into retirement by a bullying boss, one boss being a
man and the other a woman.

Most think of bullying as a schoolyard phenom but an important study
last year found that the bullying of bosses to employees is rampant.
There are, after all, no playground supervisors to monitor the
workplace as in a school playground or cafeteria. The problem, as a
result, tends to be much worse for adults than the younger set. Not
that it is not extremely severe among youth, especially young girls,
sad to say. I am including the full text of the latest article in the
New York Times on that theme at the end of today's essay called,
"Confronting Bullies Who Wound With Words." For a Baha'i this is
confirmation of the gravity and and wisdom of our most unusual and
distinctive law, that against backbiting and gossip.

One surprising point that came out of last year's bullying in the
workplace study was a finding that while the boss's pounding on
victimized employees is stressful and deplorable, it apparently does
not degrade productivity. I am confident that if the researchers
looked a little closer, or perhaps stepped back to view the broader
picture, they would find that bullying bosses are indeed detracting
from productivity. It stands to reason that a sadist will not elicit
creative performances or the free and insightful consultation upon
which long term success depends. I suspect that it is the nature of
the jobs we are asking people to do that is the determinant. A
reflective and supportive personality makes a poor drill sergeant
because that job requires turning out canon fodder who face bombs
rather than question an order. In a sane world we would not need canon
fodder workers, we would need creative problem solvers. But for the
sake of argument, let us accept that a bully can be a functional boss.

Given that things still go ahead in the shop or office when the boss
is a snit or a martinet, even so, such stress in the long term has to
degrade the health of all workers. That in turn must raise healthcare
costs and encourage the use of tranquilizers, a practice that is
epidemic, especially in the United States. Finally such drugs end up
in the water table; already disturbing amounts of Viagra and who knows
what else is turning up in America's rivers and streams. As always,
human abuse to other humans ends up poisoning the natural environment.
In effect bullies do more than their part in killing those completely
under our thumb, the plants and animals of this beautiful planet.

What can we do to reduce bullying? Yes, we can pray, we can try to
change our attitudes to our own subordinates and underlings and
dependents. As the Qu'ran says over and over, God is Merciful,
Clement. Why cannot we be too? Nobody is greater than God. And yes, we
can try to consult better, we can encourage fair play and use
education and peer pressure to keep bad bosses in line. But none of
this seems enough. All it takes is one bully, one, among all our
relationships in our whole life to ruin it completely. A clever bully
can drive a person to suicide, it happens to young people every day.
We are all very vulnerable and we surely should fear it more than any
of the terrors we witness in the media.

Certainly, long term if enough people learn and apply Baha'i laws and
principles bullying will die out. I accept that. But it just does not
seem to be enough for us, for right now. I guess what I am saying is
that we need to look at technological short cuts. Violence needs to be
short circuited by communications technology and our built
environment. That is why I am writing this book -- current working
title: "Total Openness" -- to explore technical, structural ways to
undercut whatever tends to raise a bully, be he a big kid on the
schoolyard or a Hitler or a Saddam Hussein, to the top of the heap.

Confronting Bullies Who Wound With Words
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/16/nyregion/nyregionspecial2/16lijour.html?th&emc=th
By MARCELLE S. FISCHLER
Published in New York Times, October 16, 2005

AT the beginning of her sixth-grade year at Great Neck North Middle
School, Dana Convissar sat with a few friends at a table in the
lunchroom with the "popular girls of the grade."

"When they were with the girls that were the leaders, they would
ignore me," Dana, now 13 and an eighth grader, said of her friends.
"They would laugh and they would joke, and I would never come in the
conversation."

Dana was a victim of the popularity wars of middle school, where
meanness, particularly among girls, is the name of the game.

"It made me feel like I was absolutely nothing, and I could do nothing
about it, and I couldn't be included," Dana recalled.

The war isn't fought with sticks or stones, but with social weapons
that cut children this age much deeper: taunts and teases,
name-calling, gossip-mongering and scapegoating. The ways youngsters
are tormented and ostracized by one another, often in the guise of
being cool or hip, are the stuff of teenage nightmares: being made the
butt of a clique's disdain, not being invited to the party everyone is
talking about, and increasingly, being eviscerated in nasty instant
messages over the Internet.

"'Popular' is supposed to mean you have a lot of friends," Dana said.
"But now it's come to the point that the popular girls are the cliquey
girls, and they are exclusive. They won't be friends with anyone who
is a little different from them, and they won't interact with anyone
who is not in their group."

Middle schoolers say meanness pervades their world. In a survey
released last month by Child Abuse Protection Services, a nonprofit
group based in Roslyn that creates student-targeted programs to combat
abuse, bullying and peer harassment, 83 percent of sixth and seventh
graders on the Island said their schools had a bullying problem, and
45 percent said it was significant or severe. In the survey, 3 out of
10 students over all, including 1 in 4 girls, said they had bullied
someone themselves.

"Bullying today is less about children hitting each other than it is
about children being victimized by a culture of meanness," said Alane
Fagin, executive director of the organization. "Children understand
what many adults seem to have forgotten: You don't have to get hit to
get hurt."

And the Internet is making matters a great deal worse, parents and
experts say, because it provides a cloak of anonymity and removes
physical size and bravery from the equation. Children as young as 7 or
8, who would never have dared to belittle or confront a classmate face
to face, are empowered to be vulgar and vengeful at the keyboard. The
new online dimension of bullying has grown to the point that Scope, a
nonprofit group that provides educational services to school
districts, convened the Island's first conference on bullying in
cyberspace at Stony Brook University on Sept. 28. Five hundred
teachers, administrators, technology experts and students from 3rd to
12th grade took part.

On the Internet, said Betty Kauffman, manager of Scope, "you can take
a kid who is 4 feet 11 and thin as a rail, and be the biggest bully in
the world, but in real life he couldn't do it." Ms. Kauffman
identified two common species of Internet bullies. One is "the tough
kids, the thugs, the power-hungry," she said, who use the Internet to
continue picking on a victim, one on one.

The other is the joint-bullying pack in the "mean girl" mode, though
they may be of either sex. "They get their enjoyment out of getting
everyone to join in with the teasing and the bullying," she said, in
an arena where there are no teachers or aides to intervene. The
victims "are being emotionally hurt and they are being ganged up on,
which might not necessarily happen in a schoolyard," Ms. Kauffman
said. Dana Convissar, who plays cello in her school orchestra, said
she had recently learned that another orchestra member had posted an
online message saying she hated Dana. "I would never do anything like
that to her, even if she isn't my favorite person in the world," Dana
said. "It was something stupid and rude."

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com