BU sociologist finds bullying policies are inadequate

WBUR podcast, Boston. This is Up Next. I'm Sharon Brody. Massachusetts schools report thousands of bullying incidents each year. A Boston University assistant professor wanted to see what bullying looks like up close and how to stop it. So the sociologist spent two years at a rural high school in the Northeast and now Sarah Miller says most of today's bullying prevention methods don't work. She wrote about it in her recent book, The Tolerance Generation. Sarah, welcome. Hi, I'm delighted to be here. How do you define bullying? All right, so the ways that most schools, most anti-bullying laws in this country define bullying is typically some form of harm that is intentional, that is between a clear perpetrator and a clear potential victim that involves repetition. But the way that I witnessed young people experiencing this, it was a lot more diffuse than that. And this has everything to do with social media, but it also had to do with, I think, teens' responses to all of the anti-bullying training that they had received. Are you saying that the bullying approach used by the school was too narrow in its scope and missed what was actually causing harm? Yeah, absolutely. The school that I was in had six different programs that were happening in the two years that I was there. They did an enormous amount of work to try to actually do things. And yet, in all of the things that I was able to observe, none of them actually addressed what the contents of bullying was about. And I think that's the most important piece. And certainly that's where the X Factor is for young people. Can you give an example? Absolutely. So there was a young woman, she's cisgender, she's working class, low-income, and she was openly bisexual. And this was a student who was experiencing so many different dimensions of hostility, but she couldn't point to one specific thing. So for instance, there was this image of a massive octopus, a kraken, that many students would post in various different social media platforms as she was coming into a classroom, or if she spoke in a classroom. None explicitly ever said her name, none would tag her or anything, but everybody was kind of in on the joke. And what the joke was, was that she would have sex with anyone, including an octopus, if you actually asked students. And this had everything to do with their sense-making about bisexuality. And this was a school culture where nobody talked openly about those kinds of things. Certainly they weren't getting information about that in sex education or other aspects of classrooms. And for her, you know, she was saying, you know, it's really hard to pinpoint, because can I really say that that's about me? And if she were to have filed a bullying report, she would have had to explicitly say the date, the time, who did it, under what context. And the thing was, many, many students were taking part in this. That's the kind of persistent, diffuse hostility that was most harmful, and yet was not the stuff that any of the school administrators very, very in-depth attempts to prevent bullying was actually capturing. Social media has come under fire for being at the root of a lot of society's issues. Absolutely. You also point out that it can be a benefit, even to these targeted populations. A huge benefit. So that was another massive thing I left the field. Totally, you know, it was the exact opposite of what I was expecting. Social media was actually the most effective tool kids had to actually prevent bullying amongst each other. And it's because teens are able to use social media to actually talk about what they really need to talk about. There's a chapter devoted to a specific case where multiple students were being really openly homophobic online. And overnight, I witnessed an enormous number of the students in the school responding, being like, you know, you can't actually say that. It's not OK. We don't want that in our school. And by the next morning, like one of the girls sports teams showed up all in rainbow colors to show their peers that this is a place where they are supportive of identities that aren't cis and aren't straight. So certainly social media is highly problematic. But I would also say that social media has given them tools to actually address what bullying is actually about and actually support each other in really effective ways. Well, Massachusetts passed a pretty hefty anti-bullying law in 2010. Among its main elements, it prohibits bullying on school property, requires anti-bullying training. Now that you have closely observed bullying in the wild among high schoolers, what do you think of this law? So I was not necessarily in Massachusetts. I was at a school in the Northeast. That's all I can say about where I was. But I did take a real close look at the law. And it's great. I mean, that's what I will say. It's done a really excellent job of including a variety of different forms of hostility in its definition. It's very broad. It also does a really great job of addressing that certain students are more likely to experience harm than others. The things that are problematic still is that it still requires a clear perpetrator, clear victim. And it also doesn't address why students are targeted, more likely to be targeted for harm. There's nothing in the law that requires that schools address why certain students are more likely to experience harm than others. If you could implement one tangible change in all Massachusetts schools, something that you believe would decrease bullying and harassment, what would it be? Address bullying social roots fundamentally by actually teaching about a variety of different forms of diversity, by actively engaging policies that protect marginalized and minoritized students. Addressing the social roots of it is about addressing this really inequitable society that we're living in and giving young people spaces to make sense of that, because kids care so much about that and they care so much about supporting each other. I mean, I think that that's really I mean, I'm a bullying scholar, but honestly, one of the biggest takeaways is that kids really care about each other and they really care about providing each other support in ways that adults are not doing. Listening to them and listening and really helping to build those relationships and support those relationships is really, really important. Sarah Miller is a sociologist at Boston University and the author of The Tolerance Generation. Sarah, thank you for joining us. Thank you.