Bullying?

“You make me sick. I hate you. You just bug the s— out of me.” The girl’s otherwise pretty features curled into a sneer of disgust as she spoke. And then she whacked me hard across the face.* I was easily intimidated by insults, by hatred, by anger, but I was neither a physical coward nor a pacifist, so of course I hit her  back just as hard and grabbed her hair for good measure. She grabbed mine in retaliation, but I sank my long nails into her hand, and she let go so that I was able to get away and go inside. After school that day, she and a male friend of hers whom she had persuaded to follow me home attacked me: he held my arms while she hit me, screaming “Bitch! Look what she did to me!” showing him the scratches on her hands. Again, I was able to break free and run away, this time going home to my parents’ house.

Such events were only too common at one time in my life, between the ages of eleven and fourteen or so. It was usually girls, occasionally with boys acting as their sidekicks, who attacked me this way, so that any time I read about the non-violent tendencies of girls I laugh rather hollowly to myself. It was seldom dangerous: in those days weapons played no part in school fights in any school I attended, and it was very seldom that communal or ethnic grudges of any sort were involved, which there usually are on the rare occasions that bullying turns really violent.

Not dangerous, then, but ugly, painful, and soul-destroying, which is why, although I was not frightened either of fighting back or getting physically hurt, I was nevertheless terrorized by these people, terrorized and demoralized. They turned me into an introvert, made me a bad student (I got to be afraid of school and spent as little time and thought on it as possible), and left me distrustful of people to the point of misanthropy for many years.

I’m not writing this to lament the past or rustle up sympathy, though, but to say that I know a thing or two about bullying, its causes, its effects, and its ubiquity, and to explain why I’ve always been interested in the subject. I’ve also noticed that bullying has been much in the news lately, from the sad story of Phoebe Prince to President Obama’s warning of its dangers to Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” movement directed at homosexual teenagers. Once ignored by the grownups (though they usually knew it was happening) on the grounds that their intervention would make matters worse, or  that children need to learn to defend themselves, or the related idea that being bullied builds character, it is now an object of official concern. There are anti-bullying programs, anti-bullying days (these differ from one place to another), anti-bullying pledges, anti-bullying slogans, and anti-bullying skill sets to teach to children.

All of these innovations in handling bullying are well-intentioned, and it’s possible that a handful might even work, though I have my doubts about most of them. Bullying is, well, er, a complicated social phenomenon, and it’s clear to me that many of the people talking about it have not bothered to give it much thought or to make some elementary distinctions concerning what is, and is not, bullying, nor tried to identify some basic types of bullying – important because some kinds of bullying are, as I said, physically dangerous, some are psychically damaging, and others are just part of growing up.

First – a basic definition of bullying. Dictionary.com says that a bully is a “blustering, quarrelsome, overbearing person who habitually badgers and intimidates smaller or weaker people. This seems to be the substance of most definitions I’ve found, and although I might quarrel with the idea that a bully is a “blustering, quarrelsome, overbearing person”, I would certainly agree with the idea that bullies choose smaller and/or weaker people as their victims. However, this element of the definition of a bully is often forgotten or neglected or left out of consideration by those who have brought bullying into the public eye. Somehow, bullying is coming to mean any sort of taunting, or any kind of physically aggressive behavior.

I, on the other hand, think it’s important to maintain the distinction between psychological bullying, physical bullying  and simple physical aggression. For example, I was a victim of bullying in the story I told above, but in a sense it was not true physical bullying. Why? Because the girl who attacked me was physically a match for me, about the same height and weight; it was not from her ability to intimidate me physically that she got her power over me. The man in this story (link thanks to Kathy Shaidle again) is not, as Kathy apparently believes, a bully, but an aggressive jerk. He and the coach whom he attacked were social and physical equals. The fact that he struck the other coach while the latter’s back was turned is the mark of a nasty, ill-tempered and perhaps cowardly nature, but not of a bully. The young man I once knew at university many years ago who was repeatedly thrown out of parties and games for brawling was not a bully: he was an aggressive young man who needed to find a better outlet for his energy than was available to him in ordinary school life. I say he wasn’t a bully because he never “picked on” anyone, never ganged up on anyone, and fought only men who were his own size or larger. Why does it matter so much to distinguish between this kind of thing and bullying? Because the proper treatment for the former is heavy exercise and the discipline of older men, not programs and counseling and psychiatric intervention.

Equally important is the distinction between psychological bullying and simple taunting, a difference that turns on a consideration of the relationship between the alleged bully and his victim, and the victim’s status in his own and the bully’s social group. It isn’t as easy to make as the distinction between physical bullying and simple physical aggression. June Thomas said recently in Slate that Dan Savage was “bullying” Marcus Bachmann by taunting the latter about his slight lisp and somewhat effeminate (to Savage) mannerisms. A commenter stepped in and said that this was untrue, because Mr Savage is no stronger than Mr Bachmann. I believe the commenter was quite right: Dan Savage and Marcus Bachmann have very different constituencies, but they are both men in the public eye and neither shows the kind of psychological weakness that makes someone an easy target for bullies, who feed on other people’s fear and weakness. Of course, it’s probably foolish of Savage to give those people who are genuinely hostile to gays ammunition by feeding them lines they can use against the objects of their hostility, but that is a separate issue. Bachmann is fair game, and the taunts Savage aims at him are fair enough. They may be unpleasant, and indeed it’s extremely unpleasant to be on the receiving end of taunting (and taunting can sometimes be illegal, if it turns slanderous), but it should not call for outside intervention.

But some of the readers of that column in Slate appear to have gone further, and decided that even if Savage is bullying Bachmann, he is justified in doing so because a) Bachmann is a bully too, bullying patients into becoming “straight”; and b) Savage and other gay people have themselves been victims  of bullying by people like Bachmann and by straight society in general. I would counsel anyone against using that kind of justification for bullying, as there’s hardly a bully on the planet who does not act out of a well-watered sense of grievance and a chip on his shoulder. I will use the Hitler defense and say that he managed to convince himself that rich Jews were bullying good Germans and must be stopped.

Real psychological bullying can only happen when the victim is socially and psychologically less powerful than the bully, but what defines this social power, especially among the very young? It doesn’t always reside where you might think. The rich girl at an ordinary public middle school may be for various reasons less psychologically defended, more socially isolated, (and perhaps less rich) than the scrappy street-fighter who taunts her for her manners and her odd speaking voice and gradually progresses to physically hurting her. The runty boy in class may have learned to use sarcasm and his talent for making people laugh to intimidate the bigger but less articulate new boy who finally loses patience with his tormentor and hits him. Phoebe Prince was psychologically naked because she was depressed. The girl who attacked me had intimidated me psychologically, partly because I was socially isolated, partly because her hatred was a terrible thing to encounter. All of us – me and my examples, real or imaginary – shared a certain psychological quality that shows in one’s face and body language, that is hard to define but that could be summarized by the phrase “easy target”.

An easy target is quite different from someone who becomes the object of taunting for a reason – like being fat, or white in a black school, or posh in an unposh neighborhood, or being gay, or for that matter is taunted for attacking gays. Easy targets show a certain lack of ease in their own skins; they are often depressed; they don’t know the social ropes (that’s why the new-kid-in-school so often becomes the target of bullying); and when they encounter taunting, rather than shrug it off, they show that it hurts. For a certain type of bully, this is like blood in the water for sharks – an inducement to attack. In fact, even for people who are not normally bullies, the sight of someone unravelling under taunting can be an inducement that brings out the worst in them, all their own sense of grievance and fear of their peers and remembrance of being insulted or isolated by them. Easy targets have that effect on people, and I fear the only real cure for the kind of bullying they experience is to learn not to be one.  That’s why being fat or white or posh or gay is never enough, by itself, to explain why a particular person is being bullied. It takes that look.

How can situations like these be corrected by any number of teacher interventions and anti-bullying programs? Teachers can intervene to stop children or young adults from hitting each other; anti-bullying programs may help to defuse bullying between ethnic groups; young people can be taught to speak politely to each other, at least in the presence of adults. But no counseling of the children, no adult protection, can create the psychic armor essential to defeating all attempts at bullying. I’m not certain it can be taught. I’m not at all certain how I learned it myself. All I know is that one day when I was about sixteen I was standing in our enormous school parking lot, waiting for the bus. One of my tormentors from the old days, one I hadn’t seen for several years, caught my eye and approached me. But her taunts were silly and childish and had no power over me. After a minute or two she lost interest in the game, and wandered away.

*Just back to add that I shared no classes with the girl and did not know her name. I was vaguely aware of having seen her before in the schoolyard, but that was all. In any case, as I’d had so little contact with her, her behavior to me could not possibly have been based on personal knowledge or a grudge. She simply didn’t like the look of me.

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