Just Hanging On

when my brother was 22, his best friend passed away unexpectedly. my aunt drove three hours to be there for him at the funeral. she went up to my brother, gave him a big hug, and then gave him a nickel. it was the same nickel; she had kept it in her wallet for 18 years, and now it's on a necklace that he never takes off.

She also addresses other important things in her vlogs like the reflex lots of girls have to apologize for things even when they aren’t your fault and her sister Stacie’s trouble with shyness and a bully and how maybe sometimes it’s best to just walk away from bullies and standing up for your dreams and the dream gap and the harm that “it was just a joke” does.

The Bechdel:

two or more women talking to each other about something other than a man

The Mako Mori:

at least one female character with her own narrative arc that is not about supporting a man’s story

The Sexy Lamp:

a female character that cannot be removed from the plot and replaced with a sexy lamp without destroying the story.

Chef’s Specials:

The Anti-Freeze:

no woman assaulted, injured or killed to further the story of another character.

The “Strength is Relative”:

And generates at least one that I think ought to be added:

The Pizza Night Test

I was doing my Master’s thesis on bullying until the topic triggered me back to my own childhood so badly I dropped out of that degree program.  Let me share something I know.

We haven’t quite found anti-bullying programs that stop bullying once it’s started, but we canreduce the harm bullying does.  Just a few small changes to classroom culture, like limiting children’s opportunities to exclude each other, or spending time talking about respectful communication, has visible changes.  Yeah, there’s still a hierarchy of popularity, but kids at the bottom of the ladder go from having no friends on average to having one or two.  And that’s enough to make or break a childhood.  (Sources: one two three four five)

But here’s the other thing.

There is one major factor that mediates the link between childhood bullying and adult mental illnesses (predominantly depression, anxiety, and eating disorders).  It’s self-blame.

What really damages children isn’t precisely being bullied; it’s believing that they deserve to be bullied. If children don’t blame themselves for being victims, they are much more resilient and experience fewer long-term negative consequences. (Sources: one two three four five)

Society blames children for their victimization by bullies all the time.  It says, “There is something about you that causes people to bully you.“  Common responses to bullied kids are things like: “Don’t give them a reaction.” (They’re bullying you because you get upset.)  “They’re just jealous.” (They’re bullying you because you do well.)  “Let’s teach you some social skills.”  (They’re bullying you because you act weird.)

There is nothing that can ever make you deserve emotional abuse. 

“Stop bullying” programs don’t work because they treat “bullying” like its a unique, child-specific thing you grow out of once you reach the magic age of 18 and It Gets Better ™.

It’s not. It’s just a fancy word for abuse that people coined because they didn’t want to believe their precious little baby could abuse another child and everyone went along with it because NOBODY wants to believe a six year old can intentionally traumatize another six year old to the point where they want to take their own life. Its “just bullying.” It’s not abuse. Only adults can be abusers. Kids are bullies. And if a child DOES do something evil, they’re either mentally ill or an adult drove them to it. Children can’t be bad!

Except here in the land of reality, it doesn’t work that way. Being abused causes the same amount of trauma whether your abuser is 9 or 90. I don’t care if a child has the biggest, saddest sob story in the world, they don’t get to use that as an excuse to abuse other children. Adults don’t (or shouldn’t) get away with that, so neither should children.

The disruption I was causing was being bullied. Me being targeted by bullies was somehow my fault, my problem.They had me removed from classes rather than dealing with the bullies.

By the time I was learning to teach at the tail end of the ‘90′s it had been replaced with a target the instigator and the instigator’s… I’m going to use the word minions here, though they used kinder words in teacher college.  That thing were they kick the back of the kid with the learning disabilities’ chair until ze explodes for the fun of seeing the kid explode and then get in trouble for it?  I’d watch for that little asshole and come down like a ton of bricks on the bully first kick.  I’d separate that kid from his or her sniggering friends, because they are supporting the bully in the assholery, and the bully would not only have me watching zim like a hawk for as many years as ze had me, I went around to all the teachers in the bullies pod with a list of assholery to look out for.  Because, surprise!  If you punish the bully hard and keep on that instead of punishing the victims?  The bullying nearly disappears in your room.  Not 100% but close. 

We were getting really good results in my district with a mixed approach with the things star-anise was talking about, but also a district wide program that targeted the audience of the bullying.  The research was showing that bullies, whether in schools or that adult asshole sexually harassing adult women on public transport, etc.. read silence as approval.  So we taught the kids that if they felt comfortable saying something either against what the bully was saying or in defence of the person being harmed, that it was the strongest way to help.  If they didn’t feel safe doing that, slip away and get an adult.  If they didn’t feel safe doing that?  Leave.  Because standing and watching strengthens the harasser.  on our end, we all made an effort to intervene every single time, and to model how to verbally push back against it, and to use things like classroom geography to prevent isolation and break up clusters of people encouraging each other in asshole behavior.

It helped.  It helped so much.  I’ve had the instigator’s sniggering sycophants decide they were tired of getting in trouble and it wasn’t worth it to support the bully.  I’ve seen groups of girls descend like Amazons to stand up for a kid being picked on before I could cross the room.  I’ve had a boy turn to another boy and back me up when I was confronting him on homophobia.  I’ve seen two girls and a boy hold a quiet but firm intervention about a certain boy’s bigotry while they were working on a poster project together.  I saw the Middle School with the worst school culture in the District turn around in the course of year because of concerted whole school efforts to break up cliques and intervene whenever they saw even the start of something maybe happening.

I’ve also seen it work with street harassment where we stood up for the person being harassed.  I think it needs to happen in workplaces and anywhere this sort of thing goes down.  We need to have each other’s back, whether adults or children are being harassed, there need to be consequences and intervention.  What ever the age of the person doing the asshole thing, people need to not stay silent witnesses, because that will always be a form of approval.

It can change.  It can get better, but that only happens if a critical mass of us decide to make it better.

Lies

Babies (and small children) also cry for reasons such as:

1. “I am tired and that makes me angry”

2. “I scared myself with a fart”

3. “You are the wrong parent”

4. “I ran into something with my face”

5. “I’m facing the opposite direction then the one I want to”

6. “I fell asleep in one place and woke up somewhere completely different”

7. “I am a very small person in a very big world”

8. “I got scared because YOU farted”