There’s been a vast amount of talk in the media lately about bullying. In reality the talk about it has been growing for years, but currently there’s a confluence of events, what with the trial of that New Jersey college student for webcamming his gay roommate having sex (which some have said drove that roommate to suicide), and the school shooting in Ohio by an apparently bullied “outcast,” and then a new documentary aimed at teenagers about bullying called “Bully.”
Idly reading a story on how 150,000 people have signed a petition trying to get that film’s “R” rating lowered, so that younger kids can watch it, I saw this quote from the director: “Suicide is the ultimate consequence of bullying, so yes, we did know early on that we wanted to tell the stories of parents whose children had committed suicide due to bullying.”
Is suicide truly a consequence of bullying? It seems to be the overwhelming conventional wisdom in all of the coverage of these stories. Bullying, it’s assumed, either causes people to commit suicide, or to steal a gun and shoot up the school. This is also what impressionable kids are effectively being told in all of these stories. But I would suggest that bullying does not in fact cause people to kill themselves or others. It is rather an extreme and extremely unhealthy response to being bullied that causes someone to take his or her own life or to commit a mass shooting. Continue reading “The Counterproductive Elevation of Bullying”