BOOKS OF THE TIMES
‘Sticks and Stones,’ by Emily Bazelon
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
Published: March 10, 2013
When Emily Bazelon was in eighth grade, her friends “fired” her. She had loved them; now they rejected her — an act, she recalls, that left her “crawling with insecurity and self-doubt.”
Nina Subin
Emily Bazelon
STICKS AND STONES
Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy
By Emily Bazelon
386 pages. Random House. $27.
Ms. Bazelon draws on that experience to begin “Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy.” As the book’s freight train of a subtitle suggests, Ms. Bazelon has a lot on the agenda. She wants nothing less than for her readers, and her nation, utterly to rethink bullying: to deal with it more effectively by acknowledging its complexity; to narrow our definitions and refine our punishments; to support the victims and encourage better behavior — while, by the way, making our laws and media coverage smarter.
Whew!
As a lawyer, a parent and a journalist, she is highly attuned to her topic. In a series of articles beginning in 2010 for Slate, where she is a senior editor, she explored the Phoebe Prince case, a tangled story of bullying, cyberbullying and suicide in South Hadley, Mass. Because of a crusading district attorney and the overheated news media narrative that Phoebe Prince had killed herself after months of psychological torture by mean girls, a complex situation got simplified it into a stark tale of “bullycide” resulting in criminal charges for six classmates.
Ms. Bazelon described a more nuanced world in which Ms. Prince was a both victim and aggressor, a popular girl but a troubled teenager with a history of depression and cutting herself who had gone off her medications months before. It was a messier story, but it was closer to the tragic truth of these very human situations.
Broadening her focus for the book Ms. Bazelon (who is also a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine) introduces us to Monique, a girl in Middletown, Conn., who was made so miserable through an intense campaign of bullying that her mother transferred her to another school. And there is Jacob, a boy who dyed his hair purple in his upstate New York middle school and favored eyeliner — behavior that led to online and face-to-face taunts. To clear the air, he posted a rambling announcement on his MySpace page:
“YES, I AM GAY!
“A BIG FLAMIN HOMOSEXUAL
“I LIKE MEN
“GET OVER IT
“I am not going to flirt with you.
“I don’t like to flirt with anyone.
“I am just me
“LABELS ARE FOR CANS.”
The abuse became physical, but Jacob and his family fought back in court with a suit that involved the New York Civil Liberties Union and the Justice Department. This forced some changes at the school; Jacob, however, graduated elsewhere.
These are not simple or satisfying stories, but Ms. Bazelon tells them with cleareyed compassion — even for the bullies. Ms. Bazelon notes that Supreme Court justices recognize that a teenager’s frontal lobe, which manages impulsiveness and judgment, isn’t fully developed yet, and so the court has prohibited the death penalty and even life without parole for many offenses committed by juveniles. Given time and guidance, bullies can outgrow their bad patterns of behavior, but their lives can be ruined if their awful teenage behavior puts them in the headlines or jail.
She gives appropriate attention to cyberbullying as well, not blaming the Internet for an impulse as old as the schoolyard but describing the amplified effects of online taunts, which can follow our children home and into their bedrooms, persist online and are out there for everyone to see, potentially going viral and spreading the humiliation to an audience of thousands or even millions. And she notes that some youngsters are more resilient than others, though we’re not good at figuring out who will emerge from run-ins stronger and who will be seriously harmed.
Those of us whose kids have been bullied could find Ms. Bazelon’s stories agonizing. Those of us who were picked on in school will find memories flashing back with the vividness of nightmares. In those days before bullying made national headlines getting knocked around was a part of growing up; the psychic toll went largely unnoticed. No state had laws on the books that “clearly addressed bullying,” she writes, until the shootings at Columbine High School.
In its prescriptions “Sticks and Stones” shines. Yes, we need to give bullying “serious and sustained attention” as a first step toward preventing it and helping kids who are subjected to it. But it’s also important not to overdiagnose and to try to distinguish the continuing grinding domination found in bullying from the occasional conflict that qualifies as mere drama or knuckleheadedness.
One way to do that, Ms. Bazelon argues, is to get the message to students that bullying isn’t as common as they tend to think it is and to find ways to nourish the capacity for empathy that is present in almost everybody. Another is to teach members of the bystander majority that they have a responsibility to support victims and report confrontations.
These are not airy Kumbaya dreams, she explains, but tested methods that can produce results. That is why this authoritative and important book should not only be read by educators and parents alike, but should also be taught in law schools and journalism schools, should either survive.
Ultimately, Ms. Bazelon wisely warns us, we still have to try to let kids be kids. If we turn our schools into Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, where all is seen and little is allowed, “We risk raising kids who don’t know how to solve problems on their own, withstand adversity or bounce back from the harsh trials life inevitably brings.” And so, she says with a sigh: “It’s a tricky balance to strike, the line between protecting kids and policing them. But we have to keep trying to find it.”
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário