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On Bullying

Paul Olson
UNL Professor Emeritus

Fun wasn’t all we had on the playground in Port Wing, Wisconsin. Bullying was our métier. We were the children of hard-drinking lumberjacks, tough fishermen and hard-working dirt farmers. Much of the time, we had no playground supervision.

So we bullied each other — recess, noon hour, passing each other in the classroom or on the school stairs. We bullied one another for being fat, skinny, dumb, smart; for having parents too pious or too drunk; for poverty or stuck-upedness (meaning wealth), for feed-sack clothes or fancy ones. Bullying meant words, fists, frozen snowballs, sticks and threats: “My dad can whip your dad.” My father and mother sent me to first grade, telling me not to fight, but one day dad came by the school in his Model A and found me beaten up near the school curb. He didn’t bother to tell school authorities, just picked me up and took me home. For weeks, our evenings after chores were filled with the two of us boxing, dad on his knees to be about my height. Thereafter I fought and bullied, morning, noon and night. It was no way to end the bullying, but it was what dad knew.

One day, Mr. Hogan, our grade school principal hauled me into his eighth grade classroom by the scruff of the neck and told his students: “This is one of the worst boys in the school. I have seen him in eight fights today. What should I do with him?” The eighth graders gave no answers but peered down at me goggled-eyed. The law of “Bully and be bullied” was the law I knew beyond the doors of my home — a poor law, indeed.

Some people have suggested that the aforementioned type of child and youth culture, experienced by the anti-bullying advocates, is what powers their effort to change things. Of course, pain demands changes. But more is involved. Any decent person has to be appalled by the culture of bullying — its racism, misogyny, homophobia, anti-intellectualism and fear of the different. Bullying’s sheer appeal to the hairy ape in us encourages the sense that violence creates truth. Memory returns to me a person of color, fellow teen-aged construction worker, beat up by a group of white teen-aged fellow workers: “Say you’re a __________! Say you’re a __________! Say you’re a __________!” “I’m not! I’m not! I’m not!” When he said what they wanted him to say, they stopped the beating. To stop the bullying, he had to hate himself.

James Joyce’s “Stephen” in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man faces a teasing gang: “Stephen kisses his mother good night. Stephen kisses his mother good night!” “No I don’t! No, I don’t! No, I don’t” And then the gang: “Oh, Stephen doesn’t kiss his mother good night!” with much laughter and sneering. The bullied cannot win, and the bully assumes that violence creates reality.

Education worthy of the name promotes more than high paper-and-pencil test scores. Its goal is civility, inquiry, the student’s pursuit of evidence, logic, negotiation, of resistance to violence as the creator of truth. It seeks little Galileos who can face down their Inquisition. Those who spoke to the Legislature in behalf of LB 205, Senator Howard’s anti-bullying bill, sought such an education: NFP, the major education lobbies, the NAACP, the Mexican- American Commission, the Indian Commission, the ACLU, the National Association of Social Workers, various gay and lesbian groups, the Nebraska Department of Education. Parents and children provided the most gripping and disturbing testimony — of teachers, principals and school boards who ignored the abuse of children when it was continuous, verifiable and gratuitous. Women’s groups, medical groups, and churches sent letters. With such a coalition in support, it is not surprising that the Education Committee reported out the legislation unanimously. We await the full Legislature’s decision.

If we win the bill, we have much to do. Bullying partly comes out of the culture of the school, but the new methods of dealing can change things, e.g. those at Walnut Middle School in Grand Island or those developed in many Nebraska schools by Jeff Sprague of the University of Oregon. But part of bullying comes from the home and the general culture. A. C. Baldry of the Department of Social Psychology of the University of Rome found, in a study of over a thousand youngsters, that “[e]xposure to interparental violence is associated with bullying and victimization in school, even after controlling for direct child abuse” and that “[v]iolence within the family has detrimental effects on the child’s behavior.”

What creates domestic violence? Obviously substance abuse and the assumption of male prerogative promoted by our culture. Domestic violence centers and coalitions help.

But the conditions under which the modern working-class family exists are terrible: low pay, no health care for 40 million Americans, often two jobs for one or both parents, no government-licensed universal child care, latch-key after school situations, insufficient Head Start and community learning centers, little guaranteed maternity and paternity leave, full 40-hour or more jobs for both parents of babies and small children, threats of firing or having to move to retain a job. The Women’s International Coalition for Economic Justice has called on the world to “[e]nd economic conditions that exacerbate domestic violence,” and most European countries that I have visited have done something about the issues listed above. But, after a generation of rhetoric about family values, we, ironically or perhaps deliberately, have done almost nothing. UNICEF ranks the U.S. 20th among 21 wealthy nations in the world in its care for child welfare (child welfare aggregates data on bullying, hunger, infant mortality and a number of other subjects), because of the massive child poverty in this country, and because the U.S. does not invest much in day care services, health coverage and preventative care for families and children. We place few protections in place that might make families — gay or straight, single- or double-parented — less abusive and so less likely to create bullies or bullied. Then we blame the families for failing. That indeed is bullying.

The modern family and child exist in a political culture where bullying has become the rule of the day domestically and internationally, where the talk show hosts blabber their bullying political and religious invective, and where popular shows on television encourage people to abuse each other verbally. No one cares. For those Christian people who say we are a Christian nation, and yet do not care for the rights of the poor, women, and children: the way of abuse is not the way of First-Century Christianity as I understand it, or of Buddhism, or of the great leaders of the nonviolent movement in the 20th Century.

NFP has to witness in the face of international and national violence. It also has to witness in the face of the cravings in us that create the roots of private violence. Private faith in violence turns into public faith in violence as a policy tool. Those of us who seek a better culture could learn from Robert Epp, NFP State Board member from Henderson. When in the 1980s, Bob was to go out in Nicaragua to speak with the Contras about their attacks on helpless villages, his hosts said that they could provide an armed guard. He refused and went unarmed, letting his conscience and wisdom speak. Would we could educate children to pass such tests.