- Will bullying become the new 'terrorism' leading to more invasive privacy rollbacks on the net? Coverage seems to underplay that she was bullied in person.
- Ms. Todd was given grief over flashing her chest... what, is Meadow Ridge school district some sort of wannabe Taliban stronghold? Really, what's up with that, a 'friend' gets hoodwinked and stalked by a pedophile and that's an invitation to attack her?
- Sure, its great that Ms. Todd's adult online stalker was outed by Anonymous - but he was far from the whole problem; her peer-group bullies are still at large. What's stopping any of them from basking in the limelight of pretending to have been one of her 'friends' when everyone can see, then slagging her memorial online, and finding another victim?
- Despite their age, shouldn't her peer tormenters be outed or otherwise disciplined at some level? Instead, its all being laid on one male scapegoat, Todd's death gets the kind of attention that may inspire copycat suicides, and critical attention is diverted from those of both genders who not only refused to protect her from this person, but used it as an opportunity to make things worse for her, thereby reinforcing any gratification of being untouchable bullies getting away with fooling people.
There are a couple of interesting debating positions as well, the first seeming to almost condone bullying while the other is zero-tolerance:
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Jonathan Kay: Bullying is horrible, wrenching, sometimes fatal and … perfectly natural
My colleague Kelly McParland has posted a blog entitled “Bullying is an evil on the same level as sexual abuse.”Such statements may be morally satisfying. But they do nothing to inform an intelligent policy response to bullying. In fact, they may even hinder such a response.
I don’t dispute that bullying can have horrible effects on a victim’s psyche. In some tragic cases — such as that of Amanda Todd — it even can lead to death by suicide. But it also is a scourge that has existed in every society on earth — from the Arctic Utku Eskimos to the African mountain Ik. The appetite to bully cannot be treated as a social sickness, or the product of maladaptive psychological development — which is how it is universally depicted in the media, and in government-funded public-service announcements. Bullying is in our genes. And any effort to fight it must reflect that fact.
The reason that bullying has become part of human evolutionary psychology is that it works — for both males and females — as a strategy to increase one’s attractiveness to the opposite sex, one’s perceived social status, and the cohesiveness of one’s social alliances.
In movies, bullies are shown to be wounded individuals whose bullying is a perverse symptom of the pain that’s been inflicted on them by abusive parents inhabiting poor and broken homes, or by more dominant figures in their social pecking order. There is no evidentiary basis for this stereotype. In fact, research cited by Anthony Volk, Joseph Camilleri, Andrew Dane and Zopito Marini in a 2012 Aggressive Behavior journal article indicate that bullying-induced social dominance is correlated with reduced stress and improved physical health. Amazingly, “bullying is also positively linked with other positive mental traits such as … cognitive empathy, leadership, social competence, and self-efficacy.”
Bullies are not people who crave insight into human nature, in other words: They often have more insight into our true nature, at least in its Hobbesian, adolescent form, than the people around them.
People can be bullied in many ways, of course. But, as evolutionary psychology would indicate, bullying patterns among adolescents closely reflect the traits associated with mate selection. Girls bully one another by impugning their attractiveness and their sexual fidelity — the two traits most sought after by males. Boy bullies, on the other hand, impugn the manliness, strength and wealth of rivals, in a similar play to establish dominance with regard to traits deemed desirable among girls.
The strategy works: Studies show that boys who bully other boys, on average, gain status with girls, who perceive the boys as more dominant. And girls who bully other girls, on average, receive more positive attention from boys.
As the aforementioned authors report, “Dominance has been found to be positively associated with both bullying and peer nominations of dating popularity among adolescents. Bullying is also positively correlated with peer nominations of power, social prominence, student and teacher ratings of perceived popularity and peer leadership” — all of which translate to social capital, which in turn means social or mating opportunities with the opposite sex.
All primate species, including humans, have protocols for establishing dominance hierarchies. In our “Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation” (as the term of art is used in ev-psych circles), these hierarchies often served useful purposes, because they created stable social environments and discouraged violent, ongoing plays for power within an in-group; while also serving to identify the warrior class tasked with primary defence against violent out-group threats. It is only in our modern, more peaceful, age — in which police have a nominal monopoly on violence, and disputes are settled through litigation — that such notions seem obsolete, and bullying has come to be regarded as inherently cruel and pathological.
To fight bullying, we must acknowledge that it is entirely “natural” to the adolescent brain — which is primarily hard-wired, at that time in life, for status-seeking within a peer group. That is why meta-studies show that anti-bulling programs based on appeals to empathy and social justice don’t work. As the Aggressive Behavior authors note, “Programs such as ‘zero-tolerance’ ask bullies to give up an advantageous behavior without gaining anything in return — not a recipe for likely success.”
Thus did a 2011 study in the Journal of Experimental Criminology find that programs in which students were put in charge of devising responses to bullying actually tended to make the problem worse. Absent some unusual furor — such as a one-off YouTube campaign that casts positive light on one particular bullying victim — the adolescent brain is oriented toward advancing within the high-school hierarchy, not upending its moral foundations (which is why the kumbaya ending to every high-school social-drama film is so unrealistic).
The only thing that will work is a strategy that adheres rigidly to the cost-benefit mindset of a teenage mind: Bullying behavior, once detected (a challenge in its own right, especially in the case of cyber-bullying) must be punished by parents, school officials and (in extreme cases that involve violence or threats thereof) the police. Preferably, such punishments should involve social isolation and/or humiliation.
Bullying may seem “evil” to a detached observer. But that word has little meaning to those who are inflicting it on the Amanda Todds of the world. And the first thing anti-bulling crusaders should do is dispense with the notion that we can convince teenage bullies to see the world through their victims’ eyes. The young brain simply doesn’t work that way.
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jkay@nationalpost.com
Twitter @jonkay
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Kelly McParland: Bullying is an evil on the same level as sexual abuse and deserves a similar response
Kelly McParland | Oct 15, 2012 10:18 AM ET | Last Updated: Oct 15, 2012 1:09 PM ET
The need to do everything possible to fight bullying is about as self-evident as a cause can be. Bullying is pernicious, destructive, and in many cases fatal. It ruins lives, not just for the victim but for their family and people around them. Though not limited solely to the teen years, it’s hard to imagine anything that could be more cruelly undermine a young person’s life at a period of maximum vulnerability. At the exact moment when they are wrestling with identity, self-confidence and acceptance – skills that will shape how they live and who they become – they are subjected to a senseless, irrational, wholly destructive attack on the very qualities they need to formulate a strong and confident identity.
Bullying isn’t something that happens for a month or two and then goes away. Like sexual abuse, it stays. The memory remains, as does the emotional damage, often forever. Once of the hallmarks of sexual abuse is the silence that often allows a perpetrator to continue finding victims, safe in the knowledge that shame will prevent their target from speaking out. Bullying depends on much the same sense of invulnerability: the victim is often too shattered to share the secret. Even those who do – Amanda Todd being an excellent example – still often find themselves unable to deal with the emotional impact even while receiving assistance from friends, family and existing support networks. That’s how devastating the impact is.
There may have been a day when these things could be handled by a show of physical force. Bullies are notorious cowards. They often dissolve when someone stands up to them. This might be possible in the school yard, when the issue at hand is one kid picking on another. But the Internet precludes that possibility. The internet allows the cowards to mask their identity, to strike from the safety of anonymity. Anyone more than marginally familiar with the internet knows there is a very ugly side to the online community; a mob mentality that takes a certain joy in the hounding and tormenting of others. We’re talking about people so crude that a memorial page set up for Todd has been plagued by abusive photos and comments, including a photo of a young woman hanging herself with a rope and another of a bottle of bleach and the caption “it’s to die for.”
As usual they hide behind the safety of pseudonyms and false identities. We still don’t know the name of the person who drove Amanda to her death. Depending on that person’s skill in avoiding detection, we may never know. So the old bromides for handling bullies don’t stand up in the internet age. You can’t stand up to someone you can’t identify. Nor can you escape cyber-bullying by moving away: the internet is everywhere, and, as the Todds learned, it can track you wherever you go. It doesn’t end when the school bell rings, and it can’t be ignored simply by closing your Facebook page and putting away the cellphone, since those devices are just as ubiquitous as the internet itself, and turning them off doesn’t make them go away.
Something more is needed, and that something has to strike at the root causes of bullying. That is, the sense on behalf of the abuser that they can get away with it, and that society doesn’t take their actions seriously enough to mount a serious effort to stop it; and, for the victim, the feeling that they are alone in the world, that no one can help them, that the torment will never stop and that the abuse diminishes them rather than than the bully.
The way to do this may be much the same as the tactics used to reduce smoking among young people. The great success in anti-smoking efforts has been to make smoking uncool, to establish in young people the understanding that sucking smoke into your lungs, shivering in the cold while you puff on a cigarette, hacking away because of the damage to your lungs, is just not smart or attractive. The effort has been successful because it begins at a young age, is uncompromising and relentless, and because impressionable young people can see for themselves the impact of smoking. The aim of anti-bullying efforts should be to bring about the same sort of realization, to educate people so they recognize that bullying is an emotional crime, that it says nothing about the victim and everything about the abuser. Parents teach their kids from the earliest age to avoid strangers, not to get into a car with someone they don’t know, to tell an adult if someone approaches them. It works – not always but often. Lives are saved as a result. There should be the same immediate reaction to bullying: rather than suffering in isolation, victims should know that the remedy is to speak up, that there is no shame in being targeted, that it’s not their fault. We don’t suggest people struggle with sexual abuse on their own, why should we take a less vigorous approach to mental and emotional abuse?
It’s sadly typical of sexual abuse that, once one victim finally speaks up, a flood of others follows. There is safety in numbers, and a reassurance in witnessing the courage of others. The same holds true for bullying, and the same level of public awareness and counteroffensive is essential. Amanda Todd was not without help. As is made clear in her weekend interview with the Vancouver Sun, Amanda’s mother was aware of the situation, knowledgeable, engaged, familiar with the internet and deeply involved in trying to protect her daughter. Still, she wasn’t able to protect her child. That fact shows both how devastating and how intractable the problem can be. It demonstrates that the considerable efforts already being made to deal with bullying simply aren’t enough, and that a larger, comprehensive – and relentless – strategy is needed. It has taken decades for society to come to grips with the ugly realities and pervasiveness of sexual abuse. It shouldn’t take as long to own up to the similar impact and commonality of the emotional abuse inherent in bullying, and to act effectively against it.
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McParland's position seems more straightforward, in that a lot of antisocial behaviors can be natural - and from a certain point of view, even work, but are circumscribed. At the same time, Kay says "... the first thing anti-bulling crusaders should do is dispense with the notion that we can convince teenage bullies to see the world through their victims’ eyes..."
Well, there is a way that might allow bullies to begin to see the world through a victim's eyes; out them. At the very least, people have a chance of some warning of who these predators are, the same way convicted sex offenders are outed when released.
Outing has the danger of inviting bullying and stalking to fight bullying and stalking, with context the only guide to legitimacy, notwithstanding the legitimacy of those actions at all. It can also encourage and help formalize a kind of troll subculture that embraces that kind of behavior.
