Little fascist panties
Apr. 2nd, 2010 11:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabbyGirlfighting: Betrayal, Teasing and Rejection Among Girls. This paper is about 10 years old, but I don't think anything has changed much. Today's high schools have a whack of anti-bullying initiatives, most of them based on Barbara Coloroso's theories, and I don't think they're actually working. The Toronto Raptors come into talk about how bullying is not cool, and kids perform skits and videotape them. What's lacking is structural analysis, as usual:
I'm unsurprised that most of the comments to this post were personal stories about bullying, though whether the phenomenon is so widespread as to be ubiquitous, or whether a disproportionate amount of bullying victims wind up venting to the blogosphere about it, I'm not sure. What strikes me, now, is the emphasis on how a teacher should have intervened. This hits close to home for obvious reasons. I mean, the thing with bullying that doesn't involve explicit acts of violence is that it's invisible. That's why it's damaging, that's why it works. I can, and do, intervene when kids are calling each other by homophobic slurs, but the subtle cruelties pass entirely under my radar.
I'm not sure what a teacher could have done when I was experiencing girl-on-girl bullying in grade school; any attempt at intervention by an adult typically resulted in an increase, not a decrease, in nastiness. There's nothing worse than being told you need to act like a decent human being to someone, especially by a terminally uncool teacher. And the nature of these acts are such that the aggressor isn't committing any overt crime that can be punished.
I tend to think my kids are nice; they tease each other, but it appears innocent. If there's a dark undercurrent, it isn't obvious. Fixing these sorts of problems has to be structural rather than simply reactive, and that's what I like about the paper. It isn't enough for an authority figure to intervene. The school system itself is designed to provoke anxiety. In a competitive, hierarchical closed system like a school, of course children are going to ruthlessly compete and form hierarchies. That's what they know how to do, and that's how they succeed. Slaps on the wrist and "modelling respectful behaviour" will accomplish jack shit, because children aren't entirely stupid and are excellent at recognizing hypocrisy.
Not entirely related, but quite cool. Fallen Princesses. Autoplay music warning.
Put simply, this is divide and conquer. The constant surveillance of “other” girls’ flaws and faults creates a kind of low-level surveillance that produces a lot of anxiety. How does one know whom to trust? Like informants to the KGB, the watchers and judgers hope for protection and safety, but of course their activities separate them from one another, perpetuate the denigration of femininity, support the status quo and their subordinate place in it. That is, they are judging other girls against dominant cultural ideals of femininity: on how well they contain their sexuality and negotiate heterosexual romance, conform to white middle class ideals of beauty, and collude in a passive, nondisruptive “nice girlness.” Feeling the weight of expectations and the shame of not matching up and unable to openly protest or resist without being labeled a trouble-maker or disruptive or bad, motivates girls’ acts of hidden, horizontal violence.
I'm unsurprised that most of the comments to this post were personal stories about bullying, though whether the phenomenon is so widespread as to be ubiquitous, or whether a disproportionate amount of bullying victims wind up venting to the blogosphere about it, I'm not sure. What strikes me, now, is the emphasis on how a teacher should have intervened. This hits close to home for obvious reasons. I mean, the thing with bullying that doesn't involve explicit acts of violence is that it's invisible. That's why it's damaging, that's why it works. I can, and do, intervene when kids are calling each other by homophobic slurs, but the subtle cruelties pass entirely under my radar.
I'm not sure what a teacher could have done when I was experiencing girl-on-girl bullying in grade school; any attempt at intervention by an adult typically resulted in an increase, not a decrease, in nastiness. There's nothing worse than being told you need to act like a decent human being to someone, especially by a terminally uncool teacher. And the nature of these acts are such that the aggressor isn't committing any overt crime that can be punished.
I tend to think my kids are nice; they tease each other, but it appears innocent. If there's a dark undercurrent, it isn't obvious. Fixing these sorts of problems has to be structural rather than simply reactive, and that's what I like about the paper. It isn't enough for an authority figure to intervene. The school system itself is designed to provoke anxiety. In a competitive, hierarchical closed system like a school, of course children are going to ruthlessly compete and form hierarchies. That's what they know how to do, and that's how they succeed. Slaps on the wrist and "modelling respectful behaviour" will accomplish jack shit, because children aren't entirely stupid and are excellent at recognizing hypocrisy.
Not entirely related, but quite cool. Fallen Princesses. Autoplay music warning.
