Ellen DeGeneres' video plea to take a stand against teenage bullying, in the wake of Tyler Clementi's suicide this week, looks like it's going viral.
Thank goodness. Ellen's popularity and likability hopefully will call more attention to the torment millions of teens experience each day. As Ellen says, Youtube puts the spotlight on high-tech bullying, but anyone who has gone to high school can attest that bullying was an "epidemic" long before we had webcams and Twitter.
But how do you stop bullying? A first step may be stop using the term "bully".
I don't know about you, but when I hear the word, I can't help getting one of two images in my head: the towering athlete, fully equipped with jock entourage and glinting eyes, or his female equivalent, the cool and catty biatch, with her gum-smacking posse and half smirk.
But those images are misleading, because - of course - bullying is not a phenomenon reserved for the few and the cool. It's also not an exclusively teenage behavior. We all do it, at all stages of our lives.
Yes, even me. At the age of five, for example, I directed a boy admirer to slap - or otherwise inflict injury on - a girl, just because I found her annoying. (That was the last time I had such control over a man.) In 6th grade I participated in the temporary imprisonment of a friend, tying her to a chair and deserting her in a bathroom stall. By high school, like most girls, I became more subtle in my bullying behavior, limiting myself to occasional character assassination - which I've tried to stop as an adult, but still certainly lapse from time to time.
Admittedly, none of those behaviors seem too horrible, but two points are needed. One: I was always considered a really kind, considerate girl with kind, considerate friends. Two: that's exactly why bullying is so insidious. The individual acts never seem too terrible when they are being perpetrated - in all the examples above I probably thought I was either justified or "only having a little harmless fun" - but, from the victim's stance, small instances of thoughtless cruelty can have a horrid cumulative effect.
Bullying is dangerous precisely because no one thinks they are a bully. Actors learn this early on: Iago didn't think he was a great villain, he just thought he was a victim getting back at the guy who screwed him over. Social psychologists also know our brains have a host of mechanisms to protect us from thinking we've done anything bad. For one, if we do something we know is a moral no-no, our inbuilt "attributional bias" helps us blame the circumstances, rather than our - normally - correct character. We're also handy at re-adjusting our notions of right and wrong once we do something that crosses the ethical line, a phenomenon known as cognitive dissonance.
That's why we need to ditch the term "bully". Each time we use it, everyone will agree: "yes, we need to stop bullying." But almost no one will pause to think they are the bully that needs to be stopped.
That said, I don't have a good alternative. "Small instances of thoughtless cruelty that can hurt - or kill" is too unwieldy, but it begins to get at the point. Or maybe the way to go is to start a campaign "We're all Bullies; Get to Know Your Inner Mean-Girl and Tell Her it's Not Cool." (Okay, I'm not queen of catchy.)
Either way, a successful campaign needs to recognize that careless cruelty is all too human - not something others do, but something we all do everyday.
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