FACE TO FACE:B.C. was painted pink Wednesday, but not the Face to Face columnists. Why?
Ididn't wear pink on Wednesday. Even my usually reactionary colleague refused. He, too, thinks Pink Shirt Day is counterproductive.
For my part, the day is not just unhelpful but actually harmful to what we need to do, which is work with victims and bullies so that they can both grow and avoid future victimizations.
Pink Shirt Day is a faux altruistic initiative, little more than a thinly veiled insult to schools. Proponents say that instead of ignoring bullying (which we all know schools do, right?), we need a zero-tolerance policy towards bullying.
"Bullying Stops Here!" or "Just Say No!" It worked with the war on drugs didn't it? Getting tough with or bullying the bully is the answer.
Unfortunately, bullying the bully makes things worse. Bullying the bully models for the bully precisely the kind of behaviour we want to discourage and reinforces victim behaviours in the victim. As an intervention, it is blunt and clumsy.
Victims and bullies feel empowered when we help them learn to face and solve problems themselves rather than to become perennial victims, constantly running to a combative parent or principal to fix things for them. It's never easy to see one's child unhappy but bullying is best handled by calm, nuanced intervention, not by hysterical adults demanding retribution for the sins of misguided children.
Anyway, "bullying in our schools" is a misnomer. It happens in schools because that's where young people are for six hours a day. In fact, school is the only institution in our society that works hard daily to mitigate bullying.
Bullying is encouraged almost everywhere else in society.
Bullying behaviour is modelled in our hockey rinks, in business, in families, religion, American foreign policy, popular culture, the internet and on TV. On Survivor, the best bully wins a million bucks.
This is where bullying is learned, not in schools.
Our public schools stress co-operation, respect, tolerance and participation - sometimes so much so that parents put their children in private schools that they feel more accurately mimics the "real world."
There aren't two distinct teams, bullies and victims. They are all victims, who often change teams.
Wearing pink to vilify and stop the "bad guys" is spectacularly unhelpful.
