How Bad is Bullying?

Are anti-bullying programs protecting our children or damaging their development?

Bullying is a fact of life

I grew up in a mixed neighbourhood; mostly lower-middle-class, but with subsidized housing as well. There were some fairly rough customers around, and definitely some give-me-your-lunch-money-or-else type of bullies.

Back then kids could still fail the school year and be held back (just imagine, those mean schools causing such trauma!) When I was in my first few years of elementary school, I recall one of the Grade 6’ers who had a moustache. He wasn’t the nicest fellow either, to put it mildly. You learned to give kids like him a wide berth or, if you couldn’t, you learned to be respectful even when it might not be your natural instinct.

Yeah, that was pretty much him

I was skinny and gangly and goofy, and to make matters worse I really enjoyed skipping right up until I was 11 or 12 – the age where you were supposed to stop skipping with girls and start to chase them. I don’t like to brag, but I could double-dutch pretty damn well! Skipping and being skinny at that age were not cool, so I found out. My (and a couple of my male friends’) penchant for skipping attracted the ire of a small cadre of bullies a year ahead of us in school. They were also part of my Boy Scout troop. My first long trip away from home without mom and dad was for the national scout jamboree in 1981, and unfortunately for me they were on the trip.

There’s no need for more detail. I’ll just say they were the standard bullies. Being mean to other kids was their thing. They made my life a little challenging for a stretch.

I recall mom and dad talking to me about it. Their advice was, in retrospect, very reasonable. Just ignore them. It’s fine to skip if you want. Sticks and stones won’t break your bones. Dad explained that the world isn’t always fair, and that there are mean people everywhere (even some adults) and that you have to learn to deal with them. I recall my mom explaining to me that some kids are mean because they are sad inside: a complex idea for me at that age but since I still remember it, it must have hit home.

I survived my bullying experience and I wasn’t deeply scarred as far as I can tell. I do consider it a learning experience. Knowing how to avoid the bully sometimes, push back others, but to simply ignore them most of the time is a set of useful life skills that I’ve tried to carry into adulthood when dealing with difficult people.

Prepare the Child for the Road

One thing mom and dad did NOT consider was to try to fix the world for me. They didn’t come to the school. They didn’t talk to the bullies’ parents or my teachers. They didn’t plow the road for me. They taught me that life was tough, that some people were mean sometimes, but that I could learn to deal with it. They didn’t see me or treat me as fragile.

Preparing children as well as possible for the road has been the goal of societies through all of history. Thinking we can plow every road for them is an idea of the modern Nanny State.

As a wee bit of essential throat clearing, let me be clear that I’m sure if these kids had severely beaten me, threatened to kill me, or done something truly dangerous, mom and dad would have intervened. But only a tiny percent of bullying is that severe. This Substack is not meant to advocate for bullying, but rather to suggest that The War on Bullying has second-order effects that we should consider carefully before deploying our weaponry.

My last bit of prologue is to say that I am not going to touch on the effect of social media here (that’s a Substack in itself), except to say that some of the best-adjusted kids I have met were the ones who got cell phones the latest, spent the least time on social media, and the most time in nature and interacting face-to-face.

Anti-bullying is now an industry

Fast forward to 2024. Things have changed a LOT since 1981.

• We have anti-bullying policies and campaigns.

• We have pink t-shirt days (which coincidentally was written about in the National Post a couple of weeks after I started writing this piece).

  

• Bullying is “trauma”. Period.

• We have bullying “experts” who charge consultant rates to give seminars and advise organizations on bullying prevention. They talk about “impacts”, “victims”, “imbalances of power” and “the importance of lived experiences”. (Remind you of anything else we hear a lot about these days?) “Anti-Bullying” programs have expanded to occupy the available cultural space that increased focus has opened up to them, and to consume the money made available by bureaucracies who have rushed to fund feel-good anti-bullying programs.

• Bullies are oppressors, and their targets are victims. Period.

• Once a childhood phenomenon, I now regularly hear adults talking about how they are bullied at work, or how one of their family members is a bully.

  

  Or perhaps “feeling bullied in the workplace is on the rise” is more accurate?

The definition of “bullying” is subjective and flexibly expansive

The first problem that should be obvious is that “bullying” is in the eye of the beholder. Is a boss who gives his employee a stern and negative performance review, telling her that unless she put her shoulder to the wheel that she will be fired “bullying” her? Or was she a crappy, lazy employee? But who can argue when the employee goes off on long-term stress leave because of her “PTSD”? How can a boss prove a negative, when all that is required as proof is the subjective feeling of being bullied?

Anyone who has ever had to fill out a workplace injury report will appreciate the humour here.

Is a grade 5 student who was excluded from playing with a group of kids being “bullied”? Or was it that the last few times he had played with them he was way too rough and ruined the game for the other kids? It depends on which side of the story you hear. Can an adult referee really understand the nuances?

Humans have always and will always conflict with one another. When arguments erupt, how do we decide who is “victim” and who is “oppressor”? Like “Hate Speech” and “Misinformation”, except in its most extreme forms, “bullying” is in the eye of the beholder and thus impossible to police objectively. When is someone bullied in 2024? When they feel like they were bullied.

Thinking that we can accurately judge who is bully and who is victim, and that we can thus eliminate all bullying is naive.

Weaponization

The postmodern idea that bullying is a scourge that is damaging our kids, and thus we need to empower authority to fix it can - and is - being weaponized. Nobody wants to risk being called a bully. Like “racist”, “transphobe”, “climate-denier”, “anti-vaxxer” and other modern attack words, even an accusation of being a bully can lead to significant repercussions.

Two people have a heated argument at work. Who was the bully? The one who got reported first. Want to shut up your political opponent? Easy! Just accuse him of bullying. He’ll never argue with you again.

Referees everywhere

A friend (let’s call him Grant) told me a great story. He was working for a school board in an admin capacity. One of his roles was to help schools deal with conflicts, including bullying complaints. He got a call that an elementary school was having an issue they couldn’t solve.

There was a grade 5 boy who was being “bullied” by another boy who continued to call him names and belittle him in front of other students. The victim complained to the teacher. The teacher had talked to the bully several times. But the problem continued. The “victim’s” parents were upset. Grant was called to come fix things.

As he learned more, he found out that the “victim” was more than a head taller than the “bully” and outweighed him by about 2-to-1. The “bully” was a mousy little guy with a wicked tongue. He was a kid who several times had claimed to be “bullied” when he had suffered what we’ll call “physical repercussions” after mouthing off at bigger kids.

To make the situation more interesting, the king-size “victim” was the son of an old school chum of Grant’s from back-in-the-day. Grant called the dad.

Grant talked to his friend off the record. “I’m not supposed to say this, but your son is a hell of a lot bigger than the mouthy kid. Why doesn’t he just tune him up? I’m not saying to really hurt him. But you know what would have happened back in our day”. The dad protested “Grant! You know we can’t do that. That’s no way to solve anything!”. He had drunk the parents-and-teachers-must-solve-every-conflict koolaid. It was NOT OK for these kids to work this out on their own.

Who was the bully? The mouthy kid? The big kid if he punched the mouthy kid? Or, if they worked things out on their own, would this simply be a rite of passage for two young boys who need to learn to negotiate the messy world of human relationships. How do kids learn the limits of what they can say to others – how they can treat others – while still maintaining a viable relationship, if we don’t let them butt up against those boundaries on their own? When does a joke or witty barb cross a line? When is it just plain funny? Who should decide? How do we learn to judge?

By setting up and advertising a snitching infrastructure in schools (If you ever feel bullied, we’ll solve it for you!) do we enable verbal bullying by disabling the “defensive mechanism” that a bigger, less verbally aggressive kid would have? Is there less bullying now, or has it been “feminized”?

What do we teach kids when we imply to them that anyone who is mean to them is a bully? And that such a situation is unacceptable, and must be solved by adults? What does it do to a child’s psyche to make him think that this complex world of humans should perpetually be a tender, loving place where everyone is always nice to each other, never speaks harshly, never loses his temper, and that any deviation from this is an unfairness to him?

Anti-bullying is unavoidably wrapped in an expectation of entitlement

Setting up such an expectation that nobody should ever feel bullied is a recipe for unhappiness. It is the diametric opposite of the basic Buddhist premise that life is difficult. In a world where kids now grow up thinking that human relationships can and should always be full of rainbows, unicorns and affirmation, is it any surprise that we have bred a generation of adults who are too anxious to move out of their parents’ basements?

Rights versus responsibilities

Teaching a child that we expect him to always be kind, respectful and fair to others is wonderful and laudable. Pursuit of this goal brings out the best in an individual. But teaching an individual child the apparent corollary - that he should expect others to always be kind, respectful, and fair to him - is not just unhelpful but destructive.

Always being treated exactly as we feel we deserve is not a right. Negative rights are fine (in fact they are the foundation of Western liberal democracy), but teaching people they have positive rights is ruining society. Being treated nicely is a positive right. Striving to create such a society is a utopian, collectivist idea.

When we teach a child that others should be nice to him, it is a recipe for dissatisfaction, entitlement, and unhappiness. Humans are fallen creatures. Others will often disappoint us, whether from truly poor behaviour on their part, or unreasonable expectations on ours. A child who is taught that others should always be kind and gracious to him is, as per Dalrymple’s warning, likely to be ungrateful for kindnesses, and resentful of any treatment that feels to be less than he deserves.

Splitting

The push to frame negative interactions as “bullying” encourages “splitting”. This is a psychological concept. When we “split” in judging another person, we use a black-and-white framework to characterize him. He is either all good or all bad, or in this case either victim or bully.

Splitting fits perfectly into the neo-marxist view in which we must define others as either victims or oppressors. But as with everything else in life, bullying is far more nuanced.

The majority of us have been bullied at some point in our lives. And my guess is that most of us (even if it never came to our attention) have been perceived as a bully.

We all have a bully and a victim who live inside us, either of which can manifest himself given the right set of circumstances. Yet we appear to be teaching kids that each individual is at all times either a victim or a bully, as opposed to potentially both. This is destructive to their development both in terms of the way they see and judge others, but also in terms of how they judge their own behaviour. A child who is taught to watch for bullying is much more likely to see it in others than himself.

Is there any proof in the pudding?

Anti-bullying has been around for 20 years or more in some form, and has been on steroids for the last 15 or so. Not coincidentally, in the opinion of The Pairodocs, the arrival and spread of anti-bullying occurred at the same time as the arrival of the modern, all-powerful Woke Nanny State.

There is no evidence that focusing on fighting bullying has done anything to improve the mental health of our younger generations, but much reason to suggest it has made them weaker, more depressed, and more fragile. Despite this, we continue to put a lot of time and resources into anti-bullying. Your tax dollars pay for anti-bullying programs, full-time HR employees, and expensive “experts” to police every relationship and take seriously every kid (and now adult) who believes that he has been bullied.

The Pairodocs rate this as a “MUST READ!” book, one that delves into many of the issues touched on in this Substack.

Who was better adjusted, less fragile, and less depressed? The many generations of kids who worked out arguments and conflicts on their own? Or the new cohort whose relationships were constantly policed and refereed by helicopter and snowplow parents? The Greatest Generation, without the benefit of an anti-bullying bureaucracy to protect them, developed the intestinal fortitude to fight in the great war, bring up children, and create a functional society, all while maintaining a feeling of gratitude for the opportunities that they were blessed to have. Our new generation needs puppy rooms to make it through university without melting down.

Pink T-shirt day

Sadly, as this cohort of coddled critters has aged out of school and into the workforce, the anti-bullying ethos has come with them. Anti-bullying is now de rigueur in big organizations, including health care.

When our health authority decided to get into anti-bullying, one of the first manifestations was starting a “pink t-shirt day”. I arrived at work one Friday to do an ER shift. Our head nurse approached and said “it’s pink t-shirt day – you have to wear one”. For my ER shifts I always wore a shirt with pockets for notes, pens, syringes and sundries. Plus as you can tell by now I didn’t like the “anti-bullying” idea.

I politely said “No thanks” and explained that I was just going to stick with my own shirt, as I liked having pockets. She proceeded to harangue me (in the middle of the ER) to try to make me wear the shirt. “You have to!” she said. “Everyone has to”. She got fairly animated. I stood firm. She gave up, shook her head angrily, and headed off. Ironically, she tried to bully me to into wearing the anti-bullying shirt.

Seinfeld fans will recall the episode where Kramer was bullied to wear an AIDS ribbon. And yes it was a perfect analogy.

Most ironically, the nurse in charge of anti-bullying was probably the biggest “bully” I ever worked with. She made the workplace difficult for many new hires, and even for established nurses (and doctors!) who weren’t in her good graces. Finally there were enough complaints about her that she “failed upward” into a clipboard nurse job which involved pushing papers and not interacting with humans. I don’t think her new position involves organizing anti-bullying day.

Eggshells. Are you doing enough to fight bullying!!

We have created a society where people walk on eggshells. Are you a manager who has to discipline an employee? Be DAMN careful about how you do it, because if they feel bad then you bullied them. Are you a doctor who asks your medical students hard questions? Careful! Don’t be a bully (and especially not a pimp!). Are you a grade 5 student being called names by a much smaller kid? Better not shove him or threaten to punch him, because then it is you (and not him) who is The Bully.

Are you doing enough to fight bullying!? Are you being part of the solution, or part of the problem? Woe betide the teacher who has, in the eyes of an aggrieved parent, not done enough to stop bullying in her classroom.

Is “Kind” the best measure of a good human?

I have never disagreed with trying to be kind, and teaching young people to do the same. But I have always found this injunction to be “kind” very Nanny-State-ish. Measuring “Kind” is hard. Euthanasia of handicapped persons in Nazi Germany was done out of “kindness”. Affirmation and medical treatment of kids with gender dysphoria is being pushed using “kindness” as an argument. Many evils are committed by people who feel they are being “kind”. Stating your disagreement with someone’s strongly held opinion and thus making them feel bad is not “kind”, but it’s often necessary. Punishing your child for a transgression is not “kind” (it’s a lot easier to just let it go), but if you need to do it if you want them to develop into a fully functional adult.

How about this suggested list of suggested alternatives from The Pairodocs. (Feel free to suggest your own)

If anti-bullying makes things better, why isn’t it better?

Similar to my previous arguments about “Harm Reduction”, if “anti-bullying” is so great then why, 20 years into our anti-bullying push, are things not better? Like harm reduction advocates, anti-bullying advocates are reduced to the “it would be even worse if we experts weren’t doing all of this!” fallback position.

My guess is that increasing bullying is more about changing definitions, and that kids have always been mean to each other.

Bullying is real, but can range from teasing someone for wearing glasses all the way to gang assaults or worse. Physical assault is already a crime. Obviously we should do what we can to stop severe bullying.

Trying to find and eliminate ALL perceived bullying is almost certainly a utopian fools errand that is doing more harm than good. As Abigail Shrier talks about in her recent book “Bad Therapy”, telling kids that they are fragile and that unpleasant experiences will harm them is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It creates a nocebo effect. Those who believe they will be harmed and permanently damaged by any type of bullying are much more likely to BE damaged.

In my opinion, anti-bullying is anti-productive. Similar to anti-racism, anti-oppression, and the war on fill-in-the-blank, the cure may very well be worse than the disease.

The Pairodocs recommend this book!

Are we really making society better through our attempts to stamp out bullying?

In trying to create Utopia, it seems that instead we are creating a hell of fragile, entitled young people who we have taught to be as sensitive as possible to any possible bullying. Perhaps there is something to be said for letting boys be boys and girls be girls,. Perhaps kids (and adults!) can and should work out the majority of their conflicts without a referee. Humans have the capacity to become tough, resourceful, and adaptable when given the opportunity to work out their own problems.