Let's say you are 15 years old, or 13, or 11, and for some reason--a reason over which you have no control--you have been singled out by your schoolmates as an object for scorn and humiliation. Every day at school, for you, is another day in hell. You are called "whore," "bitch," "slut;" or "fag," "pussy," "scum;" or worse. People deliberately bump into you and knock your books out of your hands in the hallway. Nobody sits with you at lunch, or, if they do, those people are harassed until they stop sitting with you. These bullies are not the brutish looking comic-strip bullies, whom nobody likes and who steal other kids' lunch money. No, these bullies are among the popular kids--the athletes, cheerleaders, preppies. They are popular not just with most of the other kids but also with the teachers, school administrators, and adults in the larger community.
The law requires that you attend school, regardless of how you feel about it and how you are treated. You are not one of the privileged minority whose parents have the means to send them to a private alternative school or to convince the school board that they can educate them adequately at home. You have no choice.
What do you do? If you are like most of the hundreds of thousands of picked-on kids who suffer like this every day you somehow suck it up. You harden yourself and somehow survive it. You may be the only person who will ever know the full extent of your suffering. You may think about killing yourself; you may even fantasize some violent revenge against the whole school, as the whole school seems to be your enemy. If you are like most kids such thoughts remain in the realm of fantasy. But every once in a while, in a particularly vulnerable person, the despair or rage or both erupt into violence, either against the self or against the whole school, and only then does school bullying become an issue to the larger community.
Here's how Helen Smith, in her book The Scarred Heart, tells one such story, that of the suicide of 13-year-old April Michelle Himes of Richland, Washington: "Kids at school called her fat, threw things at her and pushed her around. They ridiculed her with rumors that she stuffed tissues in her bra. She attempted suicide and her parents admitted her to an inpatient mental hospital program and sought counseling but said it didn't help. After missing fifty-three out of the required one hundred and eighty days of school, she was told that she would have to return to school or appear before a truancy board which could then send her to a juvenile detention center. She decided the better alternative was to go into her bedroom and hang herself with a belt. ... In times past, she could have just dropped out of school, but now kids like her are trapped by compulsory education."
In my home state of Massachusetts we've been hearing a lot recently about school bullying and suicide. A year ago, headlines were made when 11-year-old Charles Joseph Walker-Hoover hanged himself rather than face another day of bullying at the supposedly "good" charter school he attended in Springfield. Then, in January of this year, Phoebe Prince, a 15-year-old immigrant from Ireland, hanged herself after months of bullying by students at the public school she attended in the affluent community of South Hadley.
The outrage that followed Prince's suicide, coming so soon after Walker-Hoover's, forced the hands of the Massachusetts legislature. Just last week they passed, unanimously, an anti-bullying bill that was then immediately signed into law by the governor. The whole state felt that something had to be done, so that Charles's and Phoebe's deaths would not have been in vain. So they created a law.
I'm not surprised by the legislators' unanimous votes for this bill, nor by the governor's well-publicized signing of it. Given the emotional climate, they probably saw no other choice. Anyone who voted against it would have been seen as unsympathetic to the grieving parents and as soft on bullying. But this new law is not going to solve the bullying problem, and it will almost certainly create legal and bureaucratic nightmares.
Why Anti-Bullying Legislation Will Not Solve the Bullying Problem
The new anti-bullying law requires that every school employee--including cafeteria workers, janitors, and bus drivers as well as teachers and administrators--report any bullying incident that they see to the principal, who is then required to investigate the incident and take appropriate disciplinary action. In addition, the law requires that every student in Massachusetts, from kindergarten through 12th grade, in every school, participate every year in an "anti-bullying curriculum." On the surface, these may look like good things, but you don't have to scratch very deeply to see the problems.
The first problem with the reporting requirement is that very often--maybe most often--the staff member will have no way to know whether a particular act represents good-natured teasing or real bullying. This is especially true in large schools, where individual staff members don't know everyone. Teasing among friends is a normal, healthy part of adolescence, especially for boys. The best of friends may repeatedly call one another names that sound horrid to outsiders. For many boys, this is their way of hugging.
A cafeteria worker hears a kid calling another kid "loser" a couple of times and then, by law, has to report it and the principal has to investigate it. This is going to keep the principal very busy and will cause a lot of perfectly good, normal, compassionate kids to get into trouble. It'll be like the no tolerance policy on weapons, which has led kids to get suspended for such infractions as bringing a nail clipper to school; or like the no-tolerance policy on sexual harassment, which caused a third-grade boy to be suspended for kissing a little girl on the cheek. Civil liberties lawyers in Massachusetts are already saying that the new law is likely to run afoul of free speech rights. It will be one more form of top-down control over the behavior of kids in school; one more requirement that makes school feel even more restrictive and prison-like than it already does.
Another problem with the reporting requirement is that it will lead the bullies to hide their bullying from adults even more effectively than they already do. The modern-day bullies that have driven kids to suicide are, by all reports, already very good at hiding their transgressions and looking innocent to adults. This is why teachers and principals so often fail to believe the victims, or the victims' parents, when they are told about harassment. They don't see it. In their view the accused are among the best kids in the school, so they jump to the conclusion that the complaint must represent a psychological problem on the part of the complainer, and then they recommend therapy. The new law is not going to solve this problem. It's still going to be one kid's word against the words of a whole group of other kids; and the latter will often be the smoother talkers.
A third problem with the reporting requirement is that it will cause the "us versus them" gulf between students and staff at schools to become even wider than it is today. Kids will feel that they have to behave even more differently when a staff member is around than is already the case. Because staff members must bring them up for even minor infractions of the new speech code, staff will appear even more than now to be the enemy. So, students' reports to teachers and principals about harrassments will be seen as tattling to the enemy, even more so than it already is; and students who have the gall to make such reports will be singled out for further abuse, even more than they already are.
What about the other part of the law, the part that requires students to participate every year in an anti-bullying curriculum? A new course, a new curriculum, a new set of tests--these have become the knee-jerk reactions of our culture to every problem that we perceive among kids (see my post of Oct. 8, 2008, for another example of this reaction). In fact, many anti-bullying school programs and courses have been tried over the past twenty years, in other countries as well as in the United States, and many outcome studies have been conducted to see if they work. So far, no program has proven itself to be very effective.
