But why can the parents only put themselves in the victim's parents shoes? Why can't they put themselves directly in the victim's shoes?
Does something happen when people become parents that they can no longer directly empathize with members of a younger generation, and can instead see them only through parental eyes? Frankly, I find that kind of creepy. Empathy is "Wow, I can only imagine how hellish it would be if people were doing that to me." To say "Wow, I can only imagine how hellish it would be if people were doing that to my daughter" is kind of, I don't know, possessive and almost selfish. They aren't empathizing with the victim, they're really empathizing with her parents, and the empathy is fraught with touches of the same distasteful archaic ideas that lead to such unpleasant traditions as the bride's father "giving her away." It's coming from the same place that leads critics of war to say I don't see the warmongerers' kids in combat without even considering that the warmongerers' kids are in no way responsible for their parents' warmongering, or leads people to think "You'd better lock up your daughter and buy a shotgun" is a compliment, without even considering that the daughter is a human being with thoughts and feelings and doesn't deserve to be denied basic human liberty or social contact (and even some dabbling in romance if she so chooses) because her father is possessive and paranoid.
If I were the victim in this situation, I would feel even more dehumanized by people saying "I can empathize, I have a daughter." That isn't empathy - that's the kind of attitude that leads me to use the word "parental" as an insult. If you want to empathize, you empathize because you're a human being with thoughts and feelings, and have probably experienced at least a touch of bullying and/or sexual harassment in your life, and can extrapolate from your experience to perhaps begin to imagine the hell the victim is going through. If you've led a charmed life where you have never experienced bullying or sexual harassment and seriously cannot imagine being in the victim's shoes, the correct expression is "I can't imagine what you must be going through."
By sheer coincidence, I was on kind of a bullying theory kick before this incident even occurred, so I just finished The Bully, the Bullied and the Bystander by Barbara Coloroso. Overall it was quite interesting and would probably be useful to parents, but there were a few flaws that really jumped out at me.
1. The author puts huge emphasis on the idea that bullying is not sibling rivalry, thus strongly implying that bullying cannot take place among siblings. She offers no solutions to the problem of sibling bullying, which is a different issue because the victim cannot escape the bullying even in the privacy of their own home, and basically does not even acknowledge the existence of the issue. Perhaps she doesn't acknowledge this because it goes contrary to her basic thesis that bullying behaviour can be parented away, but it leaves a very real problem completely unaddressed.
2. She states several times that sometimes bullying is exacerbated when the victim does not fight back or stand up for themselves (although she doesn't recommend telling the victim to stand up for themselves - she does have other practical recommendations). However, she never acknowledges that one reason victims might not stand up for themselves is because they were told by well-meaning grownups to "just ignore it." The author does not recommend telling kids to just ignore the bullying, but neither does she emphasize that this is an ineffective, yet common, tactic. I've even seen it put forward on websites specifically dedicated to stopping bullying, with no advice given on what to do if ignoring it doesn't work (or, at least, doesn't work within a reasonable time - ignoring it will work eventually because everyone will graduate and move away, but asking someone to ignore abuse and humiliation for years and years is not reasonable or feasible advice). I would expect an expert in bullying to know that this is frequently-given and ineffective advice, and to at least mention the fact that it is ineffective. She does once quote a bullying survivor as saying that she was told to just ignore it, with the implication that this is ineffective advice, but the author never once says this herself or explicitly states that it's ineffective.
3. The author emphasizes many times the need to build up children's self-esteem, but doesn't say anything about how exactly this is done. If I were in charge of a child, I certainly would not know how to build up their self-esteem! People need to be told these things! Nor does she really address the fact that even if the parents treat the child in a self-esteem-building manner, this isn't necessarily going to build their self-esteem if no one else is treating them with basic human respect. If their parents are saying "You don't deserve to be treated like that," but everyone else is treating the kid "like that," then the kid will simply assume that the parents are wrong because they're parents and they're clueless. This is exacerbated if the ostensible reason for the bullying is because of something that originates from the parents. If the kid is being bullied because they are wearing the wrong colour jeans, and the parents bought them those jeans, then the kid is likely to be mad at their parents for buying them jeans that would get them bullied. So, from the kid's perspective, on one hand the parents are saying the kid doesn't deserve to be treated badly, but on the other hand they're furnishing the kid with possessions that the bullies use to treat the kid badly. This makes parents as a whole untrustworthy, so the self-esteem-building messages need to come from other sources.
These shortcomings make me doubt the usefulness of the methods described in the book as a whole. I'm not in a position to test the methods, but the fact that the book doesn't address some of the major issues from my own time as a victim of bullying does raise some doubt in me.
It occurs to me that there might be some value in sensationalizing all bullying.
(Forgive me if I've blogged this before - I thought I had, but I can't seem to find it in my archives).
The word "bullying" itself is rather unfortunate in that it trivializes what is in fact physical and psychological abuse. Use of the word "bullying" makes it sound like some everyday part of childhood - only one or two levels above "teasing" (which is not always even a negative thing). The word "bullying" itself is inherently negative, but I don't think it's negative enough. Legally and semantically, the activities that comprise bullying are, in fact, abuse, assault, torture, extortion, harassment, maybe even bordering on rape in some cases.
I think people in general, and the media in particular, need to take this up. Instead of using the word "bullying", we should use the worst word possible to describe the occurrence in question. For example, instead of saying "I was bullied as a child", I would say "I was threatened, harassed, abused, tortured and assaulted as a child." Instead of saying that someone was a bully, I would say that he was guilty of sexual harassment or she was guilty of psychological abuse. See the difference?
So why are we doing this? First of all, it will emphasize the seriousness of bullying. Assault is still assault even if it can also be categorized as bullying, and is no less devastating to the victim. In fact, it might be more devastating if the bully is punished for "bullying" instead of for "assault".
Secondly, it will give victims of bullying the vocabulary to describe their experiences. At the age of nine or 11, I didn't know how to describe the concepts of psychological abuse, sexual harassment, or uttering threats of violence in words that would make them sound like the misconduct they are. "He is sexually harassing me!" is much better than "He's saying things to me!"
Thirdly, (and this is the part I don't have the expertise to be sure about), it may decrease bullies' motivation to bully. Being a bully is one thing; having your name publicly associated with the words "abuser", "assailant" and "torturer" is another thing. This would be particularly effective if cases of bullying were reported sensationally in news media. The only problem here is I'm not sure if a bully would thrive the attention, even when it's such strong negative attention. I've heard theories that bullies just want attention, but there are holes in these theories. The other thing it may do, if this is doable, is make parents more likely to want to stop their kids from becoming bullies, for fear of having the kid's name (and maybe even the parent's name) publicly associated with the words "abuser", "assailant" and "torturer". Again, the problem here is that I don't know if bullying can be parented away. Some people say it can, but I have seen families where one sibling is a bully and the other isn't, so I don't know if it's 100% parenting.
Finally, I think the media should take it upon itself to demonize bullies as much as possible - both individually and collectively. Create an environment in which angry talk-radio caller types are only capable of pronouncing the word "bully" by spitting it, like certain factions in the US used to do with the word "France."
If anyone reading this happens to be a bully, I'd appreciate any feedback on whether this would actually work. Anonymous comments are welcome, and, for the purpose of this post, we won't judge you for being a bully as long as you keep your bullying out of this blog.
4 comments:
I assume from this blog that you are not a parent. Nevertheless, you criticize parental empathy directed towards parental perspectives. You also say “Why can’t they put themselves in the victim’s shoes?” Keep in mind that this is not to say that these parents may not relate the victim’s perspective to their own child(ren). Personally, if my own child were to sexually harass or bully another, I would take it as a personal failure on my part.These are indecent, unkind acts which from my own observations are as apparent in adults as they are in children. People are often quick to judge and slow to try and understand, another’s perspective.
Regards, Woody
No, I'm a parent and never will be. The thing is though, this isn't a completely parallel situation. I am not able to properly empathize with a parent because I have never been one, so that is completely beyond my experience. However, the parents were once children and adolescents. They have that experience. Every non-parent adult with whom I've discussed this can empathize directly with the victim by drawing on and extrapolating from their own high-school experience, but every parent I've discussed this with can't seem to relate directly to the victim, instead relating to their parents. Despite the fact that they have been adolescents just like the non-parents have, they seem to completely lose the ability to relate directly to the adolescent experience. This really creeps me out. It's like a part of their humanity when they reproduce. The moment they're given this huge amount of control over another person's life, their ability to relate to that person entirely as a human being lessens, and is partly replaced with relating to that person as a posession or a pet or a trophy or an archetypal example from a Dr. Spock book. From where I'm sitting, it's really quite scary.
If I were the victim in this situation, I would feel even more dehumanized by people saying "I can empathize, I have a daughter." That isn't empathy - that's the kind of attitude that leads me to use the word "parental" as an insult.
Why isn't that empathy? I think these parents just feel a more-direct connection to the victim's parents because they are now parents themselves.
People tend to identify with the others who are most like them. That doesn't mean they can't identify with the victim anymore, just that they may have a more-immediate or first-line empathy with the parents. I don't think that's abnormal.
Whether or not that's true, the fact remains that the victim deserves to be getting empathy as an individual in her own right, especially in a situation like this where empathy, unfortunately, seems to be at a premium. The parents may need empathy too, I can only guess either way, but the victim unquestionably needs it more. This whole situation has shown a really disgusting side of the community and reflects horribly on our society as a whole. To start changing that, we all need to be able to put ourselves directly in the victim's shoes. We all need to think "If I were in her place, I would feel..." And if I were in her place, and I have been in a similar place, I would feel that grownups who can only empathize because they have a daughter too cannot really empathize at all, really do not get it, and do not perceive me as a proper human being in my own right. This is not going to help the victim at all and will probably make her feel even more alone.
Post a Comment