by Izzy Kalman (May 2008)The anti-bully movement came into being primarily to prevent school shootings. But school shootings continue, and the shooters seem to have graduated from high school to college. Why haven’t nine years of intensive anti-bully education solved the problem?
While hoping to create a more peaceful society, anti-bully crusaders have been unwittingly making society more dangerous. By supporting victims against bullies, they are rewarding kids for thinking and acting like victims, so we get more kids thinking and acting like victims. The most dangerous people in the world, both to themselves and others, are not bullies but victims. When people feel like victims, they seethe with anger, hatred and desire for revenge. They are capable of committing the most horrendous actions and feel completely justified.
We wonder why school shootings continue despite nine years of anti-bullying education? Well, what can we expect, when adult “experts” have been teaching kids in school how terrible bullies are…that bullies shouldn’t be tolerated…that bullying is a terrible crime…that bullying causes kids to kill themselves and others? Are kids who hear this message supposed to think, “Bullies are no big deal; I won’t let them bother me”? Of course not! They are being encouraged to hate their perceived bullies and to believe that bullies deserve to die. When schools promise kids that they will protect them from bullies and inevitably fail to fulfill that promise, should we be surprised when victims of bullying decide they have no choice but to take justice into their own hands? When they have been taught for nine years that their bullies are the moral equivalent of psychopathic murderers, can victims be blamed for wanting revenge and inflicting the “well-deserved” death penalty upon their bullies, and upon their schools that let the bullying continue?
Our Hate-Filled Academic Researchers
If you are a mental health professional, you have probably been hearing with increasing frequency messages that we need to follow scientifically validated procedures. This means, of course, that the procedures should be validated by those doing and publishing research, as though researchers are the ultimate purveyors of truth and wisdom. Researchers are supposed to be objective or their findings will be biased. But the anti-bully researchers hate bullies. How can their findings be trusted?
I recently had a brief email exchange with a graduate student planning to do research on bullies. She claims that most of them are either neurologically impaired or emotionally disturbed, and asks, “Why would anyone want to be friends with someone like that?” Really, why would anyone want to be friends with someone who isn’t neurologically or emotionally perfect? For the past couple of decades, our schools have been intensively trying to promote inclusion and diversity among students. How foolish these efforts have been! No one, and certainly not a graduate student in education, would want to be friends with anyone who isn’t perfect!
In one letter to me, justifying her pursuit of bullies in school, she gave me a list of “bullies”:
Pol Pot Islam Karimov Robert Mugabe Idi Amin Charles Taylor Kim Jong-Il Sadam Hussein And the two most notable: Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin
Isn’t that just lovely! Adult researchers are going into our schools and fantasizing that our children-yes, our children, for the so-called “bullies” belong to you and me–are in the same category with megalomaniacal, paranoid, mass-murdering genocidal dictators! And don’t think this woman is an aberration. It is common for researchers to refer to bullying as an extreme form of violence, and for bullying “experts” to present things like genocide and slavery as examples of bullying. And we rely on the research of these zealous bully-haters as though they are the products of objective scientists.
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