.our bully society.

Bullying has been on my mind lately...

There's a new book out I'd like to read, called The Bully Society: School Shootings and the Crisis of Bullying in America's Schools by Jessie Clein.  The Women's Media Center included a piece discussing the book's focus on the impact of gender and sexuality on bullying situations.  MS Magazine also included a recent piece on the many different programs working toward ending bullying in middle and high schools.  Cartoon Network and others have sponsored a Speak Up campaign against bullying.  And today a friend on Facebook shared this NYTimes article about a new documentary coming out this Friday called Bully. Basically, I've been seeing this topic everywhere I look!

Source: womensmediacenter.com via Jade on Pinterest

I couldn't agree more with Clein's assertion:


"Our children need a compassionate school community to counter these despairing trends. Keeping discussions about gender and sexuality out of schools reinforces isolation and cements our schools’ bully society. Even schools that take bullying seriously often miss the connection to gender. They may punish the bullies and throw one after another out of school, but they leave the culture of sexual harassment and bullying firmly intact. Schools can and should instead become leaders that change these hostile conditions. Doing nothing means students fend for themselves; and that’s why so many choose violence. One-day workshops and after-school programs do little to change our schools’ culture of hostility."

Because this has been on my mind lately, and because I continue to be reminded thanks to the media and many others that bullying is such a huge issue, I'm thinking of doing a related community outreach as a project for the Feminist Theory class I'm taking this quarter.  As an option our professor is letting us choose a topic/problem that relates to feminism/women's studies and try to create a related community service project.

I was reminded as I read these articles and thought about a future prospective project, of my students in my English 102 classes; both times I taught it I've had several people write papers on bullying and cyberbullying.  Most all of these students wrote about it because they were victims of it sometime during middle or high school (it's still a problem that's close to them and that they wish to combat as freshmen in college). I was a witness to some of their 'stories of bravery' as they shared them in their short argument reflections.  This past quarter, similar to my Women's Studies professor, I gave students the option of writing a letter to someone about their topic or doing a 'pocket-size' service project that related to their topic in some way. One girl who chose cyberbullying as her topic wrote a letter to her high school, advocating for more actions to be taken against cyberbullying: teacher-led workshops, a counselor on campus for students to talk to.  Another girl chose to do a small service project by signing a pledge on Stand Together and sharing her number on her social networking sites; she said many of her friends joined her in the pledge against bullying - - I thought this was so exciting for her; she saw that in taking this seemingly small stand, she became more than just a number!

As Clein suggests, as teachers we have an obligation to create a dialogue with students to "help them creat[e] friendships based on trust rather than social climbing and clawing. Instead of more punishment and increasing suspension rates—another form of social exclusion—conflict needs to become an opportunity for teaching where students learn to stand up for one another, refrain from vilifying others, and learn ways to appreciate, support, and help everyone in their community."  But, sadly, as Clein and the NYTimes article both suggest, "cruelty is embedded in our schools and therefore in our society as a whole."

Perhaps the best way to combat this growing problem is by providing a place for sharing our stories, making them our own, and becoming people who've overcome rather than people made into victims.  The Born This Way Foundation has a mission of 'inspiring bravery,' and has created a place for people to share their 'stories of bravery,' personal experiences with bullies.  I think this is one very helpful way to put an end to bullying, by sharing those stories with others and having people listen.  I shared some of my own stories in part of a memoir I wrote for a feminist memoir class, and I can't tell you how good it felt sharing those stories, making them my own.  Similar to my students who shared their stories with me, I was glad to have witnesses to these events (I might get up the courage to share them on here sometime).  If more of us understand that we've gone through these experiences, we might find a better way to combat the issue and understand the underlying problems.