Adults Have To Act Now To Stop Bullying & Bullycide

What Can We Do About The Bully?

In a recent column I sought to make the community aware of a new phenomenon among young people tormented by bullies: suicide, or, as it is becoming known, “bullycide”.

Increasingly across America, anguished adolescents suffering at the hands of relentless bullies are deciding death is an honorable alternative to another day at school. But it isn’t enough to sound the alarm without offering something meaningful to help combat bullying in our own community, and that’s the focus here.

Let’s define the problem we’re dealing with, then consider what we must do. Bullying is intentional, malicious aggression by one or more persons directed against another person who is unable to mount a defense. Bullies are cowards, for they never push against anyone they think might push back. But bullies don’t look like cowards to our kids.

Bullied kids are required by us adults to get on the bus for a harassing ride into a hostile environment where they expect to be hurt, humiliated, degraded, or excluded. Their options are limited. They’re expected to endure, and to do it alone. They are too small to fight back, and it takes them about an hour after the humiliation is over to come up with a clever comeback. They are excluded from every group they try to join. Their day is miserable. And with the advent of cyber-bullying, the online and text-based torment goes on through the night.

So what has to change? Although the bullying we’re concerned about is kid-on-kid, it is we adults who have to change. There are three key changes we adults have to make if we expect to bully-proof the culture in which our kids are growing up.

First, we adults must fundamentally change the way we regard bullying. Bullying is institutionalized cruelty. It is harmful, but we go on one generation after another dismissing the damage it does. What seems like teasing to one child feels like torment to another. The damage to a child’s sense of themselves becomes a permanent wound in their spirit they carry through adulthood. We must become unwilling to tolerate an environment in which are children are knowingly harmed as though it were inevitable. We must get past the attitude that “boys will be boys” (which applies equally to girls) as though children are entitled to be cruel to one another, or that anyone should be expected to endure bullying as a rite of passage to adulthood. When we adopt the “boys will be boys” position, we wrongly assert that young people are incapable of being civil or sensitive, that they are at their core just brutes and therefore incapable of treating another person with respect or understanding how their actions impact another. Before we do anything else we adults must adopt and enforce a zero tolerance standard for any behavior that degrades the basic human dignity of another person.

Second, we adults have to change the expectations we have of our children. Children will rise to our standards for appropriate behavior if only we will express them as an expectation. When we adults, who are charged with raising children to become responsible grownups, are silent about our expectations our kids define their own. We need to teach our kids that when they encounter another person who is weaker, slower, less attractive, or somehow flawed they should relate to that person with compassion, not contempt. And they need to see us model that behavior. Kids should be told in no uncertain terms that they will not pick on other people, and will experience serious consequences if they do.

Third, we have to change the environment in which our kids spend their day. It’s true kids will be kids, and we will always have bullying incidents. The real issue is how adults respond. Do both bullies and victims have confidence adults will deal forcefully with a bullying incident? Are zero tolerance bullying policies established and enforced? Are known bullies confronted and counseled? Are victims supported and protected?

If your child is a bully your responsibility is to educate them in civil behavior and enforce high expectations for their conduct. If your child is a victim, you need to defend them while they grow to the point that they can defend themselves. Your child has no other advocate, no other champion. Whether it is speaking to the parents of a child who is bullying yours, holding the schools accountable for providing a safe place for your child to spend their day, or taking civil and criminal action against cyber-bullying, if you don’t defend your child no one else will.

Remember, it is the child who feels alone and desperate who is most likely to become the next bullycide statistic.

Stephen Guthrie directs Christian Counseling Services in Charlevoix. By appointment at 231.675.4682