Illustration: J.D. King
By Lyn Mikel Brown
Seven years ago, I helped found a nonprofit organization committed to changing the culture for girls. Our work is based on the health psychology notion of "hardiness"?a way of talking about resilience that not only identifies what girls need to thrive in an increasingly complex and stressful world, but also makes clear that adults are responsible for creating safe spaces for girls to grow, think critically, and work together to make their lives better.
As a result of this work, I've grown concerned that "bully-prevention" has all but taken over the way we think about, talk about, and respond to the relational lives of children and youths in schools. So, from our group's strength-based approach, I offer 10 ways to move beyond what is too often being sold as a panacea for schools' social ills, and is becoming, I fear, a problem in and of itself:
Bully prevention programs typically put kids in three categories: bullies, victims, and bystanders. Labeling children in these ways denies what we know to be true: We are all complex beings with the capacity to do harm and to do good, sometimes within the same hour. It also makes the child the problem, which downplays the important role of parents, teachers, the school system, an increasingly provocative and powerful media culture, and societal injustices children experience every day. Labeling kids bullies, for that matter, contributes to the negative climate and name-calling we're trying to address.
If it's sexual harassment, call it sexual harassment; if it's homophobia, call it homophobia, and so forth. To lump disparate behaviors under the generic "bullying" is to efface real differences that affect young people's lives. Bullying is a broad term that de-genders, de-races, de-everythings school safety. Because of this, as sexual harassment expert Nan Stein explains, embracing anti-bullying legislation can actually undermine the legal rights and protections offered by anti-harassment laws. Calling behaviors what they are helps us educate children about their rights, affirms their realities, encourages more complex and meaningful solutions, opens up a dialogue, invites children to participate in social change, and ultimately protects them.
Children's behaviors are greatly affected by their life histories and social contexts. To understand why a child uses aggression toward others, it's important to understand what impact race, ethnicity, social class, gender, religion, and ability has on his or her daily experiences in school?that is, how do these realities affect the kinds of attention and resources the child receives, where he fits in, whether she feels marginal or privileged in the school. Such differen-ces in social capital, cultural capital, and power relations deeply affect a child's psychological and relational experiences in school.