Four Difficult Questions Regarding Bullying and Youth Suicide

http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2011/12/12/questions-bullying-suicide.html

by lkrubner • 14 years ago

38 18 14 years ago

plasma• 14 years ago

The school is at fault. Schools are spineless.

My brother dealt with bullying at school a few years ago.

Constant harassment, abuse, the usual. He would hate going to school, and come home crying. On the weekends, he would disappear at times and we would have to call the police to help us find him, as he told us he was going to jump into oncoming traffic.

1) The privately paid school he went to had a "Zero tolerance" bullying policy. They did not act on it.

2) The kid(s) who were part of the bullying were eventually pulled aside and asked to stop the harassment, yet continued to do so.

3) After the problem was known about by teachers, students and staff, nothing of value was ever done. The bullying continued, just more passively now.

So he changed schools. Now he's just graduated, and he's happy to be done.

Why are schools so SPINELESS? Where is the expulsion of these kids who think its all fun and games?

Why do schools seem to try everything in their power to keep the bad kids in, and force the good kids out?

Where is the spine and values people should hold, especially at a school in charge of children's welfare and education, at a time like this? It's pathetic.

mlsuthe2• 14 years ago

The line between "fun and games" and "damaging" is very grey and differs widely from administrator to administrator. I know a lot of people (and I'm sure there are a lot of teachers/administrators) who harbor the "harden up and get over it" viewpoint.

Legislating out bullying, while a productive first step, will not make it go away. It's the conflation of factors that tell young kids that "gay = wrong/weak/unmanly"--parents, media, peers, etc. Of course it should be our mission to make schools a safe place for kids, but that's only a part of the solution. Many kids live in homophobic home environments, engage in extracurriculars (namely, sports) that are typically more homophobic, or have role models that reinforce homophobia (some religions are this way).

In order to cultivate safe spaces, schools do need:

-to call out bigotry wherever it is (zero tolerance policies that are actually enforced)

-to give teachers and administrators sensitivity training

-counseling, resources, and positive role models

-specifically designated LGBT safe spaces

And keep in mind that things have gotten a lot better for LGBT kids in school. Just ten years ago a lot of this stuff was simply shrugged off and pinned on kids who "couldn't handle" a "normal" amount of bullying.

thret• 14 years ago

"-specifically designated LGBT safe spaces"

That's hilariously bad. Every place should be equally safe. You want to herd the LGBT kids into a corner?

JumpCrisscross• 14 years ago

A central point in the article was that there may not be a clear cut distinction between good kids and bad kids, and that prematurely forcing that delineation on kids has un-intended consequences.

In high school and college I had some nasty things said to me. But I also said some overly harsh words that I wouldn't have said had I been more mature. While a harsh word from an administrator wouldn't have been out of the question, I shudder to think where my life would have gone had I been expelled.

georgieporgie• 14 years ago

I'm going to put this bluntly: I had a number of teachers that were assholes. I think being around kids all day, every day, does to some teachers what sitting in front of a computer all day, every day, does to some tech workers. They get sucked into their environment -- which happens to be juvenile drama -- and they lose the ability to remain mature and objective about respectful behavior.

Incidentally, a cousin of mine has been bullied quite badly. Sure, he's weird and obnoxious, but allowing people to bully him to "teach him a lesson" only exacerbates the cycle. And now he's even the victim of bullying about bullying from some jerk family members. Unfortunately, the a-holes sense the easily bullied like sharks to blood.

shaggyfrog3• 14 years ago

This is incredibly lazy writing for someone who is not only a researcher but a PhD. Instead of a well-researched piece with citations and supporting evidence, we get a half-assed questions-instead-of-answers style "reporting" using several inflammatory "questions" which are fleshed out with anecdotal, emotional and unsupported musings.

Especially link-baity by asking if the It Gets Better project is causing harm to children. I can see the religious right warming up their copy-paste commands.

danah boyd, if you really want to do something constructive, do some damn research. Which is your job title. This piece does nothing to advance our actual knowledge of bullying and suicide.

wisty• 14 years ago

So, asking questions (fleshed out with personal opinion and anecdotes) isn't research?

OK, there's no study or links. It's not really her area. Her first point (moral panic has stopped LGBT youths from seeking advice from strangers in the LGBT community, especially online) is probably true. The second ("It Gets Better" could have an unintended affect) is tricky. The third (media harassment is bad) is obvious, and the forth (adults should also blame themselves and society) is kind of broad and meaningless.

You're taking umbrage at the second point - that "It Gets Better" can make things worse. Just because it's a well intentioned (and in some ways effective) movement, does that mean that no-one can question it without bullet-proof evidence? Well intentioned movements often make things worse (in some way), and you can't rely on "real" research to uncover this if nobody is asking questions.

I'm all for supporting "It Gets Better" until it's proven to be a bad idea, and supporting whatever it morphs into if a better idea is found. I also think that questions should be asked; even stupid ones. Creating an "us and them" mindset is the fastest path to groupthink.

shaggyfrog3• 14 years ago

My point with It Gets Better is that she is suggesting there may be unintended negative consequences to the movement. First, this is sensationalism. Second, her own words ironically have unintended consequences since people who "oppose" LBGT groups will no doubt use this argument in the future. What would danah boyd think about giving the latest talking point to the likes of, say, the Westboro Baptist Church?

lkrubner4• 14 years ago

I don't understand your point, and I sure as hell can not imagine why you think a writer needs to stick to a formal style, rather than express thoughts both formally and informally, but this issue has come up before. Over the years there has been a set of people who reliably criticize academic writers who write in an informal manner on their blogs. The economist Paul Krugman gets this kind of criticism a lot -- that is his blog is not sufficiently formal for someone who has won a Nobel prize. All the same, danah boyd explained her reasoning before, on the matter of informality and blog writing. This is what she wrote (several paragraphs):

I'm an academic but I'm also a blogger. For me, these are separate identities. I write formal papers that I spend months trying to find the language to properly express what's going on. In those papers, I try to balance precision and readability. My blog is a different story. I write in an off-the-cuff manner, trying to paint impressions rather than nuance. In academic writing, I have to outline methodology and background, assuming that no one has heard of me or the topic before. In my blog, I write with the assumption that people are familiar with my work and with the topic. In academic writing, I write for posterity. In my blog, I write to get an issue off my chest and to work things out while they are still raw.

The informal language in my blog is intentional. The lack of citations is intentional. They are meant to signal that this is a work-in-progress. I want to signal that I'm thinking out loud. Unfortunately, many feel as though a blog must be formal and then they project this view onto my writing and then complain about the language and the lack of cites. I am capable of situating arguments in broader theoretical arguments, but I don't attempt to do that here while I'm working through things. I guess my signals are broken.

The blog structure is not built for long essays. My blog itself is not formatted to take on a 3000 word essay (it breaks). When I started publishing conference cribs, I started making them separate webpages that I would link to from Apophenia and M2M. Following that, whenever I'd write a blog entry that was longer than 2000 words, I'd shove it off to the same messy directory with my papers and my cribs and link to it from my blog. They're all under the /papers directory simply because I started keeping track of things at the papers URL. You can see more than papers there. I started sub-directorying it a few months ago because it was getting messy. Essays are exactly that and the class piece was an essay.

I added citations to everything under that directory because I was finding that people were taking that material out of context. They were copying/pasting the whole article without reference to where it came from because it looked like it stood on its own (folks didn't do that with my blog entries). I wanted people to know the context so all essays, cribs, op-eds, and papers got tagged with a citation. Unfortunately, this meant that people thought that it was a proper paper.

http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ResponseToClassDivisions....

shaggyfrog3• 14 years ago

Your over-focusing on just the issue of a lack of citations.

The entire format of this piece is centred on the use of provocative questions as headings. This is a well-known trope in journalism for lazy writers who are more concerned about generating traffic than they are doing their job, i.e., finding answers. See: Betteridge's Law of Headlines.

nhashem• 14 years ago

This article is mostly just lazy hypotheticals, but I was surprised that the author thought, "the sexual predator moral panic kicked in in 2005." I'm not LGBT, but I was pretty much 'not cool' for most of high school, and I spent a lot of 9th and 10th grade hanging out in this sci-fi/fantasy collaborative writing forum on AOL (yep, that's how 'not cool' I was), so this was like '97 and '98. Eventually I did end up meeting with two of them, a very nice couple who went to a college near me at the time, and had a fun time.

And then I told my parents I had met them through the internet, and my mom flipped her shit because all she reads about the internet is how everyone the hangs out in an AOL chat room ends up getting raped and murdered, or something.

So 'stranger danger' seems like it's been around since it became mainstream for minors to use the internet, but I would have expected it to dissipate with time, much like people used to be generally sketched out by online dating, but I don't know a single person who hasn't tried it today. Then again, as other commenters have indicated, there is pretty much no factual evidence presented here one way or another.

dasil003• 14 years ago

It was definitely around when I was a kid in the 80s. It certainly wasn't as hysterical, but "don't talk to strangers" was definitely boilerplate parenting. Of course it's impossible to really get in my own head as a 10-year-old, but I think I internalized the message more or less appropriately as "not everyone is bad, but keep your wits about you".

Later when I got on BBSes and then usenet/irc there wasn't really an adult in my life who had a clue what the Internet was (other than something that annoyingly tied up the phone line and induced nerd rage when they picked it up :), but I was talking to all kinds of strangers and rightly felt totally safe because what I was doing was just on the internet. If someone had asked to meet in person it would have been exceedingly weird and triggered all kinds of red flags.

lkrubner4• 14 years ago

"So 'stranger danger' seems like it's been around since it became mainstream for minors to use the internet"

Yes, but when was that? There is a dramatic change in scale between 1995 and 2005, regarding how many people had easy access to the Internet.

When she writes of the moral panic, she is not referring to moments when individual parents expressed concern about what their children were doing online, but rather, she is writing about when the media focused on this story. I agree the media emphasized reasons to be afraid of the Internet ever since the Internet emerged in the 90s, but there was an exaggerated emphasis in the mid 00s when it became the easiest way for lazy journalists to frame a story about the Internet.

I'm under the impression boyd is also talking about the period of time when youth in the USA faced increasing restrictions regarding their physical movement, and increased supervision from parents. Consider what boyd writes here:

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=w092y1Y6u...

She also wrote the following (several paragraphs) about MySpace in 2006:

MySpace is in a different position, one far more harrowing. MySpace has grown so large that the needs, values and practices of its users are slamming into each other. It's facing the archetypical clashing of cultures. Yet, interestingly, most users are not that concerned - they're trying to figure out how to live in this super public. The challenge is that outsiders are panicking about a culture that they are not a part of. They want to kill the super public rather than support people in learning how to negotiate it. No one knows how to live in such a super public, but this structure is going to become increasingly a part of our lives. It is no wonder that youth want to figure it out. And it is critical that they do, especially since our physical worlds have become more segregated and walled off, partitioned by age, race, class, religion, values, etc. Yet, it is the older generation that did that segregating and they're not really ready to face collapsed contexts at every turn or to learn how to engage with people who have very different values on a daily basis. Because of their position of power, outsiders are pushing the big red emergency button, screaming danger and creating a complete and utter moral panic. Welcome to a generational divide, where adults are unable to see the practices of their children on kids' terms.

If MySpace falters in the next 1-2 years, it will be because of this moral panic. Before all of you competitors get motivated to exacerbate the moral panic, think again. If the moral panic succeeds:

Youth will lose (even more) freedom of speech. How far will the curtailment of the First Amendment go?

All users will lose the safety and opportunities of pseudonymity, particularly around political speech and particularly internationally.

Internet companies will be required to confirm the real life identity of all users. At their own cost.

International growth on social communities will be massively curtailed because it is much harder to confirm non-US populations.

Internet companies will lose the protections of common carrier which will have ramifications in all sorts of directions.

Internet companies will see a massive increase in subpoenas and will be forced to turn over data on their users which will in turn destroy the trust relationship between companies and users.

There will be a much greater barrier for new communities to form and for startups to build out new social environments.

International companies will be far better positioned to create new social technologies because they won't have to abide by American laws even if American citizens use their technology (assuming the servers are hosted outside of the US). Unless, of course, we decide to block sites on a nation-wide basis....

http://www.danah.org/papers/FriendsterMySpaceEssay.html

patrocles• 14 years ago

How many people googled Jamey Rodemeyer?

It seems boyd's article revolves around our relationship with media. We look back a century and the political papers and non-stop sensationalism seems quite familiar. Humanity hasn't changed, online or offline, we still rubberneck.

So boyd wants refuges built to replace the ones that once existed. I'm wish her well. However over time, we see safe havens come and go. Why is that?

Maybe it's the same reason. Those safe havens either collapse or are destroyed because our society is as shitty as ever was.

Four Difficult Questions Regarding Bullying and Youth Suicide

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