Bullying is getting too much attention in the news, on talk shows and with celebrities conducting public confessions as to their experiences.
Wait!
Before you start complaining, hear me out.
When a topic gets this amount of pressure, one thing is bound to happen. The local, state and federal legislatures will meet and pass hundreds, if not thousands, of anti-bullying laws.
This Is Bad For Two Reasons.
One. It passes the responsibility off to someone else. The concerned individual and the target of bullying feel validated in the victim status of the target.
Two. With new laws passed, little is done to actually 1) deal responsibly with the alleged perpetrator, and 2) empower the target of bullying with new skills.
Long time readers know that I find bullying behavior inappropriate. But defining bullying is as challenging as defining pornography, “I’ll know it when I see it” is about as good as we can get.
The last time I checked, there was something over 15,000 anti-gun laws on the books. Yet, it had little to no effect on crimes committed with guns. And there is a direct correlation between carrying guns and a reduction in violence. Besides, the only real beneficiary of anti-gun laws are the prisons. You see, there’s more people to put behind bars because they committed a crime with a gun.
So, how will bullying laws effect bullying?
Well, we can be sure there will be more legislation. With more legislation comes more bureaucracy necessary to track all that legislation (i.e. reports to file, statistics to crunch, committees to talk about the reports and statistics) and on and on.
Additionally, more pressure will be put on overworked teachers to look out for yet another “high risk” activity, and they’ll have to fill out forms and other paperwork to comply with all this legislation. The list of people involved outside of the bullying interaction grows quickly. As you can see, I’ve barely touched on all the new people, currently overworked, that will be involved in this new ‘push.’
As all of these factors require time, energy and money, we’ll see new budget fights over dwindling resources and expanding priorities.
Still, we haven’t talked about teaching the bully it’s not okay, nor how to empower the target of bullying with new skills.
Bullying is not going away as long as governments and special interest groups continue to model bullying behavior – no matter how well intentioned.
Forget the laws, there are Two Effective Ways to deal with bullying.
1) Teach appropriate behavior, and
2) Teach how to stand up to and defend against inappropriate behavior.
All the rest is just feel-good, ineffective distraction.
