Midwest punk band Rise Against have produced a video for their single “Make it Stop” in partnership with the It Gets better Project.
The It Gets better Project is a nonprofit organization created to promote the message that the bullying and torment that many LGBT kids and teenagers suffer through will one day be better.
I think this is a great project and the message is a strong one. In today’s world there are many examples of strong, successful and influential LGBT adults that perservered through the pain of their adolescence to lead meaningful lives And as our culture norms shift towards grwoing acceptance of LGBT people as whole participants in our society, this group will surely grow.
I can’t help but ask what to me is an obvious question though, one that is not addressed anywhere on the organization’s website or through its various media messages: Why does it get better? Or perhaps more precisely, how did it get so bad in the first place? Why is it that even today, children face such horrible treatment at the hands of their peers, for their sexual identity, or any other reason for that matter?
While watching the video, my immediate strong reaction was remembering being picked on or witnessing bullying back when I was in school. This experience, I would guess, is nearly universal. EVERYONE remembers being the subject of or at the very least, witnessing an episode of bullying in school. School is ripe ground for bullying, and LGBT students get some of the worst of it, but they aren’t alone. Anyone who is different can be the subject of this awful phenomenon.
A lot of attention is paid to bullying in the media and in political discourse of late. Much of this attention and new legislation stems from highly publicized cases of bullying that led to the tragic suicide of the victims. In the wake of these tragedies a new breed of anti-bullying laws is being enacted. Peter Gray, a research professor of Psychology at Boston College, writes in his blog at Psychology Today about one such law that was enacted recently in Massachusetts-
“The new anti-bullying law requires that every school employee–including cafeteria workers, janitors, and bus drivers as well as teachers and administrators–report any bullying incident that they see to the principal, who is then required to investigate the incident and take appropriate disciplinary action. In addition, the law requires that every student in Massachusetts, from kindergarten through 12th grade, in every school, participate every year in an “anti-bullying curriculum.” On the surface, these may look like good things, but you don’t have to scratch very deeply to see the problems.
The first problem with the reporting requirement is that very often–maybe most often–the staff member will have no way to know whether a particular act represents good-natured teasing or real bullying. This is especially true in large schools, where individual staff members don’t know everyone. Teasing among friends is a normal, healthy part of adolescence, especially for boys. The best of friends may repeatedly call one another names that sound horrid to outsiders. For many boys, this is their way of hugging.”
On curriculum requirement, he has this to say-
“In fact, many anti-bullying school programs and courses have been tried over the past twenty years, in other countries as well as in the United States, and many outcome studies have been conducted to see if they work. So far, no program has proven itself to be very effective.”
So if none of these programs work, then what are we to do? We can tell these poor kids that “it gets better” all we want, but why should they take us seriously when nobody seems interested in meaningfully ending their suffering in the here and now?
The root of the problem lies in two areas- the compulsory nature of school in our society, and the way it is governed from the top down, with little to no regard for freedom of choice for the kids who are forced to attend every day. Kids who are suffering teasing and abuse in school have no meaningful means of escaping these things- they have no choice but to come back to school day after day and endure. The bullies themselves are also behaving in reaction to this surrounding- lacking any meaningful power over themselves, they react by bullying others. According to Peter Gray, there is one other institution where this behavior flourishes- prison.
“Bullying occurs regularly when people who have no political power and are ruled in top-down fashion by others are required by law or economic necessity to remain in that setting. It occurs regularly, for example, in prisons. Those who are bullied can’t escape, and they have no legislative or judicial power to confront the bullies. They may report bullying to the prison guards and warden, but the guards and warden may not know whom to believe and may have greater vested interest in hiding bullying than in publicizing it and dealing with it openly.”
So, in my mind, the answer to why it gets better is simple- It largely ends once you are through with compulsory school in your life. There is not really anything like the social environment of coerced education in adult life, unless you happen to be in prison. That’s not to say that bullying doesnt exist outside of school, it certainly does. It’s just that school happens to bring out the worst of this phenomenon. Think “Lord of the Flies”- a large group of kids trapped together, with no power to change or better their circumstances, turning on each other in ways that are vicious and to the outside world almost inexplicable.
If kids could walk away from school and find something else worth their time and energy, I am convinced that this problem would largely go away. Unfortunately, instead we are relying on knee-jerk anti-bullying laws while at the same time we make it increasingly harder to leave school through tougher truancy laws, and increased homeschool regulation. Leaving school behind will sound too extreme to most folks outside of the homeschooling/unschooling world, but it’s an idea that will only gain traction by continually questioning societal norms in a thoughtful way.
LOVE it!