On a recent trip the US I read journalist Dave Cullen’s book about the Columbine massacre. With a spate of highly-publicised suicides there apparently linked to bullying, and a subsequent rash of legislation in various states designed to “combat” the phenomenon, Columbine is a timely publication with much relevance to our own national debate on the subject.
In his book, Cullen demolishes one of the central and most persistent myths of the Columbine massacre: that a pair of misfits with artistic and intellectual tendencies were hounded by meathead jocks until they finally snapped. Instead he paints a chilling portrait of a malignant relationship between a psychopathic narcissist and his angry and malleable best friend.
Yes, the Columbine kids were picked on, argues Cullen, but not as badly as many others and they certainly displayed no ideological biases when it came to blowing away their classmates.
As was the case at Columbine, a simplistic, dichotomous narrative is never going to be as popular as a nuanced view of school bullying.
For the past three months I have been working on a new television documentary project about adults who were bullied at school and those who bullied them. My interviews with a number of people have led to a series of unexpected discoveries, forcing me to question the nature of bullying and the solutions that have been proposed by various official bodies.
For starters, reporting bullying usually made the problem worse. One man who was subjected to an especially humiliating high school assault that led to the expulsion of the perpetrator talked of his regret at ever allowing the school authorities to find out. After the incident, the teasing doubled and the loss of an otherwise popular student only gave his tormentors further reason to hate him.
This situation doesn’t seem to be unusual. In fact, most people I’ve spoken to reported the same: any sign of weakness was only likely to increase the victimisation. Attempts by teachers to intervene only made it more covert, which tends to make me skeptical of the efficacy of many so-called “initiatives” - rooted as often in the fear of legal action as they are in any concern for the welfare of children - designed to “stamp out” bullying.
Another surprising finding of my research has been the number of people who seem to believe they were bullied – who will swear blind their school years were St Trinian’s meets the dental drill scene in Marathon Man – when they, quite frankly, weren’t.
In one interview a woman told me that she had once been cornered and threatened by a girl who sometimes called her names. This constituted the sum total of her experience as a victim of bullying. When I asked if she knew what had happened to the girl, she gloated about having once seen her on the bus looking bedraggled.
I acknowledge that some people are more sensitive than others, and that pressures in one area of our lives can sometimes magnify tensions in others, exaggerating our sense of persecution.
In my books, however, the above scenario is called “growing up” and calls for a good old-fashioned dose of get over yourself.
The bullies themselves have perhaps proved to be the most intriguing subjects. Some school bullies are, no doubt, sociopaths who will continue such behaviour their whole lives. Most, however, have far more ambiguous motives, and a number are tortured by guilt forever.
As a skinny gay boy with a taste for eccentric hairstyles at an all-boy’s school, I was a target of constant verbal abuse and occasional physical attacks. Nevertheless, I still took great pleasure in picking on the few boys lower than me on the totem pole and witnessed numerous incidents in which groups descended on individuals, seeming to absolve all involved of conscience or blame.
Some bullies are, of course, acting out of anger. One boy, older than us, who relentlessly picked on me and my best friend had the source of his rage revealed in humiliating fashion when his father was arrested for molesting little boys at a local swimming pool.
Some who have indulged in bullying behaviour say they felt pressure to do so from a peer group. This seems to be especially true of girls who are adept at a particular kind of bullying in which a “friend” is the subject of constant subtle put-downs. Such bullying is basically impossible to police because there’s little concrete evidence and it’s difficult for an external observer to see.
Other bullies had such appalling home lives it’s possible they didn’t even realise what they were doing constituted “bullying”. One boy I attempted to track down had become a drug addict and was murdered in especially sordid circumstances. He had a life far more tragic than anyone he had ever picked on.
There are few among us who can ever really claim to have never once indulged in bullying at school. The growth in cyber bullying seems to point to an intractable cultural problem – eliminate Chinese burns and wedgies and kids replace them with “unfriendings” and bitchy text messages.
I haven’t got the solution to bullying – judging by the number of buzz words like “strategies” and “learning experiences” used by education departments in their “zero tolerance” anti-bullying policies, neither do they – but I suspect that all the rhetoric and programs in the world are probably no match for something as complex as human nature.
If you’re over 25 and would like to participate in a documentary series about your experiences of school bullying, please email Brendan at brendanrshanahan@gmail.com for more information.
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