The Bullying problem

It is generally handled badly, even making the problem worse. The author below thinks he knows a better way -- see his site https://bullies2buddies.com -- but I think I would go the way of heavy physical punishment for bullies.  That should stop it in its tracks

Thanks to the successful political activism of the anti-bullying field, schools are now required to function as totalitarian police establishments responsible for children’s interpersonal relationships 24/7. School staff need to do double duty as security guards, detectives, and judges, treating any complaint of subjective harm as a serious crime needing thorough investigation, interrogation, adjudication, reporting, and punishing. Rather than eliminating bullying, these laws have led to a growing epidemic of bullying and intensified hostilities among students, parents, teachers, and administrators. Today is the most stressful time in history to be a school administrator, as they can face lawsuits for failing to accomplish the impossible. (Research has shown that the most highly regarded anti-bullying programs barely cause a dent in the problem, yet schools are supposed to know how to stop all children from being bullied.)

Just today, the news reported that a Pennsylvania court awarded a student $500,000 dollars, because the school district could not stop fellow students from ridiculing her “gender-nonconformist presentation” — in all three schools she attended! Half a million dollars! American dollars, not Canadian! For a mere $500, I could have taught the girl how to stop being bullied, but now we, the taxpayers, have to fork out half-a-million bucks because schools can’t force all children to respect nonconformist gender presentation. In actuality, the schools’ attempts to stop the bullying made the bullying escalate.

Almost all school shootings are committed by victims of bullying. These kids are consumed with anger, hatred, and desire for revenge. Anti-bullying policies were intended to reduce the frequency of these horrific massacres. Instead, mass shootings happen with tragic and increased frequency. Should this surprise us? Ever since preschool, students have been taught to think of anyone who upsets them as an evil bully who deserves to be hated and eliminated from society. Even adults have taken to blaming bullies as justification for committing murder.

Have you seen the German film, The Lives of Others, about life under the East German totalitarian police state? The underlying political theme is the high rate of suicide resulting from government surveillance of citizens' social lives.

Many children who take their own lives do so because they can no longer tolerate being bullied. Anti-bullying policies are intended to prevent suicides by victims of bullying. Instead, the suicide rate has skyrocketed among kids — tripling among girls — during the same period that schools have been officially combatting bullying. Why? For two reasons.

What happens when kids are taught that words can scar them forever or kill them? They become more upset when they are insulted, which unwittingly fuels the bullying, so they get insulted even more.

Second, schools have been informing children that they must tell the school authorities when they are bullied. What happens when kids get the school authorities to investigate the bullying complaint? Hostilities immediately escalate, as each side and their parents try to convince the school that they are right and the other is wrong, and the informer becomes known as a snitch, which can be a social death sentence.

If the child is lucky, the school authorities will succeed in making the bullying stop. But too often, the bullying spirals out of control, even leading to serious violence. The victim of the bullying, feeling betrayed by the school’s false promise to make the bullying stop, may eventually despair and decide to put a permanent end to their suffering (and occasionally, to the suffering of schoolmates and teachers).

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Stop the campus scaremongering

A new report, published by the charity Brook and the student database Dig In, claims that ‘more than half of UK university students across the country are being exposed to unwanted sexual behaviours’. This headline-grabbing claim is based on 5,649 student responses to a survey.

And what precisely are ‘unwanted sexual behaviours’? According to the report, they could be anything from ‘cat-calling’ to ‘explicit text messages’ to ‘inappropriate touching’ to ‘being followed’ to being ‘forced into sex or sexual acts’. Given this definition encompasses such a wide range of behaviours, from the trivial to the very serious, it is perhaps unsurprising that the figure is so high. (Only a tiny proportion – three to four per cent – said they had been forced into sex or sexual acts.)

Only eight per cent of the 56 per cent said they had reported their experiences. Brook chief executive Helen Marshall told the Guardian that the ‘worryingly low reporting rate suggests that much more needs to be done at every stage of academic life’.

This is the narrative Brook and Dig In are pushing: that too few of those 56 per cent of surveyed students, especially female ones, ‘believe they are victims of sexual harassment’. Hence Marshall says that more needs to be done to encourage students to report ‘unwanted sexual behaviours’. These students need to start thinking of themselves as victims, even if they only experienced something as trivial as an unwanted text message.

Most of the respondents to this survey were not victims of any crime. The law does not criminalise something as vague as ‘unwanted sexual behaviour’. When you look more closely at the figures, it is clear that the less serious the behaviour, the less likely the women were to report it. Of the 49 per cent of women in the survey who said they had been cat-called, only three per cent reported it. Similarly, just five per cent of the women ‘inappropriately touched’ said they had reported it. I would hazard a guess that most of them slapped the hand that touched them, and left matters there – is that not a legitimate response?

The report’s definition of what does and doesn’t constitute consensual sex is also troubling. It claims that ‘only 52 per cent of students understand that it is not possible to give consent if you are drunk’. Really? There is no law that states that alcohol removes the capacity to give consent. If this was the case, every adult who has ever copped off with someone in a bar would be considered a sex offender. Drunk sex is different to raping someone who is incapacitated due to alcohol.

But most concerning of all is the survey’s conflation of serious and trivial incidents under the catch-all category of ‘unwanted sexual behaviours’. Being cat-called or receiving dirty texts is not comparable to rape. To think otherwise denigrates the seriousness of sexual assault and rape – acts that are already criminal and, thankfully, committed very rarely on campus.

Moreover, when sexual behaviour is unwanted but not breaking any laws, how helpful is it to encourage female students to interpret it as abuse, to see themselves as victims? Surely it would be more effective to empower women to call out bad behaviour when it happens, and therefore change the climate around women’s sexual freedom. This tendency to see unwanted behaviour as abuse does nothing to empower young women – in fact, all it does is freak us out about the dangers of sex.

Buried deep in the report’s press release is one scrap of positive data: 90 per cent of all respondents said they ‘felt confident to say no to unwanted sexual advances’. This shows that despite the attempt to tell us that we’re more victimised than we realise, most of us still know our red lines and stick to them.

It’s a shame that Brook is engaging in these kinds of puritanical scare stories about sex. Its founder, Helen Brook, established it to give women the knowledge they need to feel empowered in their sex lives. Reports like this one betray that ambition.

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Australia: Sydney University Truth Blitz

Bettina Arndt 

Wow, what a day! I am writing this on Wednesday night (Feb 27), just back from what I am calling our ‘Truth Blitz’ at Sydney University. We pulled off an amazing raid this morning, using student from other universities to put under student doors at most colleges a very detailed flyer warning male students about the dangerous consequences of the rape crisis scare campaign- namely the establishment of an alternative ‘believe-the-victim’ justice system based on a lower standard of proof. We also circulated a similar document aimed at male students in general, which we placed in many STEM lecture theatres. You can read the flyer here

It was a highly-orchestrated, clandestine raid conducted during the day when most students were at lectures. My students did a great job getting through most of the colleges before being discovered by security guards who warned the police would be called if they persisted.

I then spent a few hours this afternoon, with a group of volunteers, wandering around campus chatting to students and handing out the flyer. That was really revealing because we ran into absolutely no problems at all. Many students reported they knew nothing about the feminists’ rape scare campaign, they certainly didn’t believe there was a rape problem on campus and were shocked to hear the university had introduced regulations to get involved in adjudicating rape cases. I talked to many young women as well as male students and some staff, most of whom appreciated being told what is happening. 

That was actually very reassuring but also clearly revealed the utter corruption of the university administration acting against the interests and without the knowledge of the majority of students, knowingly ignoring the real facts and promoting lies about the rape crisis. These administrators must be aware of the disastrous cost of the American university tribunal system which has so damaged the reputations of colleges over their failure to offer fair treatment to male students. It is just extraordinary that our institutes of higher learning are so under the sway of a tiny feminist group that they will betray their institutions’ interests and sell out young men.

Anyway, the Sydney Uni Truth Blitz was a great success and we have plans to follow up in due course.

Pushback at UWA

Next I am getting ready for my campus talk next Thursday evening, March 7, at the University of Western Australia. This one has proved a huge battle because the student groups were all too intimidated by the activists to host the event. I had to organise to stage the event on my own and UWA hasn’t allowed me to do any advertising – no posters, no flyers circulated on campus, nor any publicity in their events social media pages.

I’m really struggling to get people to come along. I assume many people are nervous about possible protesters – which is most disappointing. Come on, people. There’s going to be heaps of security. I had to pay $352 for two security guards for the event, who will be adding to the normal campus security guards. (By the way, I am working quickly through the generous donations I received last year through the crowd-funder  for my campus tour. I’m using the funds to pay for printing for the Sydney University and UWA flyers, the security guards, airfares, paying some student helpers and so on. It would be wonderful if some of you could contribute a little more.)

I need all you Perth people to show a little more fortitude and show up to support my efforts. We’re not charging students to attend now – here’s the Eventbrite link to book your tickets. It will be so disappointing if I have to cancel the event because I am not able to pull together a decent audience. Wouldn’t the feminists love that?  They have already put together a petition to try to get UWA to close down the event. And look at the student magazine seething that the university has allowed me to speak on campus.

The UWA event is particularly interesting because Chancellor of UWA is former High Court Chief Justice Robert French who is conducting the government enquiry into free speech on campus (which was prompted by my Sydney protest.) The Vice-Chancellor Dawn Freshwater has been saying all the right things about free speech recently. She’s trying to redeem the reputation of the university following the fuss last year when UWA  cancelled the talk by Quentin Van Meter, the American doctor who was speaking about medical intervention with children dealing with gender fluidity. 

All of this makes it even more important that the event is a success. Perth people, please book in now so we know the event can go ahead. And let me know if you can help promote it.  

Email from Bettina -- bettina@bettinaarndt.com.au