What makes bullying work?
So many anti-bullying campaigns focus on the bully or the bullied, but I think we're missing something: we're not focusing on the things that make bullying possible:
Bystanders and
The power of exclusion
There's a wonderful short book by Vivian Gussin Paley entitled "You Can't Say You Can't Play," about her experiences as a kindergarten teacher talking with her kids about whether they should adopt "you can't say you can't play" as a rule. The popular kids, of course, don't want to adopt the rule, because their popularity is based on their ability to exclude less popular kids from play. What happens to schools if the power to exclude is taken away?
And what happens to bullying when bystanders stop being a passive audience whose attention fuels bullying, and increases the emotional damage to the bullied by adding humiliation to injury?
There's a great documentary called The Interrupters, about people who have volunteered to be "violence interrupters" -- third parties who confront people who are getting involved in violence and talking them down.
It made me imagine a fight breaking out and all the bystanders chanting "Stop! Stop! Stop!"
Here's the trailer for the Interrupters, which is available for streaming from Amazon: