Columbine Made Simple
“I’ve told them a million times I can’t stand being teased! So why do they keep on doing it to me?”
The true meaning of the school massacres and what the country should be learning from them.
Section Five
Teasing bullying activities:
THE DYNAMICS OF TEASING
by Izzy Kalman, MS
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The dynamics of teasing are very simple, and well understood by psychologists who deal with victims of teasing. It is caused by a simple mistake. This is how it works. The teasers taunt the victims, and the victims, instead of ignoring the teasing, become angry and try to stop it. The victims, by becoming angry over the silly insults, are the losers in this interchange, and look and feel like fools. The teasers are the winners and have a ball at the victims' expense. The victims think they are stopping their tormentors, because that is what they are trying to do. What they cannot see is that they are actually causing the teasers to continue abusing them. The more upset the victims become, and the harder they try to stop the teasers, the more fun the teasers have. And the teasers look forward to the next opportunity to repeat this pleasure.
Though it is generally a mistake to do so, it is natural for someone to feel upset by ridicule, and almost anyone can fall into the trap of getting mad and trying to actively stop teasers. That is why teasing victims are found among all groups of people, regardless of intelligence, race, religion, or socioeconomic standing. That is also why the students who slaughtered their peers came from typical American homes, confounding the expectations of analysts to find environments that breed student mass-murderers. Everyone also has the potential for enjoying teasing others (I demonstrate this every time I perform my "game" for treating teasing victims), and teasers, therefore, are also regular kids from every type of background. Unfortunately, this means that what happened in Columbine can happen anywhere.
