At home school co-op a few days ago, one of the mothers talked about her friend who knew of a child, going through bullying in first grade. She said this child suffered alienation and was treated meanly by the other kids. The alienation was orchestrated by one child, whose lead the other children in the group followed. All this was done behind the teacher’s back.
What grabbed my attention was that the target, the aggressor and the group of collaborators were boys.
My friend said that the target realized there was another boy in the class who ranked even lower than him, so he started to treat that child in the same manner he had been treated to get the other kids off his back, and perhaps, find safety by joining his former tormentors. It worked, the ringleader’s attention shifted to the new child and the old target was let off the hook.
But he felt guilty for what he did. He knew what the new target was going through. He knew how it felt. So he confessed to his mother what he had done.
I don’t know how it was handled. I asked my friend to find out, but the mother was not willing to discuss it with others.
This is classic relational aggression.
What has occurred to me is how, perhaps, our current stricter anti-bullying policies might, in some way, contribute to the rise of covert bullying among boys.
If boys were traditionally more upfront in their aggression with one another, could the prohibition of any type of overt aggression, which can be construed as bullying, place boys now in the same situation as girls?
Needing to use covert means to express power they no longer can overtly?
Will the efforts to stop physical bullying, give rise to more clandestine bullying among those who formerly would have been the more give-you-a-black-eye kind of bully? Certainly covert bullying is addressed in your more thorough anti-bullying program. But it’s harder to see, and if you’re not looking for it in boys, because it’s “girl bullying”, then what protection can we offer our sons?
And perhaps, more meaningfully, how can we address bullying other than just prohibiting behavior?
Because what a person needs to express will find a way to come out. I don’t think we can have an effective anti-bullying policy, without including emphasis on mindfulness, empathy, compassion and a viable forum or venue for freedom of expression with accountability.
And I don’t think it’s just a matter of how children relate to children, but how adults relate to children and to each other. And I don’t think it’s just about the world of children, but the actual environment we place our children for the majority of the day, which strips them off all power and any sense of self-determination.
Bullying exists outside of these conditions, and in other places. I know. I’ve seen it in home school co-ops, and there’s generally more freedom there. Sometimes too much. But institutionalized voicelessness guarantees covert aggression.
The bottom line is we need to be careful, in our efforts to squelch the more obvious signs of bullying, we don’t have the unintended consequences of just driving it underground through more covert means.
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