Tom Purcell: Bullies, Technology and Bullets
Tom Purcell is a columnist syndicated by Cagle Cartoons.
Bullies, Technology and Bullets
By Tom Purcell
Bullying isn’t like it used to be.
Contemporary bullies are also using technology. They’re making nasty cell-phone calls, sending e-mails and text messages and posting embarrassing things on the Internet.
The anonymous cowards.
When I was a kid in the ’70s, at least bullies had to put some effort into their work. They were still cowards — they picked on kids who were small and defenseless — but they had to do most of their work face to face.
It’s not possible to give a wedgie over the Internet.
That made the bullies vulnerable. There were lots of older kids in our neighborhood who protected us. A bully who roughed us up was likely to get roughed up himself. And bullies feared nobody as they did my sister Kris.
I’m certain one guy still regrets the day he decided to bust up my go-kart. He was a big, fat kid and he laughed and taunted me as he kicked my handcrafted vehicle into pieces — until Kris appeared out of nowhere.
She tackled him from behind and down he went. As he lay on his belly, Kris clenched her fists and pounded with abandon. He blubbered like a baby, forever humiliated in front of the other neighborhood kids. Bullies are generally not as tough as they appear to be.
But now, thanks to technology, anybody can bully.
“Traditional bullying was about boys intimidating other boys by physical force,” says Carleton Kendrick, a family therapist and author of “Take Out Your Nose Ring, Honey, We’re Going to Grandma’s.” “But technology has enabled people to bully who otherwise might not have before. One of the biggest trends is a significant increase in bullying by girls.”
At the same time the opportunities to bully have increased, the kids who are bullied are more isolated. Families are smaller, neighborhoods are emptier and latchkey kids often find themselves alone.
A lot of kids aren’t handling the trend well.
“According to various studies, one in three kids is either bullied or a bully,” says Kendrick. “And on any given day 160,000 kids are so traumatized by fear and intimidation they’re afraid to go to school.”
Or worse. A common thread in school shootings during the past decade — both in high school and college — is that the shooter or shooters had been bullied.
So what to do? There are no easy answers.
When I was a kid, the prevailing wisdom was to teach kids to fight back. If a bigger kid bullied you, your dad showed you techniques on how to handle him. Even if you lost the fight, the bully generally would earn a respect for you and back down.
But in these nutty times, that might not work. The bully could be packing heat. Or, if a bully is humiliated by the kid he was bullying, the bully’s parent might have his lawyer sue.
It’s no wonder numerous government and private organizations are promoting anti-bullying campaigns. It’s no wonder 27 states have passed anti-bullying laws and nine more are considering them. Or that school districts across America are implementing anti-bullying measures to defuse situations before they get out of hand.
Nobody knows who or when the next teen powder keg will be set off, but we do know that bullying may be an ingredient that sets the kid off. In our rapidly changing culture, something that used to be dealt with by kids on playgrounds has blossomed into a problem with all kinds of disastrous consequences.
Though even when I was a kid the consequences were sometimes disastrous.
In 1972, a great tragedy shocked our community. A kid who’d been bullied cracked. When the bully showed up at his house one afternoon, the kid opened his bedroom window and shot and killed him with a .22-caliber rifle.
“That’s the difference,” says Kendrick. “The landscape has changed so radically that if such a thing happened today, nobody would be that surprised.”
Tom Purcell is a humor columnist nationally syndicated exclusively by Cagle Cartoons.
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5 Responses to “Tom Purcell: Bullies, Technology and Bullets”
[...] noemail@noemail.org (Ed Kohler) wrote an interesting post today!.Here’s a quick excerptBullies, Technology and Bullets. By Tom Purcell. Bullying isn’t like it used to be. Contemporary bullies are also using technology. They’re making nasty cell-phone calls, sending e-mails and text messages and posting embarrassing things … [...]
I’m probably not the most objective viewer of this situation, since I was for years a victim of bullies myself, but I always wonder just how much of a novelty things really are. For instance I can personally assure you that “girl bullies” is no new trend. When I was in school there were plenty of female bullies, they just had female victims, while the male bullies had victims of either sex (though usually other boys).
I’m also usually very suspicious of the “anti-bully” policies that are promised. My high school had one of those, and it would have been funny if it weren’t so insulting. Mostly it was business as usual, teachers endeavoured to ignore bullying as much as they possibly could, and when they no longer had a choice (like in the case of a beating) the bully got suspended for 3 days to a week, got a stern talking to by a counsellor and had to write a letter of apology. I received one such letter from a bully, who was giggling like mad when she gave it to me. My only consolation is that, considering her age and the awe-inspiring spelling and grammar errors in it, she probably would never get a job beyond mopping floors.
Spare me the “psychological counselling” (which apparently the perpetrators got, but the victims never did), some kids are bastards and that’s all there is to it. If these new laws actually help, I’m all for them, but unless we start contemplating actually expelling the really bad offenders (don’t forget that bullies usually are disruptive in general, not just to the bodies and minds of their favourite punch-toy) especially in the high school stage, it will not get better. Considering the sheer numbers of kids who get put through hell by other kids the fact that a few crack, grab a gun and mete out their own justice isn’t all that strange. In fact, I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often.
The statistic says that 160,000 don’t go on any given day out of fear. That’s a lot of kids under a lot of pressure and feeling of isolation. From experience I can tell you that no small part of the pain comes from being told that you should trust teachers and counsellors and then seeing how they are, at best, utterly ineffective at protecting you in any way. Oh and fighting back does not in fact always work, by the way. It can even make it worse, depending on the situation. So over 100,000 kids are under extreme emotional strain on any given day. I’m sure it would be safe to say that at least 10,000 are 15 or older, and at least 1,000 of those has access to a firearm. It’s not out of this world to think that a young man or woman (though more often man) under severe emotional strain, often physical fear, feeling unprotected and angry, will a gun nearby, has a 1 in 1,000 chance of picking that gun up and using it.
I pretty much agree with Lynx. All I will add is that guns did come to our shool several times, on both the bullies’ side and against. No one ever got shot, but it came close at least once.
Given that was in suburbia, and years ago, well I can only imagine what its like today. No scratch that, there was a kid in my daughter’s class that was a real problem for her. He is now held back in Kindergarten and may have even left the school system. The good news is the school did more than my old school would have. But, I have my doubts that unless I raised some stink (among others), I am not so sure what would be done.
I see that the ability to bully long distance (cell phones, e-mails, etc.) has added a new dimension to bullying. Another new dimension is provided by the disappearance of closely knit communities. Add in parents distracted by overwork, and bullying seems denstined to grow worse.
When grandparents gossripped over the back fence, there were aldo more eyes and ears keeping track of what was happening. Now each bullied child is left to his own devices, and there is little a child can do to put a stop to it by himself.
Borrowing what David Schraub said on a post about racism, to tackle bullying will take a great national moral shift in attitude. Are we up to it?
The sad thing is that it is possible to combat it. It only takes leadership and community willpower.
When my son was bullied, we had the good fortune to have one year with a grad teacher who just wouldn’t tolerate it. In class or on the palyground, punishment for bullying was swift. “Not my Filly” omplaints from parents of bullies were not accepted. Luckily, a number of parents backed the teacher, not just one family, and for that one year
there was no bullying among 4th graders.
Parental involvement spread to other grades, other teachers were pressured to follow suit, and that little (by comparison) school improved throughout.
It can be done. But will we? I don’t know if that kind of concentrated effort is possible these days.
1. It is irrelevent where a problem is claimed where none exists, or is hyped beyond reality.
2. In this case, where there is a problem, we already see solutions, namely individuals choosing to act against bullying. The problem is actually greater than ignoring the practice of bullying; in many cases, parents set poor examples or are neglectful because they’re self-centered. Plenty of us have never found bullying acceptable and even on this thread you have already seen examples of people acting against bullying (and not listed here, but no doubt also acted against other forms of misbehavior).