Oct 08, 2010 6:03 PM GMT
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/08/4-bullied-teen-deaths-at-_n_755461.html
Four suicides at one school alone. The news is full of stories lately, mostly gay youths who've given up hope, no fault of their own, in a harsh world that seeks in seemingly every pore of culture to dehumanize their very being.
This isn't just a lack of empathy, employed by those without compassion, this is a violent assault on the very psyche of those victims of bullying. It's in our culture to be a have rather than a have-not, to be seen rather than not, be visible and visibly cool than not, and if in our culture we have elements that serve to dehumanize, whether it takes the form of bad parenting due to a tradition or perhaps a religious misreading of what love and compassion is there for, these elements go into creating bullies.
Not enough is done to focus on the bullies. Where are their pictures in the media? Why are they not publicly shamed and made to understand the full gravity of their words and actions? I say not enough time is given to the ones who commit bullying, we spend too much time on what it is that these bullies were looking for in their victims.
Where are the parents of bullies? What are they doing to stop their kids, and where did they screw up, if they did, in raising their children?
The consequences are everyday and range from post-traumatic stress disorders to various complexes to real physical damage and yes, death. Bullying is made worse today than it was decades ago. This I will say with confidence.
Decades ago you weren't followed home and tormented on the computer over the Internet. Decades ago you couldn't be phoned wherever you were and tormented. Bullying is now pervasive, making its consequences that much more grave.
From Dan Savage's site:
"It Gets Better" isn't the only answer. It concentrates on the victims, and that is important, but what about the bullies? When it comes to bullying, it's not just empathy that is important in defeating it, it's also needed to be made into something explicitly wrong, demonstrably bad in doing, and if empathy doesn't work for bullies, then yes, hit the goddamn kid.
Corporal punishment has a long history. Hitting even was done to kids during court trials in order to imprint on them the memory of certain judicial details, they could find these kids later and ask them for the details--they wouldn't have forgot. But corporal punishment was used for disciplinary action like behaving in class, and the problem with this was that proper behaviour is subjective. Well what about the dehumanization of other students?
What about bullying? Is it acceptable then? I say yes, because for all the programs and speeches to talk about empathy and the importance of putting one's self into another's shoes to understand what victimhood is like, can only go so far.
The boys who taunt with words like "fag" need to be taught that nothing is wrong with being gay and that their words can have powerful consequences. If they continue, cuff them hard enough to see stars.
The girls who call one of their own a "slut" day in and day out, who throw food at her, have to be slapped hard enough to never do it again.
Suspensions are rare, due to the idea that bullying is natural. This belief though, is most likely to have been adopted after the administrators underwent bullying in their adolescence, and having lived it, see it as a natural part of growing up. While conflict is natural, inherent even, in our race, there is a difference between conflict bullying. Conflict is between aggressors, and bullying has a victim. Bullying is different today than it was yesterday, it's much more pervasive, and as we move towards a world where gays are accepted for the human beings they are, we must see the common enemy of man as dehumanization.
Expulsions are almost never employed. A product of that same belief that victimhood is a necessary part of growing up. But it only is in order to learn what victimhood is like. Out of this do we learn compassion for others in the same spot. Bullies are often thought to be victims themselves, of bad parents, broken homes, and personal insecurities, but if they are not made to see that is this very human condition that binds us all in the same boat, then there is no compassion. There is no empathy. And if bullying continues, there must be consequences. Hit the fucker.
from articleThe family watched, she said, as the girls who had tormented Sladjana for months walked up to the casket – and laughed.
________
Most mornings before school, Jennifer Eyring would take Pepto-Bismol to calm her stomach and plead with her mother to let her stay home.
_________
"Bullying doesn't start as criminal. They need to be held accountable the very first time they call somebody a gross term," Coloroso says. "That is the beginning of dehumanization."
Four suicides at one school alone. The news is full of stories lately, mostly gay youths who've given up hope, no fault of their own, in a harsh world that seeks in seemingly every pore of culture to dehumanize their very being.
This isn't just a lack of empathy, employed by those without compassion, this is a violent assault on the very psyche of those victims of bullying. It's in our culture to be a have rather than a have-not, to be seen rather than not, be visible and visibly cool than not, and if in our culture we have elements that serve to dehumanize, whether it takes the form of bad parenting due to a tradition or perhaps a religious misreading of what love and compassion is there for, these elements go into creating bullies.
Not enough is done to focus on the bullies. Where are their pictures in the media? Why are they not publicly shamed and made to understand the full gravity of their words and actions? I say not enough time is given to the ones who commit bullying, we spend too much time on what it is that these bullies were looking for in their victims.
Where are the parents of bullies? What are they doing to stop their kids, and where did they screw up, if they did, in raising their children?
The consequences are everyday and range from post-traumatic stress disorders to various complexes to real physical damage and yes, death. Bullying is made worse today than it was decades ago. This I will say with confidence.
Decades ago you weren't followed home and tormented on the computer over the Internet. Decades ago you couldn't be phoned wherever you were and tormented. Bullying is now pervasive, making its consequences that much more grave.
From Dan Savage's site:
siteBeing told that they're sinful and that their love offends God, and being told that their relationships are unworthy of the civil right that is marriage (not the religious rite that some people use to solemnize their civil marriages), can eat away at the souls of gay kids. It makes them feel like they're not valued, that their lives are not worth living. And if one of your children is unlucky enough to be gay, the anti-gay bigotry you espouse makes them doubt that their parents truly love them—to say nothing of the gentle "savior" they've heard so much about, a gentle and loving father who will condemn them to hell for the sin of falling in love with the wrong person.
The children of people who see gay people as sinful or damaged or disordered and unworthy of full civil equality—even if those people strive to express their bigotry in the politest possible way (at least when they happen to be addressing a gay person)—learn to see gay people as sinful, damaged, disordered, and unworthy. And while there may not be any gay adults or couples where you live, or at your church, or at your workplace, I promise you that there are gay and lesbian children in your schools. You may only attack gays and lesbians at the ballot box, nice and impersonally, but your children have the option of attacking actual real gays and lesbians, in person, in real time.
Real gay and lesbian children. Not political abstractions, not "sinners." Real gay and lesbian children.
"It Gets Better" isn't the only answer. It concentrates on the victims, and that is important, but what about the bullies? When it comes to bullying, it's not just empathy that is important in defeating it, it's also needed to be made into something explicitly wrong, demonstrably bad in doing, and if empathy doesn't work for bullies, then yes, hit the goddamn kid.
Corporal punishment has a long history. Hitting even was done to kids during court trials in order to imprint on them the memory of certain judicial details, they could find these kids later and ask them for the details--they wouldn't have forgot. But corporal punishment was used for disciplinary action like behaving in class, and the problem with this was that proper behaviour is subjective. Well what about the dehumanization of other students?
What about bullying? Is it acceptable then? I say yes, because for all the programs and speeches to talk about empathy and the importance of putting one's self into another's shoes to understand what victimhood is like, can only go so far.
The boys who taunt with words like "fag" need to be taught that nothing is wrong with being gay and that their words can have powerful consequences. If they continue, cuff them hard enough to see stars.
The girls who call one of their own a "slut" day in and day out, who throw food at her, have to be slapped hard enough to never do it again.
Suspensions are rare, due to the idea that bullying is natural. This belief though, is most likely to have been adopted after the administrators underwent bullying in their adolescence, and having lived it, see it as a natural part of growing up. While conflict is natural, inherent even, in our race, there is a difference between conflict bullying. Conflict is between aggressors, and bullying has a victim. Bullying is different today than it was yesterday, it's much more pervasive, and as we move towards a world where gays are accepted for the human beings they are, we must see the common enemy of man as dehumanization.
Expulsions are almost never employed. A product of that same belief that victimhood is a necessary part of growing up. But it only is in order to learn what victimhood is like. Out of this do we learn compassion for others in the same spot. Bullies are often thought to be victims themselves, of bad parents, broken homes, and personal insecurities, but if they are not made to see that is this very human condition that binds us all in the same boat, then there is no compassion. There is no empathy. And if bullying continues, there must be consequences. Hit the fucker.
