On the sp!ked website, Nancy McDermott analyzes the “bus monitor bullying” video and the reaction to the situation:
By now, millions of people across the world have viewed ‘Making the Bus Monitor Cry’. For those of you who haven’t, it is a video of a slew of vile, verbal abuse against 68-year-old Karen Klein, a bus monitor from Greece, New York, from four 13-year-old boys. It is hard to know what is more shocking: the methodical cruelty with which the children ply their insults; or the grandmother’s inability to respond effectively to the humiliating onslaught.
Childish cruelty is allegedly old news, but, recorded and broadcast across the world, it is still jarring. Not only is the video footage completely at odds with the way we usually like to regard children — as innocents in need of protection — but their willingness and, more disturbingly, their success at targeting an adult is unsettling.
Yet, in reality, the video tells us less about the nature of children and more about the erosion of adult authority in American society. When adults are too timid to enforce basic standards of behaviour in public, and when other adults (in this case, the bus driver) are willing to stand by and tolerate bad behaviour aimed at a fellow adult, it’s no wonder children run wild. The depths of this problem are nowhere more apparent than in the confused reaction to the bus-monitor incident.
[. . .]
It is easy to forget in an age when so many adults find it hard to keep children under control that adults are inherently more powerful than children. Adults bear both rights and responsibilities for making and acting on their own decisions. Children, in contrast, have no real autonomy. To the extent that they have any limited independence, it is entirely conditional on the adults in their lives. And rightly so: children lack both the experience and the maturity to be held legally or morally accountable for their actions. Although we all hope children will learn to behave responsibly, we should be under no illusions as to their capacity to assume responsibility in the same way that adults do.
[. . .]
The seventh graders who taunted Klein did not do it because they lacked empathy or awareness of bullying, or because they were overcome by a claustrophobic mob mentality, or because they are worse than children anywhere else. They behaved the way they did because none of the people or institutions responsible for guiding them in their journey to adulthood set or enforced clear standards of behaviour. It is a pattern that repeats across America, not just in this little corner of New York state. The sad truth is that unless we wake up and recognise this phenomenon for what it is, and start letting children know where they stand, behaviour like that on the bus will continue.
Israel Kalman explains that the term “bullying” has been stretched so far that it no longer resembles what it started off describing:
‘Is this bullying? It depends upon the definition you use. According to the new academic definition, which informs all of the bullying literature, research and laws, the answer is “yes”. That’s because all negative behaviour has been redefined as bullying. This academic definition was created by the founder of the psychological field of bullying, Professor Dan Olweus. He literally says that all negative behaviour is bullying — even not doing what someone wants you to do. Thus, we have the absurd situation where if I try to force you to do something you don’t want to do, I am bullying you. But if you refuse to do what I want you to do, you are bullying me.
‘Everything from eye-rolling (I am not making this up) to the Holocaust is being called bullying today. Whenever a young person commits rape, theft or murder, it is called bullying. So yes, these kids were bullying her — according to the new definition.
‘And regarding whether it is possible for children to bully an adult who is not their peer, the answer is “sure”. The “imbalance of power” part of the definition of bullying sounds good, but is really a logical fallacy. It is obvious that often people torment people who are more powerful than themselves. The bullying experts deal with this problem in two different ways. One way is that they say, “Yes, there must be an imbalance of power. The bully is the stronger one, but the bully can also be the weaker one.” (Again, I am not making this up. This is in the bullying literature.) But this explanation is absurd because it means if I am a coward and pick on someone weaker than myself, I am a bully. If I have more courage and pick on someone my own strength, I am not a bully. But if I have even more courage and pick on someone stronger than myself, I am a bully again!
