In this issue:Time to Call Off the Anti-Bully Witch HuntHidden Victims of the Zero-Tolerance MovementPromoting Hatred and RevengeThe Official Promotion of Fear
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Dear Reader:
I hope you have enjoyed the spring holidays. I haven't sent out a major newsletter since February. Instead, I sent out a few blogs that are shorter.
In recent years, I have been writing newsletters around the anniversary of the Columbine shooting, commenting on the state of affairs of the anti-bully movement to which Columbine gave rise. This year I am again documenting the ineffectiveness of that well-inentioned but misguided movement, and some of the harm it is causing to our children and society.
I also invite you to reproduce this article, and articles in previous newsletters for your own publications (please cite the author and source).
Please consult the right-hand side-bar for my upcoming seminar schedule.
Time to Call Off the Anti-Bully Witch Hunt
A couple of weeks ago (April 20) marked the 9th anniversary of the Columbine massacre, the event that gave rise to the most massive witch-hunt in human history, the anti-bully movement. In our zeal to prevent further Columbine-type events, our society has decided to target “bullies,” in the naïve belief that such a campaign will prevent these horrible acts. The number of States that have adopted school anti-bullying laws has grown to 35. Meanwhile, we can’t figure out why bullying appears to be skyrocketing during the same period that anti-bullying programs, policies and education are proliferating. Can’t anyone make the connection between increased anti-bully efforts and increased bullying? Apparently not.
A year ago, I wrote a newsletter article about Japan’s experience with bullying. After a decade of government-mandated school anti-bullying regulations, articles hit our newspapers informing us that bullying was found to have become a more intense problem in Japan. Did anyone put two-and-two together? No. A year later, Japan is still continuing to battle bullying in schools, and more news has emerged from Japan about the intensification of the bullying problem.
A year from now we will commemorate the ten year anniversary of the Columbine massacre, and we will undoubtedly be bombarded with more articles calling for the need to stop bullying. Will we go the way of the Japanese and refuse to draw the conclusion that anti-bully crusades cause more harm than good? I doubt it. I am the only person in the world I know of who is writing anything critical of the anti-bully movement, and I am not likely to get the whole world to see the error of its ways, especially when State after State passes anti-bullying laws that force schools to treat bullying as a crime.
The Anti-Bully Movement is a Witch-Hunt
The anti-bully movement is being presented as a science-based campaign to solve a problem, but the only thing scientific about it is that scientists are involved. A witch-hunt is still a witch-hunt regardless of who does the hunting.
Witches are usually pictured as long-chinned women with hairy warts, flying on brooms and wearing tall, pointy hats, but witch-hunters of old realized that witches look like everyone else. Everyone, therefore, was under suspicion. Usually, all that was needed to have someone condemned as a witch was to accuse them of being one.
Bullies are usually portrayed either as big, dumb-looking brutes picking on people weaker than themselves or, more symbolically, as devils with horns and tails. But real-life bullies, like witches, look just like anyone else. (In fact, as I have explained in the past, the evil bullies are not other people; they are us.) So trained experts come into our children’s schools, instructing kids how to recognize their classmates who are bullies, to realize how terrible they are, not to be like them, to have no tolerance or respect for them, and to turn them in to the authorities to be exorcised. Usually, all that’s needed to get someone condemned as a bully is to accuse them of being one, for it is the kid claiming to be a victim who determines who the bully is. While we are too humane today to burn bullies at the stake, many anti-bully zealots sound as if they pine for the days of yore when burning at the stake was considered “best practice” in dealing with evil. In any case, we are becoming pretty successful at ruining the lives of those who get accused of being bullies.
Witch-hunts are started when some catastrophe–usually an epidemic–occurs. Not knowing the true cause of the catastrophe, people blame witches. Angry mobs then set out to hunt down the evil witches among them and burn them at the stake. Of course the “witches” burned alive are not the causes of the epidemic, so the epidemic continues. However, burning witches sure makes people feel better. And since no one thinks of themselves as witches, everyone is gung ho about the witch-hunt. Witch-hunters never see the evil in themselves. They do not realize that the truly evil actions are committed not by witches, but by the witch-hunters who are pursuing and burning witches.
Our current witch-hunt was spawned in response to the Columbine massacre, the most horrendous in the series of school shootings plaguing the U.S. to that date (the more recent Virginia Tech shooting killed many more). We became determined to prevent such incidents at all costs. Because these school shootings were all committed by victims of bullying, our experts determined that the cause of the school shooting epidemic is bullies. If we would only eradicate bullies, they concluded, our schools would become happy, victim-free places with no one wanting to shoot up anyone else.
However, school shootings are not committed by bullies, but by people who feel like victims. The only place where everyone is always nice to each other is Heaven. One of the unfortunate aspects of life is having to deal with people who treat us in ways we don't like to be treated. Bullying is an inevitable part of life and we all need to learn to deal with it and, unfortunately, most people never do. That's why most of us have others–usually family members–who are bullying us, and all of our efforts to make them stop fail. In fact, as I show at my seminars, the things we do to make people stop bullying us actually makes them continue!
Today, though, we are not allowed to suggest that victims have anything to do with the way they are treated. So, rather than dealing with the real problem, which is not knowing what to do when people bully us, we are blaming bullies and trying to punish them out of existence. Society is trying to solve the wrong problem with the wrong solution, so the bullying problem escalates, shootings continue, and the witch-hunt gains momentum and becomes mandated by the law.
Hidden Victims of the Zero-Tolerance Movement
We are so happy to hate bullies that we fail to see the harm anti-bully policies are causing. In my profession’s (school psychology) monthly newspaper, the Communique, authors of an article on “relational aggression” (the supposedly female version of bullying) claimed that relational aggression is escalating, and hypothesize that the cause of the escalation is anti-bullying programs. The article states:
…occurrences of relationally aggressive behaviors are only likely to increase as schools target and discourage more overt forms of aggression. In fact, researchers have found that schools that have adopted the most detailed and comprehensive antibullying policies are those in which relational aggression incidence rates appear to be higher. (Crothers et.al, Addressing Relational Aggression in Children and Adolescents, Communique, March 2008, Volume 36, Number 6, page 23)
Based on this, you would think that the authors would suggest getting rid of, or at least reducing, the intensity of anti-bullying policies. But no. They simply recommend that schools add a program to address relational aggression (and the authors are developing a program precisely for this purpose, which, of course, they hope you will go out and buy). This is the same model that our American health care system uses: take a medication to address a symptom, then add more medications to deal with the side effects of the first medication.
The greatet number of immediate victims of our intensive anti-bullying policies are the kids who are being accused of bullying. A recent article from Nevada reports on the escalation in kids being sent to special schools for aggressive behavior. While this process may help some students, does anyone actually believe that expelling kids from their school helps most of them? It is usually a major step in the downfall of the child, as the child gets sent from one school for problem kids to another, often leading to increased involvement in anti-social behavior, culminating in prison. Very often, anti-bully researchers point out that a high percentage of bullies end up in jail, so we can pat ourselves on the back in congratulation for our efforts in pursuing bullies. But we make them that way! Instead of being proud of ourselves for supposedly targeting criminals-in-the-making, we should be ashamed of ourselves for making kids become criminals. In the hope of creating safer schools, we are ultimately making society a more dangerous place while sacrificing countless students on the anti-bully altar.
And why do these kids get sacrificed? As the article says,
December is typically a slow month when it comes to discipline problems. But in December 2007, principals referred 535 students for expulsion, compared with 344 in December 2006. One theory is that the Dec. 11 wounding of several Mojave High School students who were shot after getting off a school bus spurred the expulsion referrals.
One act of violence occurs, and hundreds of kids who had absolutely nothing to do with that incident pay the price because of our own fears. It's a classic witch-hunt phenomenon!
The most violent people are not the "bullies" in school. They are the adults, who, in the name of making schools safer, are ruining kids’ lives en masse! There are many excellent approaches for reducing aggressive behavior by treating kids like human beings. But rather than using them, which requires that we, ourselves, make the effort to act like human beings, we employ simplistic zero-tolerance-for-bullying policies that turn kids into criminals by treating them like criminals.
The anti-bully movement came into being primarily to prevent school shootings. But school shootings continue, and the shooters seem to have graduated from high school to college. Why haven’t nine years of intensive anti-bully education solved the problem?
While hoping to create a more peaceful society, anti-bully crusaders have been unwittingly making society more dangerous. By supporting victims against bullies, they are rewarding kids for thinking and acting like victims, so we get more kids thinking and acting like victims. The most dangerous people in the world, both to themselves and others, are not bullies but victims. When people feel like victims, they seethe with anger, hatred and desire for revenge. They are capable of committing the most horrendous actions and feel completely justified.
We wonder why school shootings continue despite nine years of anti-bullying education? Well, what can we expect, when adult “experts” have been teaching kids in school how terrible bullies are…that bullies shouldn’t be tolerated…that bullying is a terrible crime…that bullying causes kids to kill themselves and others? Are kids who hear this message supposed to think, “Bullies are no big deal; I won’t let them bother me”? Of course not! They are being encouraged to hate their perceived bullies and to believe that bullies deserve to die. When schools promise kids that they will protect them from bullies and inevitably fail to fulfill that promise, should we be surprised when victims of bullying decide they have no choice but to take justice into their own hands? When they have been taught for nine years that their bullies are the moral equivalent of psychopathic murderers, can victims be blamed for wanting revenge and inflicting the “well-deserved” death penalty upon their bullies, and upon their schools that let the bullying continue?
Our Hate-Filled Academic Researchers
If you are a mental health professional, you have probably been hearing with increasing frequency messages that we need to follow scientifically validated procedures. This means, of course, that the procedures should be validated by those doing and publishing research, as though researchers are the ultimate purveyors of truth and wisdom. Researchers are supposed to be objective or their findings will be biased. But the anti-bully researchers hate bullies. How can their findings be trusted?
I recently had a brief email exchange with a graduate student planning to do research on bullies. She claims that most of them are either neurologically impaired or emotionally disturbed, and asks, “Why would anyone want to be friends with someone like that?” Really, why would anyone want to be friends with someone who isn’t neurologically or emotionally perfect? For the past couple of decades, our schools have been intensively trying to promote inclusion and diversity among students. How foolish these efforts have been! No one, and certainly not a graduate student in education, would want to be friends with anyone who isn't perfect!
In one letter to me, justifying her pursuit of bullies in school, she gave me a list of “bullies”:
Pol Pot
Islam Karimov
Robert Mugabe
Idi Amin
Charles Taylor
Kim Jong-Il
Sadam Hussein
And the two most notable: Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin
Isn’t that just lovely! Adult researchers are going into our schools and fantasizing that our children-yes, our children, for the so-called “bullies” belong to you and me–are in the same category with megalomaniacal, paranoid, mass-murdering genocidal dictators! And don’t think this woman is an aberration. It is common for researchers to refer to bullying as an extreme form of violence, and for bullying “experts” to present things like genocide and slavery as examples of bullying. And we rely on the research of these zealous bully-haters as though they are the products of objective scientists.
The Official Promotion of Fear
I recently read The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things by sociologist Barry Glassner (Basic Books, 1999). Glassner shows how the media, politicians, and various advocacy groups use fear to promote their interests. Quite simply, fear brings them power and money. This book was written before the anti-bully movement became powerful in this country, but just about everything Glassner says in the book about other exaggerated sources of fear is especially true for bullying.
The media love presenting the horror of bullies. People love reading about evil, and bullies fit the bill wonderfully. Not sure about the media’s love for bulling? Sign up for Google Alerts for the words “bullies” and “bullying” and you will receive an email notice every time an article appears on bullying. You will receive dozens of links every day, and every one of these articles will present bullying in a negative, scary light. You will get articles about: how terrible bullying is in the workplace and in school; the escalation of bullying in all areas of life; bullying being more destructive than sexual harassment; cases of “extreme bullying” (in other words, actions that used to be called “crime” are now being called "bullying"); kids killing themselves or others because they were bullied; state legislatures debating and/or passing anti-bullying laws; individual schools proudly announcing their adoption of anti-bullying programs; sports teams and politicians accused of being bullies; speakers giving lectures against bullying; and the incredible prevalence and destructiveness of cyberbullying. You will receive so many anti-bully articles that if you were to read them all, you would be busy 24/7. And one thing you will never find is anyone suggesting that there is anything wrong with anti-bully programs and policies. Though articles may report that bullying is escalating even when schools and companies have anti-bully policies or programs, they will never suggest that the escalation may be a result of these anti-bully programs and policies. Such a possibility is beyond anyone’s imagination.
But the fear of bullies is good business not only for the media. It brings money to everyone involved. Politicians get the votes of their constituents by fighting for anti-bullying laws. With bullying becoming a crime, police forces have more work to do, which means they get more funding from us, the taxpayers. Lawyers on both sides of anti-bully lawsuits make money. And the mental health professions get financial support, too. With the government often looking to cut expenditures by doing away with non-essential services, school mental health professionals are constantly at risk of having their positions eliminated. The public fear of bullies give school mental health professionals a new lease on life, since they are usually the ones given the responsibility for implementing anti-bullying programs.
What about the findings that these anti-bullying programs usually don’t help or lead to an intensification of bullying in the schools? No one cares. The same researchers who find the programs don’t work recommend the programs anyway. You can’t blame them for wanting to preserve their source of income, can you?
How many years will it take society realizes that hunting bullies only makes the bullying problems worse?
Many of you, my readers–and especially those of you who have attended my seminars–understand the folly of the anti-bully movement and are happy that I am trying to do something to restore sanity to our schools and society. However, I can’t help getting the impression that you think I am far more powerful and influential than I really am. My wife, Miriam, is my main assistant, but we are only two people. We not only have financial limitations, but limited experience in public relations as well. We are learning all the time, but it is a slow process. And, believe it or not, I am incredibly inefficient and disorganized, which makes Miriam’s work even harder.
If you want to help us in our mission of countering the anti-bully witch-hunt, there is a lot you can do:
1. If you have a website and/or newsletter of your own, write about Bullies to Buddies and link to us. Copy our articles into your newsletters if you think they would be of interest to your readership.
2. Let your schools know about our website, www.Bullies2Buddies.com. There are many people–teachers, students, principles, parents, PTA members, and school district officials–who would be happy to know that there is an approach to bullying that really works, and that many of our resources are completely free.
3. If you are using our products or techniques and achieving success, let the local media know. As much as the media like promoting fear and loathing of bullies, they like it even more when local people are actually solving problems that are of public concern. Media people love to know about kids who have conquered bullying on their own, and that there are professionals who are doing innovative things that benefit the individual and the community.
4. There is one area of help that is especially important to me: Research. I am not a researcher, and am not currently in a position where I am able to do serious, peer reviewed research on my own. Cleveland State University, in conjuction with PSI Solutions, is currently conducting a multi-year study of the Bullies to Buddies program, but more studies are needed. If you know anyone who is interested in doing meaningful research on bullying, such as a doctoral student who needs a good dissertation topic, or a researcher who is actively engaged in searching for solutions to problems, please refer them to me. The research does not necessarily need to be about bullying in school. This approach is applicable to the workplace and to any kind of relationshop problems. I will give the researcher all the materials and help I possibly can to carry out a study they can be proud of, a study that can actually lead to a better society, rather than just documenting how horrible bullying is, as so many research studies do.
If you would like to help but are not sure how, email us at Miriam@Bullies2Buddies.com or call us at 718-983-1333 to discuss it. We will be more than glad to enlist your aid.
Best Wishes,
Izzy Kalman
email: izzy@bullies2buddies.com
voice: (718) 983-1333
web: http://www.bullies2buddies.com
