Four Difficult Questions Regarding Bullying and Youth Suicide
zephoria.org
zephoria.org
My brother dealt with bullying at school a few years ago.
Constant harassment, abuse, the usual. He would hate going to school, and come home crying. On the weekends, he would disappear at times and we would have to call the police to help us find him, as he told us he was going to jump into oncoming traffic.
1) The privately paid school he went to had a "Zero tolerance" bullying policy. They did not act on it.
2) The kid(s) who were part of the bullying were eventually pulled aside and asked to stop the harassment, yet continued to do so.
3) After the problem was known about by teachers, students and staff, nothing of value was ever done. The bullying continued, just more passively now.
So he changed schools. Now he's just graduated, and he's happy to be done.
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Why are schools so SPINELESS? Where is the expulsion of these kids who think its all fun and games?
Why do schools seem to try everything in their power to keep the bad kids in, and force the good kids out?
Where is the spine and values people should hold, especially at a school in charge of children's welfare and education, at a time like this? It's pathetic.
Legislating out bullying, while a productive first step, will not make it go away. It's the conflation of factors that tell young kids that "gay = wrong/weak/unmanly"--parents, media, peers, etc. Of course it should be our mission to make schools a safe place for kids, but that's only a part of the solution. Many kids live in homophobic home environments, engage in extracurriculars (namely, sports) that are typically more homophobic, or have role models that reinforce homophobia (some religions are this way).
In order to cultivate safe spaces, schools do need:
-to call out bigotry wherever it is (zero tolerance policies that are actually enforced)
-to give teachers and administrators sensitivity training
-counseling, resources, and positive role models
-specifically designated LGBT safe spaces
And keep in mind that things have gotten a lot better for LGBT kids in school. Just ten years ago a lot of this stuff was simply shrugged off and pinned on kids who "couldn't handle" a "normal" amount of bullying.
That's hilariously bad. Every place should be equally safe. You want to herd the LGBT kids into a corner?
In high school and college I had some nasty things said to me. But I also said some overly harsh words that I wouldn't have said had I been more mature. While a harsh word from an administrator wouldn't have been out of the question, I shudder to think where my life would have gone had I been expelled.
Incidentally, a cousin of mine has been bullied quite badly. Sure, he's weird and obnoxious, but allowing people to bully him to "teach him a lesson" only exacerbates the cycle. And now he's even the victim of bullying about bullying from some jerk family members. Unfortunately, the a-holes sense the easily bullied like sharks to blood.
Especially link-baity by asking if the It Gets Better project is causing harm to children. I can see the religious right warming up their copy-paste commands.
danah boyd, if you really want to do something constructive, do some damn research. Which is your job title. This piece does nothing to advance our actual knowledge of bullying and suicide.
OK, there's no study or links. It's not really her area. Her first point (moral panic has stopped LGBT youths from seeking advice from strangers in the LGBT community, especially online) is probably true. The second ("It Gets Better" could have an unintended affect) is tricky. The third (media harassment is bad) is obvious, and the forth (adults should also blame themselves and society) is kind of broad and meaningless.
You're taking umbrage at the second point - that "It Gets Better" can make things worse. Just because it's a well intentioned (and in some ways effective) movement, does that mean that no-one can question it without bullet-proof evidence? Well intentioned movements often make things worse (in some way), and you can't rely on "real" research to uncover this if nobody is asking questions.
I'm all for supporting "It Gets Better" until it's proven to be a bad idea, and supporting whatever it morphs into if a better idea is found. I also think that questions should be asked; even stupid ones. Creating an "us and them" mindset is the fastest path to groupthink.
You write "This is sensationalism" but you don't bother to say why. boyd is a researcher who focuses on issues such as the effect online social services have on teen social pressures. In what sense is her question invalid? Why is this not a valid topic for further research?
I gather that you are mostly worried about the unintended consequences of her words. To the extent that I can find a coherent line of reasoning in your words, it amounts to fear, and a desire to shut boyd up. The gist of your fear could be summed up as "boyd should shut up or her words might be used by the enemies of the LBGT community". You don't seem to consider that perhaps she has a loyalty to the truth that goes beyond her desire to give support to policies endorsed by some LBGT non-profits, and also, and more importantly, her research might ultimately do good for the LBGT community by pointing out that some of those policies currently being pursued by various levels of government and also NGOs (It Gets Better) might be doing harm.
In other words, you are criticizing her without ever considering the possibility that what she writes might be true.
You then try to make a point using the Westboro Baptist Church as an example. Your point amounts to "boyd should lie or otherwise the Westboro Baptist Church might misuse her research."
Your argument is ridiculous.
I'm an academic but I'm also a blogger. For me, these are separate identities. I write formal papers that I spend months trying to find the language to properly express what's going on. In those papers, I try to balance precision and readability. My blog is a different story. I write in an off-the-cuff manner, trying to paint impressions rather than nuance. In academic writing, I have to outline methodology and background, assuming that no one has heard of me or the topic before. In my blog, I write with the assumption that people are familiar with my work and with the topic. In academic writing, I write for posterity. In my blog, I write to get an issue off my chest and to work things out while they are still raw.
The informal language in my blog is intentional. The lack of citations is intentional. They are meant to signal that this is a work-in-progress. I want to signal that I'm thinking out loud. Unfortunately, many feel as though a blog must be formal and then they project this view onto my writing and then complain about the language and the lack of cites. I am capable of situating arguments in broader theoretical arguments, but I don't attempt to do that here while I'm working through things. I guess my signals are broken.
The blog structure is not built for long essays. My blog itself is not formatted to take on a 3000 word essay (it breaks). When I started publishing conference cribs, I started making them separate webpages that I would link to from Apophenia and M2M. Following that, whenever I'd write a blog entry that was longer than 2000 words, I'd shove it off to the same messy directory with my papers and my cribs and link to it from my blog. They're all under the /papers directory simply because I started keeping track of things at the papers URL. You can see more than papers there. I started sub-directorying it a few months ago because it was getting messy. Essays are exactly that and the class piece was an essay.
I added citations to everything under that directory because I was finding that people were taking that material out of context. They were copying/pasting the whole article without reference to where it came from because it looked like it stood on its own (folks didn't do that with my blog entries). I wanted people to know the context so all essays, cribs, op-eds, and papers got tagged with a citation. Unfortunately, this meant that people thought that it was a proper paper.
http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ResponseToClassDivisions....
The entire format of this piece is centred on the use of provocative questions as headings. This is a well-known trope in journalism for lazy writers who are more concerned about generating traffic than they are doing their job, i.e., finding answers. See: Betteridge's Law of Headlines.
1. What if the stranger danger / sexual predator moral panic increased LGBT suicide?
2. What if “It Gets Better” increases emotional devastation for some LGBT youth?
3. What if the media spotlight around bullying causes harm to youth?
4. What if us adults are part of the problem?
Let's talk about a hypothetical: you have created a new online social service, and now there are media reports that it is being used by some kids to bully and torment other kids? How would you feel?
If I was in such a situation, my response would focus on the systematic forces that allow bullying to happen. I would argue to the media that the focus should be on the social pressures that lead to bullying, rather than my online service. I would also reach out to the victims and offer any support I could. I feel that being helpful in such situations is the best course, both morally and for the business. I would not worry about "setting a precedent", as that line of reasoning was a disaster for AirBnB, in its recent scandal.
2 things should be noted:
1.) danah boyd's line of reasoning is convenient for online services trying to protect themselves legally. I'm sure lawyers for online services will be looking at her line of reasoning and considering that she is a PhD who works for Microsoft, and possibly crafting future defenses around such arguments.
2.) danah boyd could be correct, which for some strange reason is a possibility that you are not even willing to consider. I mean, what if the stranger danger / sexual predator moral panic increased LGBT suicide? This is a perfectly valid hypotheses for research. Why are you so quick to dismiss it? If boyd decides she wants to investigate this question further, or she feels other researchers should be investigating this question, then why is it you want the question dismissed without consideration?
And then I told my parents I had met them through the internet, and my mom flipped her shit because all she reads about the internet is how everyone the hangs out in an AOL chat room ends up getting raped and murdered, or something.
So 'stranger danger' seems like it's been around since it became mainstream for minors to use the internet, but I would have expected it to dissipate with time, much like people used to be generally sketched out by online dating, but I don't know a single person who hasn't tried it today. Then again, as other commenters have indicated, there is pretty much no factual evidence presented here one way or another.
Later when I got on BBSes and then usenet/irc there wasn't really an adult in my life who had a clue what the Internet was (other than something that annoyingly tied up the phone line and induced nerd rage when they picked it up :), but I was talking to all kinds of strangers and rightly felt totally safe because what I was doing was just on the internet. If someone had asked to meet in person it would have been exceedingly weird and triggered all kinds of red flags.
Yes, but when was that? There is a dramatic change in scale between 1995 and 2005, regarding how many people had easy access to the Internet.
When she writes of the moral panic, she is not referring to moments when individual parents expressed concern about what their children were doing online, but rather, she is writing about when the media focused on this story. I agree the media emphasized reasons to be afraid of the Internet ever since the Internet emerged in the 90s, but there was an exaggerated emphasis in the mid 00s when it became the easiest way for lazy journalists to frame a story about the Internet.
I'm under the impression boyd is also talking about the period of time when youth in the USA faced increasing restrictions regarding their physical movement, and increased supervision from parents. Consider what boyd writes here:
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=w092y1Y6u...
She also wrote the following (several paragraphs) about MySpace in 2006:
MySpace is in a different position, one far more harrowing. MySpace has grown so large that the needs, values and practices of its users are slamming into each other. It's facing the archetypical clashing of cultures. Yet, interestingly, most users are not that concerned - they're trying to figure out how to live in this super public. The challenge is that outsiders are panicking about a culture that they are not a part of. They want to kill the super public rather than support people in learning how to negotiate it. No one knows how to live in such a super public, but this structure is going to become increasingly a part of our lives. It is no wonder that youth want to figure it out. And it is critical that they do, especially since our physical worlds have become more segregated and walled off, partitioned by age, race, class, religion, values, etc. Yet, it is the older generation that did that segregating and they're not really ready to face collapsed contexts at every turn or to learn how to engage with people who have very different values on a daily basis. Because of their position of power, outsiders are pushing the big red emergency button, screaming danger and creating a complete and utter moral panic. Welcome to a generational divide, where adults are unable to see the practices of their children on kids' terms.
If MySpace falters in the next 1-2 years, it will be because of this moral panic. Before all of you competitors get motivated to exacerbate the moral panic, think again. If the moral panic succeeds:
Youth will lose (even more) freedom of speech. How far will the curtailment of the First Amendment go?
All users will lose the safety and opportunities of pseudonymity, particularly around political speech and particularly internationally.
Internet companies will be required to confirm the real life identity of all users. At their own cost.
International growth on social communities will be massively curtailed because it is much harder to confirm non-US populations.
Internet companies will lose the protections of common carrier which will have ramifications in all sorts of directions.
Internet companies will see a massive increase in subpoenas and will be forced to turn over data on their users which will in turn destroy the trust relationship between companies and users.
There will be a much greater barrier for new communities to form and for startups to build out new social environments.
International companies will be far better positioned to create new social technologies because they won't have to abide by American laws even if American citizens use their technology (assuming the servers are hosted outside of the US). Unless, of course, we decide to block sites on a nation-wide basis....
It seems boyd's article revolves around our relationship with media. We look back a century and the political papers and non-stop sensationalism seems quite familiar. Humanity hasn't changed, online or offline, we still rubberneck.
So boyd wants refuges built to replace the ones that once existed. I'm wish her well. However over time, we see safe havens come and go. Why is that?
Maybe it's the same reason. Those safe havens either collapse or are destroyed because our society is as shitty as ever was.