The Bully Society

School Shootings and the Crisis of Bullying in America's Schools

Jessie Klein

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781479860944
• eBook ISBN: 9780814763711
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi di genere

Choice's Outstanding Academic Title list for 2013 Through interviews and case studies, Klein develops an explanation for bully behavior in America's schools In today's schools, kids bullying kids is not an occasional occurrence but rather an everyday reality where children learn early that being sensitive, respectful, and kind earns them no respect. Jessie Klein makes the provocative argument that the rise of school shootings across America, and childhood aggression more broadly, are the consequences of a society that actually promotes aggressive and competitive behavior. The Bully Society is a call to reclaim America's schools from the vicious cycle of aggression that threatens our children and our society at large.Heartbreaking interviews illuminate how both boys and girls obtain status by acting "masculine"—displaying aggression at one another's expense as both students and adults police one another to uphold gender stereotypes. Klein shows that the aggressive ritual of gender policing in American culture creates emotional damage that perpetuates violence through revenge, and that this cycle is the main cause of not only the many school shootings that have shocked America, but also related problems in schools, manifesting in high rates of suicide, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, self-cutting, truancy, and substance abuse. After two decades working in schools as a school social worker and professor, Klein proposes ways to transcend these destructive trends—transforming school bully societies into compassionate communities.

1
Social Status Wars

The twenty-three-year-old Virginia Tech gunman Cho Seung-Hui had been relentlessly teased and bullied throughout middle school and high school. He was angry at what he perceived as an unjust school hierarchy that privileged the wealthy. Before he killed thirty-two people and then himself in a 2007 rampage, Cho raged against the rich, declaring his shooting a response to the “brats” and “snobs” at his school who were not satisfied with their “gold necklaces” and “Mercedes.” The South Koreanborn Cho, whose parents ran a dry-cleaning business, seemed to believe he had been bullied because of his lower economic status and his race. His peers said they couldn’t understand his accent and way of speaking and told him to “go back to China” one of the rare times he mustered up the courage to speak in class.¹

When Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold sauntered into the Columbine High School library, they were similarly angry at those with higher status in their school. Armed with a rifle, a shotgun, handguns, knives, and bombs, the first thing they shouted was “All jocks stand up. We’re going to kill everyone one of you.”²

These were vicious and devastating attacks that grabbed headlines all over the world. The media presented a parade of analysts and experts trying to figure out why two middle-class boys or a quiet college student had become mass murderers. Few of them looked at the high school culture that places a diminished value on students who are perceived as not measuring up. In today’s high schools, race and class, the historical purveyors of American status, are still important factors, but gender is also crucial. Students are measured against reductive and stereotypical standards for what it means to be the “right” kind of girl or boy. Children may be perceived as not good-looking or affluent enough; boys are judged for being not sufficiently masculine or athletic; and girls are scrutinized for the extent to which they are pretty and popular with boys. Children found lacking are pushed to the bottom of their school’s social hierarchy, where life can feel unbearable.

The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu explains in his groundbreaking works the dynamics of power in social relationships. Social inequality becomes reified among adults through the acquisition of different forms of capital.³ Young people also find that to win power and influence in a given community they have to have a certain kind of body (body capital), be friends with certain people (social capital), participate in particular activities that are valued in a given school (cultural capital), be up on the latest gossip (information capital), and of course have a certain amount of money (economic capital) and the material possessions that money can buy (symbolic capital).

Children who come up short in one or more of these categories are often deprived of basic opportunities to fulfill their potential. A bully culture instead circumscribes their lives. Students who don’t achieve the prescribed status markers can be shunned, taunted, assaulted, and otherwise forced to pursue their education in a hostile environment. Children who do score high on these measures are not necessarily much better off, since these goals encourage an obsession with external approval that rarely leaves room for young people—or adults—to express their authentic selves.

The status systems in schools reflect familiar forms of institutionalized discrimination in which some members of society continue to be treated as second-class citizens. Many of the stories I heard from people around the country centered on bullying behavior that took place on their school bus and brought to mind the history of racial segregation on public vehicles. Older students or students perceived as more popular tend to claim a certain part of the bus—front or back—and other students are often forced to sit in the remaining spaces, if they are allowed to sit at all.

Rebecca, from an upper-class northeastern suburb, talked about how she had joined the bullies after years of being harassed about her weight. “What is she wearing?” “What was she thinking?” she and her friends would whisper loudly about the other girls. “If someone was wearing something really off the wall, we would laugh about it.” Rebecca had a keen sense of who was higher or lower on the hierarchy. “I had graduated to the back of the bus,” where the older kids would sit, Rebecca recalled, “and all the way in the front of the bus, this girl called me a ‘fat bitch.’ She said it in front of everyone. So I grabbed her by her hair and smacked her in the face and said, ‘Don’t you ever call me that again.’” What seemed to concern Rebecca most was that the girl was younger than she was: “It might have been different if she was older. I couldn’t get over that this little girl who annoys the whole bus was going to say this to me.” She reasoned to herself that “if I didn’t do it, someone else would.” If you’re a “freshman in high school, you’re the little guy. Unless you have a big brother on campus, you don’t run your mouth. It’s a known thing; when you’re the youngest grade in a school, it is known that you have to keep a low profile until you gain experience at that school.”

Shantique, from an impoverished southern rural area, also remembers the bus as the scene where the most ferocious jockeying for status took place, and the worst bullying. “I was always the last person to get on my bus so I would have to negotiate to get a seat. No one wanted to move over. It was high school kids who drove the bus and no one would let me sit down. One little guy sometimes let me sit down, and then they would pick on him.” The powerful girls sat at the back, she said, and controlled the whole bus. They were particularly horrible to one girl because her family had even less money than those of the other girls on the bus. “They picked on her mercilessly, extorted money from her whatever she had, and they made fun of her and called her names. She would cry hysterically and cut school as a result.” Finally the girl told her parents what was going on because she was missing so much school. “They got her on another bus,” Shantique said, “but then the [powerful] girls would go after her in school.”

The rigidity of the school status system often remains hidden from adults. Students who are tormented and ostracized at school come home sullen, depressed, angry, or otherwise distressed, but many say they don’t want to talk about their treatment because it is humiliating, and they don’t even want their parents to know that others don’t seem to like them. Abused young people bring home a host of upsetting feelings and problems that can overwhelm family members—who, even if they are informed about the situation, may also feel helpless and at a loss about what they can do to make it stop. Sadly, some adults who are informed dismiss or minimize the problem.

Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold and their bullies were in fact living in a typical American high school culture where, in a microcosm of an authoritarian state, kids were made to conform to constrained parameters of acceptable behavior that were often vicious and hostile. If you didn’t accept the school leaders and the imposed culture, you were against them and would be severely punished for it, said Columbine classmate Brooks Brown in his book No Easy Answers: The Truth behind Death at Columbine. Brooks, who considered himself Dylan’s good friend, sometimes hung out with the social group the bullies at Columbine referred to as the Trench Coat Mafia.⁴

Eric and Dylan were seen as weak, nerdy, and weird; in short, they were way outside the narrow ideal of what people in their school and their community believed a boy should be, and therefore they were treated as less than human, Brooks explained. Eric had two strikes against him. He had a slight deformity that left his chest a bit sunken. When he undressed in gym class, the bullies were ready to mock him. “Mocking a guy for a physical problem he can’t control is one of the most humiliating ways to bring him down,” wrote Brooks. Eric was also the shortest in the group. “The rest of us, as we got older, became well over six feet in height; Eric never did,” Brooks continued. “He was small, he was a ‘computer geek,’ and he wasn’t even from Colorado to begin with. He was as prime a target as the bullies at Columbine could have asked for.”⁵

Brooks Brown describes some of what the bullies’ targets endured: “At lunchtime, the jocks would kick our chairs, or push us down onto the table from behind. They would knock our food trays onto the floor, trip us, or throw food as we were walking by. When we sat down, they would pelt us with candy from another table. In the hallways, they would push kids into lockers and call them names while their friends stood by and laughed.”⁶ Brooks recalled another incident “when a bunch of football players drove by, yelled something and threw a glass bottle that shattered near Dylan’s feet. I was pissed, but Eric and Dylan didn’t even flinch. ‘Don’t worry about it, man,’ Dylan said. ‘It happens all the time.’”⁷ Someone reported to school authorities that the two boys had drugs “as a way to harass them.” They were removed from class and searched, and their cars and lockers were searched as well. “No drugs were turned up,” Brooks writes, “but the two of them had been humiliated nonetheless.”⁸

In his 2005 book on rage in contemporary America, Going Postal, Mark Ames writes that Eric and Dylan “were so marked for abuse that even talking to them was dangerous. One female student recounted how, when she was a Columbine freshman, some ‘jocks’ spotted her talking to Dylan Klebold in the school hallway between classes. After she walked away from him, one of them slammed her against the lockers and called her a ‘fag lover.’ None of the students came to help her— and when asked later why she didn’t report the incident to the administration, she replied, ‘It wouldn’t do any good because they wouldn’t do anything about it.’”⁹

Even after the shooting, many students seemed to see nothing wrong with bullying students like Eric and Dylan. Elliot Aronson writes in Nobody Left to Hate, “Most members of the ‘in group’ considered taunting ‘outsiders’ a reasonable thing to do.”¹⁰ Aronson quotes one member of the Columbine football team, who said, “Columbine is a good, clean place except for those rejects. Most kids didn’t want them there. Sure we teased them. But what do you expect with kids who come to school with weird hairdos and horns on their hats? It’s not just the jocks; the whole school’s disgusted with them…. If you want to get rid of someone, usually you tease ’em. So the whole school would call them homos.”¹¹ Kevin Koeniger, at the time seventeen years old and a junior on Columbine’s Rebels Football team, told a reporter, “If they were different, why wouldn’t we look at them as weird?” Another student from the soccer team, Ben Oakley, agreed. “They’re freaks.”¹²

In this case, the “freaks” struck back. With guns in their hands they were, for a moment, at the top of the pecking order, and they doled out humiliation, abuse, and death not only to the students who bullied them but to everyone in their path. The teacher who was hiding in the library during the massacre recalled hearing the shooters say, “Kill all the jocks.” But she also heard them say, “What do we have here, a nigger?” just before they shot Isaiah Shoels, an African American and a star football player. They said to someone else: “Whatta we got here, a fat boy?” And they taunted a student with glasses. While they had compiled a “hit list” in advance, their real hope, Harris wrote in his diary, was that they could use explosives to simply blow up the whole school, reducing the site of their torment to rubble.¹³

In Comprehending Columbine, Ralph W. Larkin writes, “They apparently wanted to target the entire peer structure, in which they were at the very bottom. Although they were harassed by a small minority of the student population, they blamed everyone in the school for their own degraded social status,”¹⁴ perhaps because no one helped them and because many seemed to have watched their humiliation with either indifference or some degree of pleasure.

Eric and Dylan internalized the status hierarchies in their school. They despised the “bullies” who tormented them, but they didn’t seek to defend other targets of bullying. Instead they became the biggest bullies, in an apparent effort to momentarily be at the top of the school hierarchy themselves—torturing those they had learned to believe were categorically inferior.

Why Did They Shoot?

As the Columbine shooting took its place among an escalating number of school shootings in the 1990s, most observers asked: “What was different about those boys, what was it that made them reject common social and moral standards?” Such questions belie the fact that in some sense Eric and Dylan were affirming, rather than rejecting, some of the prevailing social and moral standards at their schools. These expectations push boys to achieve certain kinds of status at all costs—and in particular link the achievement of this status to a narrow definition of masculinity that values power and dominance above all else. A close look at three decades of school shootings shows how tightly school social expectations and the school shooters’ responses are intertwined.

If they want to be popular, male students in American high schools are often expected to conform to hypermasculine values. Boys are pressured to be successful at sports, highly competitive, dominant with girls, emotionally detached, able to hold their own in a fight, disdainful of homosexuality, and derisive toward academics. More often than not, they are expected also to be affluent, with a nice car, expensive clothes, and money to throw around—more evidence of their power and success. The recognition that boys gain if they exhibit these qualities allows them to climb up their school hierarchy and maintain a high social status.

Living as they do within such a strict and punitive social hierarchy, boys are told in one way or another to prove their manhood and, in some cases, to prove that they exist at all. Many boys feel they must go to great lengths to differentiate themselves from those perceived as gay, feminine, poor, intellectual, or weak. They’ll harass, bully, demean, humiliate, and generally try to crush the social value of anyone who doesn’t fit in, all in an effort to secure their own social standing. By calling another student “gay,” a boy demonstrates to others that he is successfully heterosexual, while a boy who “beats up” another student proves how powerful he is compared with the injured party. Such bullying techniques are pervasive across American schools as children work desperately to prevent their own social demise and to raise their otherwise fragile status; without this violence, boys, in particular, fear that they might not get recognized at all, or worse, could become the targets of the abuse themselves and lose any opportunity for social connection. In various ways, boys of all races and economic groups, across the country, feel compelled to demonstrate an aggressive masculinity. What’s more, “dominance bonding” tends to be socialized through school athletics as well as other school institutionalized activities.¹⁵

Of the 166 school shooting perpetrators whose identities are known, 147 were male. Most of those who committed the massacres, as revealed in the examination of their cases, struggled for recognition and status among their peers. The majority of them languished at the bottom of the social hierarchy. They tended not to be athletic, and they were often described in the media as skinny, scrawny, short, lanky, or pudgy. They were teased for looking feminine or gay. They tended to be academically oriented. They were generally unsuccessful with girls. Many of them were also significantly less wealthy than the popular teens at their schools. As a result of these perceived failures, they were mercilessly teased and abused.

Without even a shred of the status necessary for surviving socially in their schools, these boys repeatedly chose to prove their masculinity through overwhelming violence. Many of them targeted more popular kids who had harassed them and girls who had rejected them. They believed their violent response, a powerful demonstration of masculine prowess, would win them the recognition they desperately craved. Whether they were dead or alive, free or behind bars, one after another, the perpetrators spoke about their yearning for notoriety. They could no longer imagine achieving recognition in their present reality, so they dreamed of receiving it in some form of afterlife obtained through violence and infamy. Most people work hard to get recognized and seen— a basic human need. Without more constructive vehicles in schools and elsewhere in the community, these youth turned to any means necessary.

Some of the shooters who survived—who didn’t kill themselves or get killed in the mayhem—expressed these feelings explicitly. Fifteen-year-old Michael Carneal told psychiatrists he was proud of himself after he shot and killed three girls, including two who had rejected him, in West Paducah, Kentucky, in 1997.¹⁶ Michael told the psychiatrists that he wasn’t sure why he had started shooting that day. “I didn’t expect to kill anyone. I was just going to shoot. I thought maybe they would be scared and then no one would mess with Michael.”¹⁷ “Murder is gutsy and daring,” bragged Luke Woodham after his 1977 shooting in Mississippi.¹⁸

In fact many of them did become nationally or internationally known figure...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Gender Police
• 1 Social Status Wars
• 2 Masculinity and White Supremacy
• 3 Violence against Girls
• 4 Gay Bashing
• 5 Girl Bashing
• 6 Cyber-Bullying
• 7 Adult Bullies
• 8 The Bully Economy
• 9 America Is from Mars, Europe Is from Venus
• 10 Creating Kinder Schools and Cyberspaces
• Conclusion: From a Bully Society to Compassionate Communities
• Appendix: Methodology
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author