Bullying comes in all forms but is usually thought of as a K-12 issue that ceases to exist once students head off to college.
This misconception is one that could be harming many college students, according to Brian Van Brunt, President of the National Behavioral Intervention Team Association and author of the book Ending Campus Violence: New Approaches to Prevention.
“I think it’s that perception (college) a blank slate,” Van Brunt says. “Once high school’s over it’ll be a whole new experience, but the problems don’t go away. These things don’t just disappear … I would argue they get worse because you’re adding stress … Why would that get easier not harder?”
THE REST.
Obviously I am not in favor of bullying, but how bout sticking up for yourself, does that ever come into play? I understand that we need protections for children and for those with disabilities, but conveying the idea that bystanders will intervene and society will protect everyone from unpleasantness from others, well, that's simply not the way the world works for adults. So at what point do we establish that, if you object to being called a geek or a nerd, then you should say something, and perhaps that's more effective than telling a teacher or waiting for bystander to intervene? And as far as the connection between mass murder and being bullied, it's always more comforting to believe that circumstances "made" someone commit an atrocity than that a small percentage of humans are innately murderers regardless of their circumstances. Thus we have mass murder defined as a form of misogyny caused by our misoygnistic society which might be reformed, rather than caused by one individual's abberrant behaviour which cannot always be prevented.
ReplyDeleteOf course it's hard to convey that without sounding like an insensitive jerk.
Indeed it is.
Delete"While cases like that of Elliot Rodger - who killed six and injured 13 more during a shooting rampage near the University of California Santa Barbara in May - are far and few between when compared to cases of every day bullying, Van Brunt says there’s a higher possibility for there’s a higher chance of those situations when mental illness is untreated and bullying, isolation and stress reach extreme levels."
DeleteSure, the bullying made him do it. Anything to avoid the cold hard facts that 3-4% of men are psychopaths and small percentage of those will be dangerous to others. But I understand that few want to believe the cold hard facts and prefer the Pollyannish idea that people are only what society makes them and that we have no inherent qualities whatsoever, this way, it is society, not Rodger, who murdered those people. This idea, which is so reassuring to most, seems frightful to me.
Patty, I agree. "Bullying" has become a catch-all accusation that encompasses both harmful behavior of children and generally acceptable behavior by adults. Bullying can be simply hard-ball office politics. Life is competative. Some adults wish it were less so.
ReplyDeleteI would love to know what they were using to define bullying in their study. For example, I have felt bullied by some students, yet didn't give in to their demands because I held the power. Would I have claimed to have been bullied on a survey such as this? No. Yet one of my students filed a complaint that I had 'bullied' her when I simply sent an email stating that the late work she had turned in would earn an F, since that was the course policy.
ReplyDeleteIf this is part of the course then it's institutionalized bullying, which is arguably worse.
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