How the Internet Has Changed Bullying
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
When I was in elementary school, I was mercilessly bullied and terrorized by a group of 4 kids, probably from 3rd to 5th grade. I was singled out for whatever reason and anyone who associated with me would get a taste as well. The parents were total trash who in one case was encouraging the child's behavior, but they were active in the PTA. So the school ignored it.
One time on my way out the door, I was tackled and bashed in the head with a metal lunchbox. The teacher standing there turned around. The kid got in trouble because my mom and a family friend witnessed the thing.
The retaliation for that was in the lunchroom a week later. The lunch monitor (aunt of one of my bullies) watched as my lunchbox and lunch was smashed and kicked. Then when I pushed a kid, the whistle blew and I was forced to stand in a stress position with a hotdog in my jeans pocket off to the side. (There were little alcoves where tables were folded when the lunchroom was converted to a gym.)
Fortunately, a teacher who had taken an interest in me and was a really amazing guy, happened by and stopped it immediately. The administration STILL wouldn't take action against the lunch aide or bully's. So I ate lunch in that teacher's classroom (he was a science/music teacher) for the rest of the year. That teacher made a really big difference in my life, and I learned later that he got a lot of grief for trying to do the right thing.
With "cyber bullying" the evidence is right there, and it's easy to share in public. It's difficult for bureaucrats to pretend that nothing happened.
> data suggests that [cyberbullying's] incidence has declined by as much as ten per cent around the world
Definitely pre-smartphone -- the only person with a phone that I knew was my uncle... he was a telecom guy for a big bank and had a cellphone that looked like an army radio!
That advice didn't work back then, and blocking bullies on Facebook/Twitter/Snapchat/etc. doesn't work now.
Later I realized it wasn't about a reaction, it was tribal posturing to others. It was about showing they were "in" and I was "out."
It was a jungle when I was growing up. And it is a jungle today. It is unfortunate that zero-tolerance policies keep boys (and some girls) from working out their differences with a little fisticuffs.
Now get off my lawn :-)
With zero tolerance policies, often both parties get punished in an altercation. Even if the victim never hits back. So if you're getting punished for "fighting" while cowering in the corner, you might as well go down swinging.
This was genius because if you were big, it was considered extremely cowardly and unmanly to enter a dispute with someone smaller than you.
If you did, your friends would make fun of you for picking a fight with no personal risk, since everybody knew that no matter what it would come to blows. There is neither honor nor glory in a cruiserweight battering a featherweight for six minutes, and everyone knew it.
And little guys never picked fights either, for obvious reasons. In fact it ended up in practice that hardly anyone ever disagreed about anything if they were even approximately near Mr. Burns, and we all learned a bunch of very important lessons about character, civility, and how to stay on your feet after you get hit.
If I ever have kids I will go to great lengths to have them grow up somewhere like that.
I was bullied to shit at school, all anonymously (pre-internet era)....urine soaked chocolates put through my front door, cans of drink emptied and refilled with urine, someone even fired an air rifle through my front door one weekend..not all bullying is "easily" solved by retaliating in kind, and punching someone will have fairly heavy consequences as an adult, so perhaps it is best to learn other ways of dealing with it..."But he started it" does not cut it if someone bullies you at work.
(incidentally, I later found out that it was my "friends" who had been doing this)
> Ronson documents the rise of cyberbrigades which unite in virtual outrage, on Twitter, Reddit, or elsewhere online, to disparage someone’s words or behavior. Participants often feel that their abusive actions flow from justified outrage—but all bullies think that their behavior is justified. “We know from moral disengagement work that all bullies feel morally justified in their actions,” Swearer pointed out. [..] “They build narratives of their behaviors.” Many of the bullies Swearer has dealt with don’t seem to have realized that what they did was bullying: they demonstrate “a lack of insight and self-awareness.” Instead, they see themselves as righteous crusaders.
Social media is weird, basically. It's public, but people don't quite seem to treat it like that. Even though anyone could theoretically find it, people make tweets as if only their followers can see them. Hence perhaps-unintentional public shaming? Especially when someone's venting.
(I hope this comment is at least semi-coherent. I'm not trying to justify such behaviour, FWIW.)
Because there is something the article does not mention: that bullying often happens because the victim cannot escape. Bullying is an ineffective strategy when the victim can get away and/or has no good reason to stick around, so it is done mostly when there is no escape. That is why bullying is so prevalent in environments where people are trapped with a fixed group: public schools (in the American sense), prisons, etc.
FTA:
> But getting away from it has become more difficult.
And that means it will happen more often. It will also be more damaging when it happens.
By the way, I originally saw this idea -- that inescapability is what leads to bullying -- in one of those popular economics books (Freakonomics? The Undercover Economist?). It jibes well with my own experience.
In contrast, it is easier to learn to avoid the chatrooms where the trolls hang out. (The article mentions bullying on your facebook page, but that is very easy to fix with facebook's privacy settings).
The other thing about internet bullying is that it's much easier to get evidence against the bullies. A few years ago someone is our small rural town was charged -- and convicted -- of libel when they defamed someone on a facebook post.
Bullying isn't just done by random people, it's also done most significantly by people you know at school, often having greater social power than you. When I was still at school a decade ago, being excluded or bullied by people over instant messenger (e.g. MSN) wouldn't have been something you could ignore or write off as nothing like you can with anonymous trolls, it would have been social death.
I feel that, in the end, and this isn't particularly useful advice to everyone, the strategy is to out-social them by winning over your own group of friends and support group who will choose you over the bully. Or just holding on until you can leave and meet better people.
What if bullying is via your only public presence?
> The article mentions bullying on your facebook page, but that is very easy to fix with facebook's privacy settings
Facebook privacy settings only prevent people talking to you. They don't prevent people talking about you.
> The other thing about internet bullying is that it's much easier to get evidence against the bullies.
The law will rarely do jack shit, though.
It's still easier to ignore that people talking directly in your face. (I'm not saying it's not a problem, just that it's somewhat easier to control).
>The law will rarely do jack shit, though.
In the example I gave the person was actually charged. This was a little town in rural Canada with a handful of police officers, about 5 years ago. And it was just a minor politician lying about something on facebook, not anything as disturbing as some of the cyberbullying cases.
But that's not the real-world analogue. That would be people spreading rumours behind your back.
> In the example I gave the person was actually charged.
It does happen, but more sophisticated cyberbullying is often not prosecuted.
I strongly disagree with this statement. The internet has made bullying far easier to avoid; you just don't participate in the first place. That option doesn't exist when you're in a school and have no choice but to see these people every day.
Perhaps it was growing up with what we had in the late 90's and early 2000's that made this seem trite, because at that time the only way we (at least my friends) seemed to communicate online was via insult. I never felt the urge to participate in identity exposing social media, and perhaps that was a lesson learned from the early years of my experiences online. The kids I know of now coming up through high school and college have advertised nearly every intimate detail of their lives for all to read on the tubes.
I was bullied a bit in high school, but it never really affected me negatively. If anything it made me never want to replicate the aggressor's behavior.
I google my name from time to time to see what is out there, but all I ever find are video game tutorials from my Diablo II days and my LinkedIn profile.
I see this example get brought up a lot. Is it really that common? I swore it was only me.
>You haven't been part of that so it's probably hard to understand how fundamental social media is to the lives of large groups of kids.
The problem as I see it is people's strange desire to be popular/center of others' attention instead of being themselves. I blame this mostly on physical bullying. Don't fit in? --> Bullied. Nobody wants to be bullied.
I've never noticed this problem in kids who aren't hooked up to their TV for five hours a day and spend most of their free time on personal hobbies instead of keeping up with the latest trends. This doesn't seem to be a problem among introverts that are fortunate enough to not be bullied in school.
Although in a largely extroverted world, I can see this being a problem for many people. They care too much about what others think about them.
People don't necessarily want to be popular/center of attention, but most (though not all) people want to be part of a social group. Humans are social animals, that's how we arose and that's how our closest cousins work.
Of course once you have a presence you are left open to a 24/7 bullying outlet that is far harder to detect as a parent/teacher. Think about getting shoved around the schoolyard - every teacher would know the bully (even if they did nothing about it) vs. being tormented online anonymously via apps your parents have never heard of.
Forcing someone to withdraw from using social media when the rest of their peers are using it is on its own a form of bullying, especially when the person who withdraws is then categorically left out of normal social engagements because of that non-participation.
You can get away from it a little bit because being 30 something, you can maintain relationships without social media. I'm in the same boat at the same age.
My brother who is 10 years younger ends up doing a large majority of his communication with his social group through social media. He couldn't stop using it and maintain relationships, not because he's unable to, but because his peers wouldn't be able to easily communicate with him.
I can count on one hand the people I still talk to from those days, and they are the only ones that went on to accomplish anything. They decided to keep in touch.
None of the others matter to me. The only thing I was focused on was getting the hell out of highschool and college and being left alone to do my own thing.
I find it hard to believe I'm the only one that was capable of taking this approach.
I'm 28 if this matters at all.
Why would a single bully, whom I can block, force my withdrawal from social media?
And, if an entire group is doing the bullying, why in the world would you want to communicate with them? The Internet makes it damn easy to find people who don't suck.
Yeah, maybe you won't get laid at Podunkville High School homecoming--that sucks. However, if you spend that time making sure you get out of Podunkville instead, you'll be WAY better off. After you leave, most of the people you thought were sooooo hot look a whole lot more pedestrian. Yeah, one or two really are hot, but they likely weren't in your league anyway (or you wouldn't be being bullied). The rest were just big fish in a small pond.
1.) Delete their harassing posts and/or report them.
2.) Use the privacy settings so they can't see or interact with me
3.) Not use the service if it isn't contributing to my well-being
It's hardly inescapable, and I was just using Facebook's options as examples because I know it's interface pretty well. Similar things could be said for most of these places. Unlike the schoolyard scenario, no one is forcing you to engage with the bullies: you can almost always block/ignore.
And you've already seen the comment and it's already affected your emotional state. This is also akin to blocking your ears and saying la la la la la.
It fuels the bully and makes you look like a 5 year old. You don't want to look like a 5 year old.
> 2.) Use the privacy settings so they can't see or interact with me
And that gives them free reign to spread any rumors about you and you can't retaliate or even know what's going on. Nobody likes being the butt of a joke they haven't even heard, but everyone else has.
> 3.) Not use the service if it isn't contributing to my well-being
And throw away 80% of your communication with friends and family. Perfect.
It's hard to opt out of Facebook because it does contribute to your well-being. It's just that pesky 2% of times you use it that are the problem.
Luckily all these problems automagically go away once you and your social group grow up a bit. But during early puberty, bullying has always existed and always will. It looks like a core part of how humans work.
I would say that this seems to be true in the modern phenomenon of post-pubescent teenagers being forced to spend large amounts of time together without any real responsibility. I wonder whether it was true back when this was the age one would begin apprenticeships and taking on actual real-world responsibility -- if you weren't already working out in the fields.
Not new.
> without any real responsibility
Did you read the article? Bullying happens in the workplace, too.
Such a blanket statement is a tad optimistic.
My own memory of bullying was witnessing it happen to two classmates in elementary school.
Years later I read that when you are in danger in a crowd you need to point to a particular person in the crowd and say 'You! Help me!', otherwise no one does anything, as they expect somebody else to do something, or they even join in the violence.
The violent group behavior from our early days as a species are, unfortunately, with us still.
Another recommended book: The Dragons of Eden (Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence) by Carl Sagan.
> All bullies think that their behavior is justified. Bullies believe they are teaching someone a lesson; they claim that their victims are, through their own actions or faults, asking for it, and that they need to be called out and corrected.
Then they end with this useless advice:
> The first step to preventing bullying among adults, therefore, might be simple: introspection.
How is this going to work for a person who is unable to see his/her actions as bullying?
And that's why you'll remain a victim.