Who's to Blame for Our Culture of Bullying?

When my son was in kindergarten, he came home from school one day with a frown on his face. "Mommy," he said, "what does it mean when someone calls you gay?" My mouth dropped open, as if in a cartoon, and I found myself at a loss for words. Hard to believe, I know, but I asked him how the word was used. The kids had been playing "Four Square" and my young Masonite had missed the ball. An older boy had shoved him and said, "You're so gay."

I looked at my intense little son for a moment and gathered my thoughts. We knew a gay couple from his former preschool and I wondered how much information my son really needed. Long story or short story? I explained to him the older boy had actually used the word to mean "stupid," then went on to explain what the term really meant, using the couple we knew as an example. Many people would say I had given him way more info than he needed, but weeks earlier he had asked me why his preschool friend had two mommies and I decided to be truthful.

Years later, when he got to the , a youngster who had bullied him in elementary school bullied him again. The school psychologist offered him a bouquet of homilies and told him to "just say no," or "just walk away." Needless to say, the bullying continued. It was early in the new century, and bullying was not yet seen as the problem it is today. Or maybe we were all still in that “boys will be boys” bubble where bullying was seen as just part of growing up.

We all knew one—the kid in the neighborhood who scared the pants off of us and lived to grab our Stingray bike or swipe our Tastykakes. In my neck of the woods, it was a girl named Yvonne who had come to our neighborhood straight outta Philly. She was a tough, profane pincher who stole my Brownies beanie, wrapped it around a large rock, then hefted it into the Cooper River. I ran home, already inventing a story about how it had gotten lost.

When the Tyler Clementi tragedy made headline news, my reaction was not unlike what many others were feeling: a mixture of sadness and anger. Sadness that a young person would feel so hopeless as to end their life and angry that Dharun Ravi had filmed Tyler’s intimate moments and so blatantly broadcast them for his college world to see. “That bully should be sent away for life,” I remember saying to my husband.

That harsh sentiment stayed with me until and I saw him for what he really was. A stupid kid. A stupid kid who could have been my stupid kid or your stupid kid. But a bully? I wasn’t so sure.

Gov. Christie’s Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights, adopted in January 2011 and amended in March 2012, is that lays out . This light reading can be found on the district website, or if you’re really ambitious, you can go to the NJDOE website for guidelines and tutorials.

Ironically, bullies are often motivated to abuse others because they, too, have been victims of abusive behavior at home or at school. They take the anger they feel as a result of being bullied and direct it toward others. I witnessed this firsthand when running an acting workshop at one of our elementary schools. A boy who had been relentlessly picked on came into my workshop and immediately set upon another boy, calling him a "faggot." I directed him into the hallway and told him I would not permit any sort of unkindness in my group, and he needed to be respectful of everyone. “You’ve been picked on,” I told him. “You know that it hurts, so why would you do that to someone else?” He just shrugged.

If you haven’t spent much time in the classroom lately, let me enlighten you as to what teachers in the 21st century are up against. In addition to teaching and testing, they are now family mediators, they are etiquette instructors, role models and they are supposed to be experts on bullying. They must take HIB workshops; they must immediately report what they see and when they saw it. Their vigilance must not only be to the "three Rs" and teaching to the test, but to every corner of a student’s life. How do they get any instruction done?

What about some of the verbiage that goes on during youth sports games: coaches yelling at kids, parents yelling at kids, kids yelling at kids? What about the woman I overheard while walking the dogs? She was chastising her son, telling him she didn’t want to sit through another game just to watch him strike out again. Bullying? And what about the feminine perspective? Fights between girls are gleefully referred to as “cat fights.” The Housewives reality shows make it seem as if everyone is bullying everyone else AND getting paid a lot of money to do so, somehow glamorizing bad behavior.

, rather than wait for the appeals process, which could take months to be completed. He has also issued a tardy apology in which he states he was never motivated by hate, bigotry or prejudice, and never meant to hurt or humiliate anyone. He acknowledged that although he didn’t mean to cause harm, his childish actions had done just that. Too often, our actions DO hurt or humiliate others, regardless of our intentions. 

As we move into active presidential campaigning, I find myself dreading the negative: the flying innuendos, the stories of prep school bullying, newly revived questions about Obama’s birthplace.

Every seven minutes in our country, a child is bullied. Is it any wonder?