bullying: nothing will change if you can't discuss it

i've got bullying on the brain. a week or so ago, several parents in our community called a town meeting to raise awareness of bullying in our community. i saw a sign about it at the library, but it was the same day that i spent at the food co-creation event and i only got back to town as it was starting and i still hadn't fed my family yet at that point, so i didn't go, even tho' i was curious about it. earlier in the year, i worked on english subtitles for a danish program about bullying that was broadcast on DR1. while my own child doesn't have problems with it (either as bully or bullied, thank goodness) at school, i know it's a big issue in schools and frankly, in the workplace and other places among adults.

it turned out that very few people attended the meeting that evening. and the reason is a disturbing one. apparently teachers at the 0-6 school had taken down the signs about the meeting and spread the word that it had been canceled. and quite a lot of parents must have believed it, as only a handful came to a meeting where they were expecting to have more people there than were allowed by the fire code (that would have been 150+). why would teachers not want this important topic to be discussed, i wondered?

the issue moved to the pages of the local newspaper in the days that followed. the first article reported on the meeting - three parents of children who were bullied told their sad and harsh stories. the reporter expressed that it was too bad no one from the bully's side had shown up and that there was no debate on the topic, as had been planned, since it was only the bullied side that was present.

but that must have not been quite correct, as the next day, there was an interview with the principal of the 7-9th grade school, where she said she had attended the meeting and thought it was a shame that she was never given the chance to speak. the first article had indicated that there was no one else present who wanted to speak, so i wonder if she didn't even try to speak up that evening.

she confirmed that the posters had been taken down by teachers at the other school, but said that they would have to speak for their own actions, she wouldn't do so for them. she also indicated that the school acts immediately in cases of bullying, talking to both the children involved and their parents immediately. she gave a recent example of a student who had used a fellow student's gym bag as a toilet and was going to be replacing his bag. she did admit that teachers and school leadership could only do something about incidents which they knew about and that undoubtedly other things happened at school that were never reported and thus not acted upon. fair enough that the teachers cannot be everywhere at all times.

things were quiet for a couple of days and then the story of the worst bullying incident came out in the newspaper. the story had been told at the meeting that evening, but too few had heard it. it was a case of systematic bullying over two years, which resulted in the boy in question growing increasingly angry and violent himself and eventually he, as the bullied, was kicked out of school. he was also diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of the bullying and spent several months away from school. he's now started in a new school, as it was impossible for him to return. a sad tale indeed.

only one side of the tale has been told, as the school claims to be under a confidentiality agreement not to discuss the case. all of the parents received a letter from the superintendent who is responsible for both local schools, on friday (the day after the article appeared). the tone of the letter is very defensive and, in my view, not at all willing to admit that there is an issue. he claims that they have been "hung out" and that not all of the stories are true and that it's quite difficult to have to just "sit back and take it," due to the confidentiality agreement. the letter tries only to shut down the discussion, not open up for an honest conversation that might lead to solutions and new thinking around ways of handling bullying.

then, on monday, a politician got involved and has asked the school for a written explanation of the events in the story of the boy who ended up with PTSD. the explanation will be handled on a political, municipal level by the division of children and young people. it will be interesting to see what comes of it.

i find it sad that it's such a sensitive issue that it seems to be impossible for the school to open up and talk about it. no one wants there to be bullying so bad that a child is chased out of school completely, but to not be able to discuss it is a tragedy. how can anyone learn from the experience and prevent the next one if it's surrounded by defensiveness and a lack of open, honest discussion?

in the program i worked with in the early spring, many of the teachers were also very closed and unwilling to discuss the topic, some of them actually resorted to bullying tactics themselves on the man who was making the program, ignoring him and not letting him join them for lunch when he asked. unless they are involved in the bullying themselves, i can't see why teachers wouldn't want to open up and look for solutions together with parents and the community as a whole?

it's a sad affair all around and i'm grateful that somehow or other it's not an issue that's affected our family or our child's love for school. a week or so ago, she was actually sick and insisted on going because she didn't want to miss out on what they'd be doing in class that week. so the school is doing something (and probably a whole lot of something) right, but they're not handling this bullying issue very well. not very well at all.

containing the bullshit

i think the next time i have to go to a danish association's yearly membership meeting, i'm going to ask husband to bring one of these containers home so there will be room to dispose of all of the bullshit.

actually, husband was a big help this evening, asking a lot of questions that got at the heart of the matter (and undoubtedly making himself as unpopular with our dear leader as i am). it was quite delightful watching the troglodyte squirm. what wasn't as delightful was watching his blatantly sexist reaction to one of the women who tried to ask questions as well - interrupting her, cutting her off and being completely condescending, which he did to none of the men who spoke. interesting that. it's getting to be quite a list of words ending in -ist that apply to him...sexist, racist, fascist, ageist, (is nepotist a word?)...i wonder where it will end?

i can tell you that in my novel, it ends in drag in a seedy nightclub.

taking lessons from the sea

the wind and the waves on the west coast of denmark have such a calming effect. when i was there on sunday, after the course, i didn't really need relaxing and to have my head cleared, but after a really bad night's sleep and another encounter with xenophobia, sexism, racism and bullying, which the culture house meetings have become, i could definitely use some of that pounding surf right now.

i try to replace the hurt feelings, which completely zap all of the good energy out of me with loving, comforting thoughts. but, like this heart in the expanse of sand, those thoughts shiver there, all alone.

and then, right there on the beach is a big, ugly cement bunker, which feels like it's lashed around my neck and i'm dragging it along, and it's filled with all of the bad karma of the xenophobia, sexism, racism and bullying (fascism?). and even tho' someone has written kærlighed (love) on the side of it, it's still an eyesore.

but i can shift it over to the side of my vision and take in the sand and the wind and the waves and the cold, cleansing air. and they wash over me and i can breathe again.

but there is still a big knot of unresolved tensions and hard feelings and well, xenophobia, sexism, racism, bullying and exclusion. and they're piled there, seemingly impossible to untangle.

so i turn once again to the clear expanse of sand and sea and wind and winter sunshine. and let the cold freeze it all away, replacing it with calm, an inner rhythm that matches the waves as they relentlessly continue to wash ashore, not letting anything stand in their way. and i choose to take my lesson from that.

more fodder for my book

as you all know, i am part of a local group that was elected in a more or less (emphasis on less) democratic process early last summer to oversee the establishment of a new "culture house" in our little town. the group is composed of 7 members and 2 non-voting extras (who perform a sort of runner-up role, in the event one of the elected members is unable to fulfill their duties, one of these will step up). this has already happened, as one of the members, fed up with the way the chairman behaves, recently resigned, so one of our runners-up has already stepped up to take his crown.

the chairman's latest bid in a series of methods for exercising control is to write a 17-point "business order" document for the group (apparently you can never have too much bureaucracy and by-laws, while holy writ, are not enough). it covers everything from how to conduct the first meeting (tho' that ship sailed long ago) to what the agenda should consist of to that the meetings are closed (tho' who would want to attend them if they didn't have to is beyond me) to who can call for meetings and how far ahead they must do so (it states the agenda must be sent out 8 days before the meetings, something which has never happened in the 9 months we've been meeting). probably the most interesting point is #4, which says that there is a chosen group within the larger group, called, literally, the "business chosen ones (forretningsudvalg)." this group consists of the chairman, the vice chairman and one chosen crony of their choice (because really, we can't trust the democracy and a group of seven can hardly be expected to get anything done, right?). it struck me as i read it that the soviet way of doing things isn't as dead and gone as one might think and that it apparently extended farther west than we realized.

even more interesting is another document accompanying the first one. it contains only four points, but they are a broad brush mandate for "the business chosen ones (forretningsudvalg)." it is the mandate of this group to:

1. take care of the daily interests of the board (not stated is why the board is incapable of this themselves).
2. only members of this group may contact public authorities, cooperation partners and the press.
3. this group can, when it's expedient/necessary, make fast decisions which affect the budget and/or the group as a whole to a high degree.
4. the group is responsible to the board and refers to the board.

in other words, the chosen ones can make whatever decisions they want whenever they want, without asking the board until afterwards. and it occurred to me that what i am a witness to here isn't so much soviet-style bureaucracy as fascism. after all, fascism postulates that a chosen few are not only allowed to dominate on behalf of the inferior elements of society, but they must do so for the common good. i should say that i do hesitate to throw the word fascism around, because as george orwell wrote in 1944, "the word 'fascism' is almost entirely meaningless ... almost any english person would accept 'bully' as a synonym for 'fascist'." basically, our troglodyte pal is moving to formalize (bureaucratize?) his mandate to bully the group as he sees fit.

the documents are so transparent in their attempt at control and happily, leave so many loopholes uncovered, that they are quite laughable. of course, in the early days of the nazis, their antics were also thought laughable and look where that led, so one has to be vigilant. for now, my inner anthropologist finds the documents give a fascinating insight into the mindset and yes, the fears, of the small-minded, small-hearted man who is, for whatever reason, at the helm of this group. he has exposed himself for all to see. and it's not a pretty sight. but it is fodder for my book. and for that, i am deliciously grateful.

of bullying and dead squirrels

in the past month or so, we've been developing a new concept and some new projects in my little company. part of it has been to look a bit more deeply into bullying. there's a new program on television that is following an actor who is trying to make a difference on the atmosphere in an ordinary public school. his interest in bullying (which is called mobning in danish and seems to me to resonate so much more in danish than it does in english) arose when his own son was attacked twice inside of three weeks by a group of neighborhood boys. since then, he's had countless speaking engagements in schools, bringing attention to the problem of bullying.

of course, looking into this topic got me thinking about my own experiences bullying and being bullied (the whole miss king bitch shit incident). i imagine i did my share of making fun of particular people and of freezing others out of some or other group - i think we probably all did and to an extent, i think it's a natural part of the process of growing up and finding your position in the scheme of things. but i only very clearly remember one incident where i was just truly mean and horrible to someone (tho' i'll admit there were probably others).

there was a girl who was very dorky and unpopular. she had none of the right clothes, right glasses, right haircut. she wasn't smart or pretty or funny. tho' i don't think i realized it or thought about it at the time, i think her family didn't have much money (which probably explained the clothes/glasses/haircut thing). she was the butt of many jokes and probably doesn't look fondly back on her years in school.

i was driving one afternoon with a friend and although for some reason i didn't have my glasses on, i was behind the wheel. i must have been 14-15 and my eyes were pretty bad and i definitely needed glasses or contacts in order to drive. so basically, there i was, driving along a quiet city street in our little town, pretty much totally unable to see. suddenly my friend shouted, horrified, because i ran over a squirrel.  she looked at me incredulously, thinking i'd actually tried to hit it, but in truth i hadn't seen it at all, since i wasn't wearing glasses.

we stopped the car and jumped out to check on it. it was dead, but strangely unharmed - it wasn't flat or openly bleeding - possibly the car going over it had scared it death. well, the whole incident occurred in front of this dorky, unpopular girl's house. so we got it in our heads that we'd toss that dead squirrel into her bicycle basket, which was parked out front. it was done in a careless, thoughtless way - not at all premeditated - the idea arose just because we were stupid teenagers and happened to be in front of her house with a dead squirrel at our disposal. if it hadn't happened right there, we wouldn't have gone out of our way to drive by her house and put the dead squirrel in her basket, we actually had nothing against her per se, so there was really no ground for this rather shockingly malicious act.

i never knew how she felt about it, but can you imagine how horrified you'd be if you came out and found a dead squirrel in your bicycle basket? i think i'd be traumatized for life. you wouldn't be able to help wondering who hated you that much and would be so evil.

and yet, as horrible as it sounds, it wasn't really an evil act - more of a highly thoughtless, stupid one, brought on by a particular collusion of circumstances and not so much by ill will. it was just dumb kids, doing a dumb thing. and i wonder how much of bullying starts that way and ends up totally wrong.

i don't have an answer to that question, but i do feel a rather odd urge to look up that girl from back then and tell her i'm sorry about the dead squirrel in her bicycle basket.

"mobning" in the blogosphere

this may look a little scary

but really it's a totally cool place.

danish has a great word--mobning. i've seen it translated as bullying, but to me, it's a bit more nuanced than that word is in english. it's a word that conveys the whole notion of holding someone outside of your group. intentionally. if you're the parent of a school-age child, you hear the word a lot. because danish schools (or at least the one our daughter attends) are very focused on it and on keeping it from happening, at least to a harmful, overt extent, since you can never really fully prevent it. because everyone needs their albanian. but even an albanian would like to belong.

small aside to explain the last statement: this is one of the earliest theories that husband and i came up with (way back when he was still someone else's husband). we were in the balkans and noticed that everyone there (well, everyone everywhere, really, if i think about it) had someone they looked down on to feel better about their group--the croats and the serbs had each other. and tho' it was never clear to me where the bosnians stood, they had some complex system of someone they looked down on. the bulgarians looked down on the macedonians. the macedonians looked down on the albanians. the albanians looked down on the...hmm. there wasn't really anyone--except maybe the roma and let's face it, everyone looks down on them, so sadly they don't really count. if you were a regular albanian, you looked down on those poor suckers in kosovo and vice versa. so we decided that albanian was the end of the line. and that everyone needs their albanian--someone to feel superior to.

now, back to the regularly scheduled post. i've been thinking about this because things have gotten a little nuts in the comments on some of the other blogs of late (most recently the blog camp blog last evening--and i can't even blame wine b/c i was drinking tea in my hotel room in oslo since the little tiny bottle of wine in my hotel minibar costs 185NOK ($28) and the two glasses i'd had six hours earlier in the lounge at the airport were no longer having any effect).

you see, we're all stark raving mad. and we found each other here in the blogosphere. and finding other mad people has clearly fed that madness. and i fear that some people (like whoever stopped following blog camp in the middle of the madness last night) found all this talk of corn and rocks and herman and to rad or not to rad (definitely the latter) (and which shall hereafter be referred to (on this blog at least) as the r-word which shall not be named) and pink and all that stuff to be a bit much.

but i'm here to say that we most definitely didn't mean it that way. and so you should ALL feel that you can jump into the fray at any time. like monique (hey, she's new!) did last night on the blog camp blog.  all of this madness might have looked like mobning, but it really sincerely wasn't meant that way. we want everyone to feel welcome in this particular vortex of madness. so please play along if you want to--jump right in and ask what all that silly talk is about if you don't understand. we're really quite harmless. we just like the calming effect of rocks and watching corn grow (not watching corn pop, that's totally not relaxing, or so i've heard) and IM conversations in the comment section. maybe it just makes our comment numbers look good, or maybe we're just a bit crazy. but either way, we're harmless and would love it if you joined in the fun. we're all albanians here. :-)

p.s. none of this comment madness really happened here on MPC, but i feel a bit responsible for it because i'm definitely one of the IM-convo commenters, so that's why i'm posting here. click the links above if you want to see firsthand what i'm talking about. :-)