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[sethrenn]

So, uh. Today's Writer's Block on LJ asks about "one thing you can stop or do to prevent bullying." This is a topic that... hits very close to home for us, even though we don't talk about it a whole lot publically; I'll just leave it at that for now. But we can give you, in fact, an entire list of bullying prevention tips guaranteed to work.

Comments

[pendelook]

You know... a lot of the problem is that there's not much people can do to eliminate bullying, because, fundamentally, a lot of bullies do not care, and no one has figured out how to make them care.

The only thing I can think of that may reduce bullying is getting this culture to respect that people's emotions really matter, and that hurting someone's feelings is not something to just brush off as no big deal. That the whole "toughen up" thing is fundamentally just damaging and a foolish view of how life actually works. (This could at least help with the bullies who don't realise they're bullying because they justify their behaviour.)

Unfortunately it looks to me like a problem on the level of a deep change in our entire culture's attitudes. Very deep. Because people are willing to make superficial changes in the form of exceptions, but the only thing that will really get rid of bullying, as opposed to shifting around the targets, is to change our culture's actual values on a level that is just too fundamental for me to even begin

[luinied]

Bullying does seem like one of those problems that, once it's happening, it's too late to find a real solution. Because the people who are bullies are already bullies, and the people who think that bullying is normal or not really a problem already have that opinion, and changing people's minds and behavior is just so fucking difficult.

I do wonder, though, if the best pragmatic approach to reducing bullying in school might be to stop putting kids in situations where they spend so much of their time bored. Which is perhaps easier said than done, I know...

[pendelook]

Well, but kids don't only bully because they're bored. They do it to scheme for position, to test out their limits, and many other reasons... including simply that it's easier to make fun of something that's new to you than admit to yourself that you're the one who doesn't understand it. I think that even if we tried to keep kids active and engaged in things, in a lot of situations they would rather ignore the activities in front of them to bully someone else instead. Otherwise nobody would get bullied during interesting movies or while doing activities that were actually fun.

I'm not sitting here shooting down suggestions just for the sake of naysaying, but I really do think that pragmatic approaches that focus on just trying to stop one situation are merely going to shift the problem to breaking out more somewhere else. Possibly in a form that will take us another generation to acknowledge as mattering.

[luinied]

Well, but kids don't only bully because they're bored.

Oh, definitely not. But, like, at least with boredom I can imagine some things to make school less boring - or, rather, other people who are better at figuring out how most kids work can. Whereas with the other things you mention I have absolutely no idea how you'd even begin to address them, nor have I read anything by someone who seems to have something approaching an answer. And boredom certainly seems to be an amplifying factor, both from anecdotal evidence and from studies that have shown it to increase how much ingroup/outgroup distinctions affect people.

(Although, wait, anything that would make school less boring for anyone would assuredly require slight tax increases, at least on the very rich and/or in the form of closing horrible loopholes. So I guess this isn't practical after all, at least in this country.)

[pendelook]

Also, can I just say, "it gets better" was something that was used as an excuse, when I was a child, to not do anything about it. It did not get better until long after the projected estimate, the revised estimate once that didn't happen, and the revised revised estimate. Meanwhile, I experienced permanent traumatic damage. And doesn't anyone ever care about now?

I know the idea behind promoting "it gets better" is to keep people hanging on indefinitely rather than committing suicide. But it's also far too easy of an out to keep from having to do anything about the problem.