Florida Archdiocese Permits After-School Cyberbullying, Then Brazenly Blames Parents

Thanks to Florida’s tough new school anti-bullying laws, which earned that state a rating of A++ with Bully Police USA, parents are now able to set the Miami Archdiocese straight about another one of it’s areas of perverted morality. As though condoning the sexual abuse of children by priests weren’t enough, the Catholic Archdiocese allows students to bully each other after school hours, according to a new lawsuit. Click here to read the full story. Apparently the Catholic church, that bastion of archaic morality, has failed to realize that once a student is enrolled in a school, that school becomes legally responsible for the student’s behavior round-the-clock. And to make matters worse, the Archdiocese had the gall to suggest that parents show some accountability for what their children do when they’re at home. “At some point, the parents must kick in and know what's going on,” the Archdiocese spokesperson and lawsuit defendant, Mary Ross Agosta, brazenly asserted.

According to the article, the school, Our Lady of Lourdes Academy, has an anti-bully policy forbidding kids to use cell phones during school hours. As the Archdiocese spokesperson Agosta explained, “Students must leave their cell phones in lockers and the school does not have Internet access.”

Since the bullies were not permitted to cyber-bully in school, the bullies requested permission from the school principal to use their cell phones and computers to bully their victim after school hours. “Sure, you have my permission,” said the principal. “And my blessing. That snotty little witch [referring to the teenage plaintiff] has been doing nothing but snitching on kids for picking on her. She is a female Judas, and I hope you kids give her what she deserves. Do you need my permission in writing, or is my spoken word sufficient?” Unfortunately, the bullies said they did not need her written permission, so the above factual account is conveniently being denied by the Archdiocese.

What shocked me most, though, is the paltry sum that’s being requested in the lawsuit: a miserly “more than $15,000.” Perhaps this is because it’s a Catholic school. If it were a Jewish school (and I can get away with saying this because I am a Jew) they would have sued for millions, as the financially savvy parents did in a recent bullying suit against a Jewish school in Florida. Is the suffering of a Jewish child really worth so much more than that of a Catholic?

[7.28.08 Addendum: Some people who read this blog took me too seriously. It is strictly satirical. I am not criticizing the church. I am making fun of our absurd anti-bully laws.]

[For a deeper understanding of anti-bully laws, read my articles, The Insanity of Workplace Anti-Bullying Laws and The Insanity of School Anti-Bullying Laws.]

Kentucky Murder-Suicide Highlights Danger Posed by Victims

I'm sure many of you heard the news last week of an angry young employee, Wesley Neal Higdon, who killed five people at a Henderson, Kentucky plastics factory where he worked, before taking his own life.

Such murder-suicides are not uncommon. A recent study by the Violence Policy Center found:

"more than 1,100 Americans died in murder-suicides in 2007. The murder-suicides included in the study range from high-profile mass shootings like the April 16, 2007, Virginia Tech massacre to familial shootings claiming the lives of spouses and children."

These horrific actions are committed by people who feel like victims. They are furious about the way they are treated and their anger builds up till they can't take it anymore. Finally, they lash out at their perceived tormenters, then take their own lives to end their misery. And these are only the statistics about murder-suicide. Many more people who feel victimized kill without taking their own lives.

But the modern world does not have a campaign against people who think and feel like victims. Society is only going after bullies. But bullies don't commit murder and suicide. Victims do. However, the worst thing anyone can do today is suggest that victims have anything to do with the way they are being treated. So we go after bullies instead, with the hope that if we can just get rid of bullies, there will be no victims, and these horrific murders and suicides will stop.

But, if anything, our anti-bullying policies are encouraging disgruntled workers to commit these horrible actions. If we are repeatedly bombarded with messages about how terrible bullies are...that bullies should not be tolerated...that bullying is a crime...that terrorism, rape, murder, slavery and genocide are acts of bullying, how should we react when we feel bullied by our employers and colleagues? Don't terrorists and rapists and murderers deserve to die? So we feel justified in wanting to kill, thanks to our ceaseless anti-bully education.

I often say at my seminars that no one gets insulted and criticized as much as I do. Because I dare to criticize the anti-bully movement as a misguided and counterproductive witch-hunt, explain how victims unwittingly reinforce their bullies, and teach victims how to stop being bullied all by themselves, many victims and victim-advocates want to see me dead. Don't believe me? Read the following email I recently received from D.T. (he does not want me to give his full name) with a nice email address of gofuckyourself@yahoo.com. Note that his gripe is not only against me, but against Jesus, as well. After all, we give the same advice. (By the way, I get many letters like this, but most are more inhibited in expressing their sentiments towards me.)

You disgust the Hell out of me. I hope you spend all eternity getting picked on in Hell. ____You obviously have no idea what you are talking about. You obviously were never the victim in school. If you had been the victim you would know what shit your advice really is._____From Bullies to Buddies_ is the stupidest advice I have ever heard. Would you tell a girl that is getting raped that it is somehow her fault? That_s what bullying is. A form of rape. What the victims need to be told is that they have the right to defend themselves. Enroll the kid in Martial Arts classes. Teach the kid how to fight. The bully will find another target. ____I am 48 years old. 35 years ago I was picked on unmercifully in High School. I didn_t fight back. I had the bible beating _turn the other cheek_ parents. That is the worst advice you can give. LEARN TO STAND UP FOR YOURSELF. Bullies always pick out the weakest target. Teach kids not to be a target.____If all else fails, BREAK THE BULLIES NOSE. IF BULLIES GOT THE SHIT KICKED OUT OF THEM, THEY WOULD LEARN SOME MANNERS.____THE ONLY GOOD BULLY IS A DEAD BULLY

And we're worried about bullies?

Best Wishes,

Izzy Kalman

Proud Victim Outraged at Charges of Being a Bully

The international anti-bully witch-hunt could be quite laughable if it didn't have such deleterious effects, such as promoting a victim mentality in society, and helping destroy the lives of countless kids who get accused of being "bullies."

Several weeks ago, I signed up for Google Alerts for the terms "bullies" and "bullying," so I receive an email notice when articles appear with those terms. I get dozens of links a day, and can't possibly read all of the articles, but I do try to glance at the headlines, and when there's one that sounds particularly interesting, I take the time to read it.

One that recently caught my eye was a British story, "Emmerdale actress 'shocked' at bullying claims." (By the way, the anti-bully witch-hunt seems to be even stronger in Britain than it is in the U.S.) As the story indicates, an English actress, Roxanne Pallet, who was a victim of bullying in school and is now an anti-bully campaigner, was accused in the Sunday Mirror of having bullied a couple of kids in high school. In other words, this woman who claims to have been a victim was herself victimizing other kids. She, of course, became outraged, insisting that as a virtuous victim she could not possibly have made other kids feel bad.

These conflicting accusations are possible because we have been brainwashed into believing that there are certain people in our midst called "bullies," who are evil and quite different from ourselves–who are not bullies–and there are people who are victims, and they are innocent and virtuous. We have forgotten that "bully" is not a diagnosis, but an insulting term we use against someone who makes us miserable and we don't know how to stop them. And we conveniently ignore the fact that victims are not necessarily virtuous, but actually are the most dangerous people both to themselves and others. They are often angry and hateful, and they believe that anything they do in revenge is justified.

Bully and victim are not objective diagnostic terms but subjective judgments. Most of the people who get called bullies insist they are victims, and from their point of view they are right. Roxanne Pallet thinks of herself as a victim and gets outraged at being called a bully. She is only aware of the misery that others caused her, but she can't fathom that she might have caused anyone else misery. Victims, after all, are virtuous and harmless. (Why, oh why, do all these frickin' victims have to periodically shoot up schools and tarnish this angelic image?)

Ms. Pallet also apparently takes pride in having been a victim, as though it's a badge of honor. What it really means to have been a victim is that she allowed herself to fall into the trap of getting upset by other kids, and didn't have the wisdom to successfully solve her social problems.

When will society wake up and realize that these categories of bully and victim are foolish and counterproductive? Few of us are saints, and just about all of us feel victimized by some people, and other people feel victimized by us. The bullies aren't other people. The bullies are us.

School District Proud of Anti-Bullying Program that Didn't Work

Have you heard about Austin Moore, the 13 year old boy in Deland Middle School in Florida who planned to commit a Columbine-type shooting, with the help of a couple of friends who were also being bullied? You can read about it here: Teen: Bullying Led To School Murder Plot

The article states, "The Volusia County School District said it prided itself on its anti-bullying program, but Moore said talking to school officials as dictated by the program failed."

The Florida State legislature is currently in the final stages of passing an anti-bullying law requiring schools to protect kids from bullying. While everyone seems to support anti-bullying laws (they only disagree on the details), they don't realize that these laws cannot make bullying disappear because anti-bullying programs generally don't work or make the problem worse. All these laws do is give ammunition to parents to sue their schools for failing to protect their children from bullying, a process that will bankrupt schools if enough parents take advantage of them.

As the article tells us, Austin Moore did what anti-bullying policies tell kids to do: to tell school authorities that they are being bullied. Unfortunately, as almost any kid can tell you, telling doesn't work. It just makes the kids angry at you for telling on them, so then they really want to beat you up. And when the school tells you repeatedly how terrible bullies are, that they are the moral equivalents of murderers, and that you must tell the school on bullies, what do you do when the school fails to live up to its end of the bargain and the kids keep on picking on you? You may very well decide, as Austin Moore and friends did, that you have no choice but to take justice into your own hands and shoot up the school.

Why is the Volusia County School District so proud of it's anti-bullying program?

Middle-aged Director of Anti-Bullying Charity Born Yesterday

Middle-aged people were usually born several decades ago, but it is possible to be born middle-aged yesterday. As you can see from the following news story, 'Apprentice' slammed by anti-bullying charity’, Claude Knight, director of the anti-bullying charity, Kidscape, was born yesterday and, turning on the TV for the first time in his fresh life, watched The Apprentice. To his great horror, he discovered that it showed public humiliation. As newborn director of an anti-bullying organization, he declared that The Apprentice was making it seem like public humiliation is acceptable, and condemned the show for encouraging bullying. It’s a good thing that he hadn’t tuned in to American Idol, or his young brain may have suffered a stroke.

The article didn’t mention the fact that Mr. Knight was born yesterday, but the astute reader can readily deduce this. Had he not been born yesterday, he would have seen the public humiliation that Eliot Spitzer was put through a couple of weeks ago, to everyone’s glee. If it is okay for adults to enjoy former Governor Spitzer’s humiliation, kids will certainly get the message that it’s okay to publicly humiliate kids for their faults and weaknesses.

And Mr. Knight may have noticed the public humiliation that our former President Clinton experienced for his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. And let’s not forget what was done to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

And with all the humiliation that gets dished out on a daily basis to President Bush, Britney Spears, and the endless series of people who adorn our newspapers, tabloids and TV screens, kids will certainly think it’s okay to humiliate the ordinary kids they see every day.

And Mr. Knight certainly would have come across the most egregious show of all, America’s Funniest Home Videos, in which members of a live audience laugh their heads off while watching people falling off roofs, getting hit by baseball bats, kicked in the balls, and being victims of all sorts of humiliation and violence. Imagine, a “family” show implying that it’s okay to laugh at human misery!

In fact, had Mr. Knight, who is so sensitive to aggression and humiliation on TV, been born decades ago, he would certainly have noticed by now that there is hardly a show on TV that doesn’t feature aggression and humiliation. With so few shows portraying people always being nice to each other, he would have concluded that the entire media is promoting bullying. Lets hope that Mr. Knight continues on his noble crusade and gets all our beloved entertainment pulled off the air.

And when he gets done with TV, let’s hope he’ll tackle movies, radio, newspapers, magazines and literature. And the Bible. Bullying must be stopped at all costs!

Response to comment by "Anonymous"

Thanks so much for your supportive response. I'm so glad that you have been able to help kids with my methods.

You are not the first person to have recommended the Nurtured Heart to me. I have actually purchased it, but haven't gotten around to reading it yet. I will also look into the work of Alan Kazdin when I have a chance.

Best Wishes,

Izzy Kalman

Zero-Tolerance Marches On–Especially in New York City

I was moved to write this blog entry after giving a four-hour presentation of my Bullies to Buddies approach to the middle- and high-school staff of a Special Education school that serves New York City–an experience I hope I will never have to repeat.

My basic philosophy, if you are not aware of it, is that the best way to reduce bullying is by teaching students how to handle it on their own rather than playing police officers trying to protect the students from each other and punishing kids for bullying behavior. The latter approach has taken over our country and is being written in stone by State after State passing school anti-bullying laws forbidding any kind of behavior that can upset anyone. Even though researchers repeatedly tell us that zero-tolerance doesn’t work, the zero-tolerance movement continues to grow in strength. Why? It’s because the “experts” themselves don’t know the alternative to zero-tolerance. In an earlier article, I wrote about a lecture in which the highly revered childhood aggression expert James Garbarino informed an audience that zero-tolerance doesn’t work, and then suggested that the solution to bullying was to make it a “human rights issue.” As though violations of human rights are to be tolerated! He simply replaced zero-tolerance with a euphemism for zero-tolerance.

I travel throughout the continental United States giving seminars and trainings, and nowhere, to my great chagrin, is zero-tolerance more evident that in my own hometown of New York City. About a year ago, I was hired by a public school in my own borough of Staten Island to implement my Bullies to Buddies program. In the middle of my standard presentation to students, the principal threw me out! Why? Because in my role-plays with children, I used the words “idiot” and “pee.” When I had a child push me in a role-play to teach kids how to deal with physical aggression, the principal had had more than she could take and ordered me to leave the building! Here I am, hired to teach kids how to deal with aggression, but apparently those who hired me apparently believe that if kids hear words like idiot and pee, and watch me being pushed, the children will be terribly harmed, perhaps even growing up to be psychopathic killers.

Several months ago, I gave my Anger Control Made Easy seminar in Manhattan. To teach how to deal with ethnic insults, I requested a volunteer to come up front and insult me for being a Jew–a demonstration I have done quite often. You should have seen the look of horror on the participants’ faces! They looked at me like I was absolutely insane! You would have thought I was asking them to rape their mothers! Not one person dared to volunteer. Adults—mental health professionals no less—who are supposed to help people learn to deal with the difficulties of life, have been so brainwashed to believing that the most harmful thing in the world is an ethnic insult, cannot fathom making ethnic insults even within the context of a make-believe role-play for training purposes!

My most recent humiliating experience occurred in the New York City special education school I mentioned at the beginning of this article. My role-plays repeatedly demonstrated their effectiveness, yet many of the staff were outraged by the idea that any student should be allowed to “get away” with touching another student, even when there is absolutely no pain involved (and I am not referring to sexual touching, which of course is not acceptable). At one point I could hardly continue with my presentation because of the bombardment of opposition.

To some extent, the staff opposition was due to their difficulty imagining how my techniques would work for classrooms full of behaviorally disturbed students. Certainly it is more difficult to teach such kids to control their impulses than to teach non-impaired students. But imagine the alternative: demanding that kids who have difficulty controlling themselves not touch anyone, and punishing them when they do! How is a school supposed to accomplish this? Any attempt to get such kids to stop touching each other is going to keep the staff busy with endless disciplinary actions, taking away precious academic time in order to deal with nonsense. One teacher, in her revulsion at my approach, invoked Columbine as a justification for zero-tolerance, as though adults punishing kids for the slightest acts of aggression is going to teach them they should not want to shoot up their perceived bullies!

The school staff, of course, never used the distasteful word “punishment” when explaining how they respond to children's acts of aggression, using the more positive-sounding euphemism, “consequences,” that is the vogue in the educational world. It was explained to me that the school does not “punish” kids. They have a three-tier system in which kids are sent to the principal’s office, where they are first warned about their behavior. Each trip to the principal’s office earns a more serious response, culminating in suspension for the third incident.

Don’t school staff realize that sending a child to the principal’s office, even for a reprimand and warning, is punishment? Do they think it is a reward, or even a neutral act? If you and I are kids, and I get you sent to the principal’s office because you bothered me, you will hate me even if you weren’t immediately suspended. And you will hate the principal, too. You will want to get even, so the next incident will have been set in motion. In revenge, you will commit aggression against me again, and again I will get you sent to the principal’s office, till you are expelled from the school that is being paid to provide you with an academic education! Yes, the very act of sending a child to the principal’s office is punishment, causing kids to hate both each other and the school. It is high time the educational establishment stopped fooling itself with euphemisms that help schools deny the fact that they are punishing students.

Schools declare that they are dedicated to teaching tolerance, but zero-tolerance policies promote intolerance. If we want to help our children, we need to teach them how to handle the ordinary and inevitable acts of aggression they encounter. If they don’t learn how to handle aggression in their childhood, we are handicapping them for life. Having been led by their schools to believe they are entitled to a life in which no one abuses them in any way, they are going to be in for a real shock when they get married and have children, and discover what abuse is really like!

Click here for my latest seminar schedule.