Bullying, School Shootings and the Right

Bullying is a huge problem for LGBT youth both inside and outside of the nation's schools, but the problem extends far beyond just LGBT youth. And as a piece in Salon reports, bullying ties directly to the alarming rise of school shootings. As does the growing economic and social viciousness supported by conservative elements in society and, of course, the Republican Party where the poor, the immigrant, the gay, and all those deemed as the "other" are viewed as discardable and unworthy of the rights of citizenship. What makes this picture all the more disgusting is the way in which far right Christians want a free pass to denigrate and bully anyone who doesn't conform to their religious/world view. Here are some article highlights,

As the details of this week’s Chardon, Ohio, school shooting emerged, they seemed eerily familiar. . . . Once again, the alleged shooter, T.J. Lane, a 17-year-old fellow student, was described as a “loner” with a “troubled” family history. And, once again, other students described him as the victim of “bullying.” And so Chardon joins the long list of violent school incidents with a connection to America’s rampant bullying problem.

According to Jessie Klein, the author of the new book “The Bully Society,” it’s a problem that’s only getting worse. In her excellent examination of the school bullying epidemic, Klein, an assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at Adelphi University, takes a broad approach to the subject. She first lays out the scope of the problem, before explaining how kids’ changing attitudes towards masculinity, the birth of child-targeted consumerism and the erosion of our compassionate society have all helped to create a culture in which children are increasingly feeling overwhelmed and helpless, and, in some cases, prone to violence. Most provocatively, she ties the rise of bullying behavior to America’s economic move to the right.

Between 1979 and 1988 there were 27 school shootings. From 1989 to 1998 there were 55 and then they continued to increase from 1999 to 2008 to 66, so there were 148 shootings in the three decades from 1979 to 2008. What’s most disturbing is that in the three years since 2008 there have been 43 shootings, and that’s almost two-thirds of the number of shootings that occurred in the preceding decade.

I started studying the school shootings when I first heard about a school shooting in 1997. I was really struck by why he said he committed the shooting. He talked about how he had been picked on, and called gay, and harassed for being fat.

We have an increasingly high depression rate, anxiety has increased among children. There are so many different ways that the children are acting out their despair — suicides, self cutting, substance abuse — and so much of it relates to school bullying. So, what I try to show in the book is that school shootings are the most horrific response to school bullying but they’re not the only response at all, and mostly they magnify what’s happening at schools. You know, most of the kids who committed shootings really wanted to tell the world that they were so miserable and they were treated so badly and this is what they felt forced to do.

When school shootings occur people like to say, “Oh that person was a psychopath.” And it’s a way of personalizing the issue and not taking responsibility as a society. As Durkheim, a classic sociologist, said in his seminal work called “Suicide,” when you see the same thing happening over and over and over again, you can’t keep blaming the individual. You have to look at the social environment and say, why is this happening over and over again?

These kids really were willing to do anything to increase their respect in the school. They’d been so harassed and so degraded. It was such a miserable experience that they thought if they picked up guns they would finally feel powerful and gain some respect. And I think that is a very sad statement in our society that kids get that message: To get respect they need to be dominate and aggressive and violent.

[W]hat I show in the book is that masculine values of aggression, violence, dominance are not specific to men. Girls and women are increasingly pressured to demonstrate those values as well.

[W]hat’s fascinating is that social isolation has increased. It’s tripled since the ’80s, and depression and anxiety statistics are extremely high. These are, I think, indicators of what’s going on in our society more generally.

There are many people who do believe that the more you help people, the less they will work, the more lazy they will become. . . . society has gotten more and more harsh in that way and I think people feel strongly in our country that that’s the way to get ahead. We’re the only country in the industrial world that doesn’t have a paid leave for women who have children, whereas other countries in Europe go out of their way to make sure there’s a long paternity leave.

[P]eople here believe that if you make money you’ll get support but if you don’t make money, you’re pretty much on your own. And I think that’s what kids in schools feel. A lot of the school shooters said, “The principal wasn’t doing anything, the guidance counselors weren’t doing anything, so I had to take things into my own hands.” And that’s pretty much the message that people get, whether you’re an adult or a kid.

The cultural dialogue around school shootings seems to have shifted in the last decade and a half. When Columbine happened, video games and violent movies were really being blamed. This doesn’t really seem to be the case anymore. It’s more about bullying.

We’re going through this election cycle in which, once again, welfare recipients are being demonized, and the GOP primary has become a race to out right-wing Mitt Romney. . . . Right now kids are trained to be heartless and pursue success at any cost.

I suspect that it's not lost on teens and youths that the least compassionate and most bullying prone are conservative Christians who, in my view, are well on their way towards killing the Christian brand all together.