The Brutal Years
‘Sticks and Stones,’ Emily Bazelon’s Book on Bullying
Gabriella Giandelli
By ANDREW SOLOMON
Published: February 28, 2013
The question of whether humans are becoming more brutal or more
civilized has been debated urgently by the Athenians, the philosophers
of the Renaissance, the Victorians and the existentialists. Those who
argue that cruelty is currently becoming more acute point to the Rwandan
genocide, global warming, and the malicious acts of selfish
corporations and corrupt politicians. Contrariwise, others point to a
safer and kinder society of greater prosperity and less prejudice
against social, religious and ethnic minorities; Steven Pinker’s 2011
book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” proposes that we live more
peaceably now than ever before. The dichotomous argument has particular
resonance in the context of childhood. Teachers no longer routinely hit
students; laws require accommodations for young people with learning
disabilities; parents keep watch for teachers’ abuse and vice versa;
developmental therapists are around every corner. Yet the Internet has
unleashed meanness of a previously unimagined scope and celerity; broken
households escalate children’s proclivity to launch unmonitored
assaults on weaker kids; ethics are preached neither at home nor at
school; and the accessibility of assault rifles enables nearly
apocalyptic juvenile excess. Adult bullies from talk radio to Congress
get constant airtime, and in many quarters their belligerence is
applauded. Still, we are shocked when children behave belligerently
toward one another. Youthful aggression has always been a problem and
always will be; the pitilessness of childhood, like that of the world,
is most likely a constant quantity.
STICKS AND STONES
Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy
By Emily Bazelon
386 pp. Random House. $27.
Emily Bazelon’s intelligent, rigorous “Sticks and Stones” charts the
experiences of a few bullied children and synthesizes the scholarship on
how to contain or prevent such harm. She focuses primarily on the
stories of three kids: an African-American girl, Monique McClain, who
became the target of a few girls at her school in Connecticut, went
through a depression and finally switched schools and found happiness; a
gay boy in upstate New York, Jacob Lasher, who struggled against
prejudice but also enjoyed being a provocateur; and Phoebe Prince, an
Irish girl transplanted to a town in Massachusetts, who was bullied
atrociously and committed suicide. Bazelon includes chapters on
anti-bullying measures with good track records. She reviews
jurisprudence on bullying, and examines both the virtues and the
pitfalls of treating it as a crime. She tries to delineate what parents
can achieve, what schools can achieve, and what may come of the shifting
power differential among parents and schools and social agencies.
Bazelon is at her best as a storyteller, and the most interesting parts
of the book are its human narratives. She resists the idea that there is
always an innocent victim; among her three subjects, she paints Monique
as essentially blameless, but the others as having some hand in their
own suffering. Her writing about Phoebe Prince for Slate, which inspired
and is expanded in this book, is especially trenchant; it rejects the
simple “bullied to death” narrative that dominated the media at the
time. Bazelon indicates that Phoebe’s situation was complicated: she had
been cutting herself, had had problems in a previous school, had made a
prior suicide attempt and had gone off her antidepressants six weeks
before she took her life. Given Phoebe’s history, Bazelon writes that
she couldn’t understand the prosecutor’s decision “to lay the burden of
her suicide at the feet of six adolescents.”
If charity begins at home, then so, too, does brutality: at home and
early, and Bazelon looks for the seeds of troubling behavior in the home
lives of bullies. She is taken with the work of Dan Olweus, the grand
old man of anti-bullying theory and practice, whose programs target the
school, the classroom and the individual. She describes a headmaster who
was able to transform the climate at his school largely through
charisma, will and the methodology proposed by George Sugai, who
believes that positive rewards given to students for positive social
skills may be just as effective as punishment for those who are out of
line. Investigating the role of the Internet in modern bullying, Bazelon
visited the offices of Facebook, achieving an unusual degree of access.
She describes both the company’s woefully inadequate anti-bullying
protocols for young subscribers — Facebook’s current business model
seems built on “habituating kids to giving up their privacy” — and their
ill-advised efforts to bully her once they got a whiff of her
criticisms. Bazelon explores the role of adults in the lives of kids who
are bullied, and shows that often, parents and teachers who set out to
help end up exacerbating the problem. She refuses the notion that the
real reason for bullying is violent video games, rock music, parental
neglect, social media or any other single cause. She thinks with nuance,
making it clear that the problem is overdetermined and requires
complex, subtle solutions.