When I was a kid, I got in a lot of fights in school. Partially because, in a small town in Maine, that was kind of what you did, and partially because that was how I was taught to react to bullies. In fairness, I may have misinterpreted what "stand up to" means and not understood the subtle conflict between "stand up to" and "choke until he turns blue." I think it's a toe-may-toe/to-mah-toe sort of thing.
In the constant quest for civilization, and the effort to minimize the number of school shootings, we, as a society have moved away from the self-help against bullying strategies and, instead, moved towards passing laws that prohibit bullying. Laws often inclued rules against cyber-bullying, bullying students regarding race, gender, and sexual preference issues, or any other number of subjects. Some of these laws even make such behavior a potential criminal offense. These laws work a lot like harsh sentences against sex offenders, they target behavior everyone hates, they are incredibly popular, they do nothing at all to change behavior, they ruin lives, they're based on misinformation, and they make other societal problems worse. In short, they're bad policy.
Anti-bullying statutes are bad policy precisely because of their popularity. I understand that in a Democracy, one often thinks that popular policies must be good policies. Vox populus vox dieux, the popular voice is the voice of G-d. But, the reality is that huge groups of people often make as bad or worse decisions than any one of them, and that policies supported by "common sense" often lack any sense at all.
I did a bunch of policy work when I worked for the DA's office and did work with bullying statutes. One of the things I most hated was that they were all painfully vague. Part of the reason, I suspect is because bullying is a lot like pornography, difficult to define, but you know it when you see it. Try, right now to come up with a real definition of bullying that is both specific and comprehensive; you'll find it almost impossible, and if you do come up with a good one, you should call the Governor's office immediately, because he could use it. Almost inevitably, bullying statutes include some prohibition against insulting people for belonging to a protected class, in some states that just includes race, religion, and national origin, but in California it includes almost everything.
One problem with such prohibitions is that simply insulting someone is free speech and probably protected. And, while lives can be destroyed by mere insults, the actual behavior in question is more difficult and the facts more nuanced, generally, than can be easily summed up by legislators.
Another problem with such laws is that they criminalize behavior that should be a disciplinary issue. The difference between disciplinary and criminal actions are serious. Disciplinary actions are dealt with by school authorities, on school grounds, and create school records. Criminal actions are dealt with by court authorities, in courts of law and create criminal records. Criminal actions are far more likely to result in expulsion or suspension. Criminal actions have a profoundly negative impact of graduation rates, and, criminal records can affect whether students get accepted to universities or hired for jobs far more easily than disciplinary ones.
Additionally, most of these bullying laws are reactions not to actual trends but to perceived trends. We hear a lot of stories about the horrors of bullying on the news, and one group did a survey that suggests that one-in-six students in the US are so afraid of bullies that they've skipped school in the last thirty day. The first of these in anecdotal, and not actual indicative of meaningful trends. The second of these is because such studies are deeply flawed, in that they simply presume student honesty. There are different ways to collect data which permits corrections for accuracy, but that isn't how we study bullying in this country.
If people seem interested, I'll do a future policy bite on the data collection issue, but the key point is that such studies presume that children give more accurate answers if surveys are anonymous, and a couple studies suggest that A) they don't and B) if you know the student's name you can check their school records to see if the the things they say are factual.
But, Anti-Bullying laws can get around all these problems because they're popular. A lot of popular policies are bad. But those policies can afford to be, because there's the will to pass them even if they are bad. If they were good policies that actually stopped bullying, we'd pass less of them and they'd become less popular. It's a vicious circle.
I'd be interested in the data collection errors, on how the studies' method alters the results. Thanks for posting this.
ReplyDeleteBullying surveys have always been anonymous, under the presumption that kids would tell the truth if they knew no one could identify them. A British Social Scientist didn't believe this, so he did two surveys in two schools in either the same or similarly situated towns, I don't remember which. The results for the two surveys were almost identical.
DeleteHowever, when he had the student's names, he discovered that something like a third of all students who claimed to have miss school in the last month because of bullying had not actually missed any school in the last month, there were similar deviations in students who claimed to have reported or been punished but, in fact did neither.
So, a third of the kids claiming that bullying is the worst are probably lying. But, an anonymous survey that doesn't have a way of fact checking will miss that. Before you conclude that it's only a third, so what, consider the statistic everyone likes to quote that approximately one-in-six students feel unsafe in school 1/6 is a little over 15%, when you drop a third off of that, it becomes much closer to 10% or one in ten.
A problem affecting one-tenth of all school kids is bad, no question. But it's a very different thing than one that affects one in six.