I have a mildly surprising confession to make: I was bullied as a child. I was held down and punched in the stomach. I had my bookbag torn from my back and thrown in the lake. This treatment started in primary school and lasted through my freshman year in high school. After that, there was attempted bullying but that didn't work out so well for them. That being said, I have another confession that is a bit more controversial: I don't put any stock into the anti-bullying movement.
I am not saying I am for bullying either. I don't like bullying, and can't imagine anyone does, even the bullies themselves. Bullying is the recourse of the weak and insecure, usually coming from children that have some sort of family, personal, or social situation they don't know how to deal with. Many bullies come from broken homes or are abused. Many (and most of mine) were simply privileged children with a chip on their shoulder and an imaginary social standing they felt they had to reinforce. I don't hold a grudge. I'm doing fantastic while many of them are working part time at a car wash.
This past week on South Park in the episode titled "Butterballs" the gang tackled the complex issue of bullying by bullying each other into a political stance on bullying. Stan created a video speaking out against bullying, saying that it should kill itself. The video Stan makes is actually called "Make Bullying Kill Itself." There are multiple references to the movie Bully as well as a "jack it in San Diego" reference, which is a direct dig on Kony 2012 creator Jason Russell.
Once again South Park was able to take a complex social issue and break it down in a 22 minute chunk of hilarity that we all should take a lesson from. Why is it that the most obvious lessons in life tend to come from cartoons? Because they are able to cross the lines that we are afraid to cross, and say the things that we can only think without fear of retribution. While I anticipate the backlash to this article will be hefty, it's worth it because of the end message.
That message, about bullying, is that it will never go away. This is not something that we can erase, but it is something we can control and learn to handle with awareness. As Butters tells his bully (his grandmother) at the end of the episode, "people like you will always exist but I will not always be sad. One day I will be happy but you will die as an empty person." Sadly, for most children this cognitive thinking is not enough to lift the weight of having to deal with a full time-bully.
The director of the film Bully, Lee Hirsch, laid out the inherent problem with bullying with this quote: "I felt that the hardest part of being bullied was communicating," Hirsch said. "And getting help. I couldn't enroll people's support. People would say things like 'get over it,' even my own father and mother. They weren't with me. That was a big part of my wanting to make the film. It's cathartic on a daily basis."
The bullying Hirsch had to endure, the bullying thousands of kids endure on a daily basis, continues for one major reason - the ignorance and ineffective response of parents, teachers, school administrators and peers. While I don't believe you can erase bullying, you certainly can't ignore it to the point that children take their own lives because of it. The parents who tell their kids to "deal with it" or "get over it" are just as much to blame for continued bullying as the bullies themselves. In fact, more so because they are adults capable of controlling and understanding a situation better than any child should be able to. Most of the time, bullies don't understand why they do what they do, just that they do.
The key is being aware of the situation, except when I say that in public, I'm branded as a bully myself because I'm not directly voicing opposition to bullying, rather asking for a full understanding of the situation. Bullied kids need help dealing with a bully, and bullies themselves need help as well. Acting like it's a black and white situation where a socially inept kid is being picked on for no clear reason is ignorant.
As to my experience, once I stood up to bullies (on the advice of my father) the bullying slowed to a crawl and eventually stopped. But while I was no longer being bullied, they searched for others to bully. Their behavior didn't change, they didn't get the help they needed. The numerous suspensions, referrals and detentions did nothing to deter them because there was never any conversation. No one above the student level seemed to care.
What this episode of South Park and the film Bully have succeeded in doing is to bring awareness to a situation that needs more of it, even if the overall delivery of the message is a bit murky. When bullying comes to a head and a child commits suicide we all respond with shock and outrage, two emotions that imply no one saw it coming. Sometimes that might be true, and I do have a personal situation that reflects that (but I'd rather not publicly speak about it for the sake of my family).
The point is, after that shock and outrage, we see the signs that were presenting along the way that there was trouble, and that is on us. That is because we weren't fully aware of the situation of the child and didn't make enough of an effort to be fully aware. As a parent of a tween and a teen I'd like to think I am as aware as one can be, and check daily for any signs of undue stress or changes in behavior that would indicate any troubles that might be related to bullying.
We see a film like Bully or a terribly sad news story surrounding it and we get that shock and outrage. We run home to our kids, "Are you being bullied? You'd tell me if you were, right?" We spend that day, a week perhaps, feeling a small percentage of that loss or sympathy, but then we forget about it. Then we move on. And that's the problem. We need to react and be vigilant every day of our children's lives. We need to stay involved and stay aware. We can't just wait for some event to happen, or for the media to latch on to some story to give a crap for a day. We need to give a crap every single day.
This recent episode of South Park also made two other very pointed remarks about bullying. First, that the anti-bullying campaigns themselves are a form of bullying and second, that if everyone should see the film (in this case, Stan's film about bullying) it should be released for free on the internet, rather than in theaters. I'd have to agree with both of those points. If Bully is such a life-changing and eye-opening piece, in this day and age of social media, it should be released on-line, for free, rather than in theaters through major distribution companies and studios. The ad money alone from the YouTube channel with millions of views would do well enough to pay back investors.
As for anti-bullying campaigns, they exist all the time, like suicide hotlines, but only seem to become loud when they have the backing of a media story and the power of advertising. For instance, I just saw a Bing (Microsoft's search engine) commercial for Bully. Now we care. Now it's on television with the money of major corporations behind it, so it must be important, right?
However you might interpret all this, you must know I do believe that bullying in this nation goes too far, and we must try to control and understand it. We cannot stop it, just as we cannot stop many other deeply psychological behaviors that are ingrained into our human nature. We can no more put a permanent end to bullying no more than we can put a permanent end to any other crime based on psychological factors no matter how much we dislike it. Bullying, whether physical or mental, happens every day, at every level and walk of life. Whether it be a kid on the bus or a co-worker pushing you around mentally. When we are adults, we must find a way to deal; when we are kids we don't know how to without help.
Pay attention to your kids. Whether they be the bullied or the bullies themselves. Let's not wait for a movie to come out on the subject, or another tragedy in the news to spark our interest in bullying. Let's be vigilant and care every day. Ask your child how their day was, look for signs of a disturbance, something you should (if you are an attentive parent) be able to identify. Don't wait to get bullied into caring about bullying.
Image credit: Flickr user JoelK75 - A page from "The Super Dictionary" (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, July 1978)
