Social Sciences

How to Fight a Bully

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We all know the archetype: the schoolyard tough whom the other kids fear. The classroom cutup quick to wound another student with a derogatory remark. The bully who builds himself up by tearing others down.

But bullying is about more than simply picking on people, sociologist C. J. Pascoe says. So the remedies are more involved than just condemning the conduct.

This is the era of the bully. According to one report, up to 70 percent of young people experience bullying. The White House hosts an anti-bullying webpage, superstars run anti-bullying foundations and schools prominently display anti-bullying policies on their websites.

But Pascoe says it’s ineffective to view bullying as simply the actions of a particular person targeting another who is weaker. Rather, she believes the behavior is rooted in the inequalities that societies create—and then teach to the next generation.

In recent research, Pascoe argues that kids don’t bully simply because they’re misbehaving. They bully because they’re recreating the adult world and all its warts—discrimination, sexism and racism, for example.

“The things people get bullied for—their body sizes, their race, not expressing their gender correctly—these aren’t just random differences,” Pascoe said. “These are social inequities that adults support in law, policy and social institutions, whether that be the criminalization of young men of color, Title IX violations or antifat bias in the medical field.”

In her 2011 book Dude, You’re a Fag, Pascoe chronicled how high school boys use homophobic slurs. After more than a year of observing teenagers, she arrived at a counter-intuitive conclusion: Boys were bullied with gender-based epithets regardless of their sexual orientation.

“The insults are usually levied because boys are not acting manly enough. They’re showing too many emotions, they can’t use a wrench correctly, or even if they’re too smiley,” Pascoe said. “All the boys are victims.”

It represents a shift in homophobia, she says, as boys are targeted not only for being gay, but also for failing to act as society expects them to.

Pascoe calls for a shift in how we look at bullying, to place social forces, institutionalized inequality and cultural norms at the center of the discussion.

If we can learn to see bullying as an “illness” that kids contract from simply breathing the air of our social discourse, Pascoe believes educators can more effectively address hostile school environments. Children need robust social sciences lessons from kindergarten through high school to properly assess culture, media and the unconscious education they’re absorbing from society, Pascoe says.

Consider the “Genderbread Person.” This character—a teaching tool based on the Gingerbread Man—conveys information about sex, gender identity and interpersonal attraction. After a Eugene, Oregon, teacher came under fire for using this classroom material, Pascoe wrote a guest column in the local newspaper defending it as a way to combat bullying.

“It’s vital,” Pascoe said, “that young people start having discussions about gender.”

Pascoe is also laudatory of restorative justice programs that bring the bullies and bullied together to talk about the conflict and how they can each take responsibility for a resolution.

She’s less impressed with what she calls “prepackaged anti-bullying programs” in which students vow not to bully.

Said Pascoe: “Those are about as effective as virginity pledges.”

—Marc Dadigan