Harsh words

I’ve been wrestling this week with mixed feelings about boys, bullies, and the messy rites of growing up.

At my son’s school… well, actually, in my son’s physical and virtual social networks this week, a major rift happened when four boys went onto Facebook and posted a photo of all the 7th and 8th graders from a school outing and then tagged each student’s and teacher’s face with rude, racist, slanderous, malicious comments. They targeted appearance, socioeconomic status, weight, ethnicity, sexual orientation, heritage, intelligence, lack of coolness – everything bad you can think of, if you put yourself in a smartass 13-year-old frame of mind.

The thing blew up on Monday at school. Several girls confronted the boys in the lunchroom. Some kids went to the principal. Everybody talked about it. Everybody knew.

By Tuesday morning, two boys were suspended (I’ll call them Jerk 1 and Jerk 2) for a day, the other two (Jerks 3 and 4) spoke with the principal. Jerk 1 spent part of his day at home (presumably under the watchful eye of a parent?) texting Jerk 3 at school (in blatant violation of the no-cell phones policy) about how he was grounded for a month and sharing their indignation with the lunch table gang about how “people can’t take a joke” and the like. Jerk 4 somehow managed to talk his way out of trouble. A letter came home with all kids that afternoon, acknowledging the incident and repeating the no-bullying policy in bland legalese.

On Wednesday, the principal called an assembly of the 7th and 8th graders, during which Jerks 1 and 2 were made to give public apologies (consensus is that the boys were marginally contrite) and did some public squirming (Jerk 1 took blame for writing bad things about his classmates but baldly claimed no knowledge of who wrote the bad things about teachers, even though his classmates in the audience “all” knew Jerk 3 did that bit). Then the town safety officer spoke about Internet civility, and gave the students a chance to speak and to vent. During this portion, amazingly, Jerk 3 stood up and tried to argue that “it wasn’t that bad – it was meant to be funny.” The audience didn’t much buy that line. After the assembly, Jerk 1 handed out individual, hand-written apologies to the kids he dissed online. Despite the relatively identical nature of his message to each kid, that helped some. He also asked several kids “can we be friends,” since he’s under orders to make new friends as part of his rehabilitation. (Even though he was the ringleader of this debacle, his friends are being portrayed as the proverbial bad influence.)

Anyhow, the week ended today with confirmation that Jerk 1 is a serial offender, Yesterday during gym class he was overheard repeating out loud the same insulting remarks he made online about one of his female victim’s appearance. The girl’s mother marched into the main office this morning packing that piece of info. Jerk 1 clearly has some more lessons coming on the subject of respect…

So, is this “boys being boys” or something more? Certainly, kids have been obnoxious toward each other since Neanderthal days. Name-calling is nothing new – and the more hot-button bad words you can string together the better, right? General stupidity isn’t exactly a rare human condition either. Nor is it a surprise that teens who are left under-supervised will tend to get into trouble. In education, they term such kids “at-risk,” and usually school officials can see these problem children coming a mile away. At worst, they’ll see abusive behavior surface on the playground or “out back after school.”

But in the new world of online interaction, the school doesn’t necessarily see all that goes on. Nor does it necessarily have authority to punish or arbitrate offenses. Parents are likely fairly out of the loop. In cases of cyberbullying, it happens in perhaps the worst combination of ways – acts of abuse taking place within a relatively closed network of individuals who are ill-equipped to respond appropriately. In English, that means kids are online slamming each other without adult intervention and the victims are either intimidated or embarrassed into not responding and left to deal with the hurt or humiliation on their own.

Thank heavens, then, that this week’s particular act of mayhem hit a large group all at once. Almost no one was spared, which helped the victims deal collectively with the pain and anger. That doesn’t necessarily make it any easier to take for the weigh-conscious girl who was called fat and ugly, or the academically challenged African American boy who was labeled a dumb black blob, or the Hispanic girl who was labeled an immigrant whore. Nor for the so-called “Goth wannabe,” the “rapist,” or the “flat-chested” girls. Labels have a way of sticking, even among the best of friends. The stigma can’t so easily be erased.

There is no easy solution. Just as we all did during our own uneasy youths, these kids too will process and (one hopes) shed this unfortunate incident. Out of misery can come growth for all involved. That doesn’t make it any simpler to help navigate or monitor as parents or educators. It just means there’s one more playground we all have to watch.