From: rc@depsych.Gwinnett.COM (Richard Carlson)
Newsgroups: misc.legal,misc.kids,alt.postmodern,sci.psychology
Subject: Harassing vs. Bullying
Date: 14 Oct 92 18:55:01 GMT

This morning I watched Sally Jessy Raphael as she tackled the
question of sexual harassment in the schools -- beginning as early
as Kindergarten!

It looked to me as if the guests on her show had found themselves
some attorneys into the empowerment movement, although the word
was not used on the program.  Empowerment is the use of civil law
to augment or even replace criminal remedies when the latter prove
ineffective.  Basically what had happened was that the parents of
several girls of various ages had sued the schools under the new
civil rights laws designed to prevent sexual harassment of women
and collected money damages from the schools.  We're not talking
big bucks here.  One family collected twenty thousand dollars
because the 4th grade boys on the school bus used sexually charged
words and crude terms for parts of the female anatomy while
teasing the girls on the bus.  There was, though, apparently some
physical touching with the boys grabbing the girls' crotches.
Another parent, who also seems to have collected something,
described the practice of "spiking" in the high school her
daughter attended. "Spiking" apparently involves two cooperating
bullies flanking the victim and pulling down h/er pants.  Often
the underwear is pulled down as well and the mother added that a
lot of the kids who expect to be victimized have taken to wearing
those new tightfitting bicycle pants under their dresses or pants
because they are hard to pull down.

It will not have escaped anyone who has read this article this far
that this "sexual harassment" sounds a lot like old-fashioned
bullying.  It didn't escape Sally Jessy either and she brought out
a guest, a man named Olsen, who has written a book critical of the
excessive litigation characteristic of contemporary America.
Extending the idea of sexual harassment down to the Kindergarten
level certainly raises a number of questions of a mostly legal
nature. Suppose a boy picks on a girl but does it for a reason
other than her gender, and in teasing or picking on or bullying
her does not mention any parts of her anatomy?  Do these civil
rights laws -- Title something-or-other -- the parents are using
afford the girl any protection?  What if the girl is black or
Asian and the boy makes it clear that it is his prejudice against
her race that motivates his hostility?  It is still a boy picking
on a girl but clearly and explicitly it is not because of her
gender. Suppose the girl is smarter than the other kids in the
class and it is resentment of he superior achievement that
motivates the bully?  If he once says something like, "You think
you're so smart!  You even think you're smarter than white
people!" we know that racial bias plays some role in his
hostility. Would litigation come down to trying to establish
whether or not he had said something like, "You think you're
smarter than boys, don't you!" even once, along with his
denigration of her ethnicity. Then, of course, there is the
question of whether there is any protection under any law if there
is no _difference_ between the bully and the victim.  If a white,
Anglo-Saxon male bully pulls down the pants of another boy (who is
not handicapped and who is also a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant),
and makes a deprecatory remark about the victim's penis, or
perhaps about some part of the anatomy boys and girls have in
common, he is clearly not guilty of sexual harassment because the
victim is the same sex. Does that mean that the male victim
doesn't have equal protection?

Obviously this is a question which should be discussed if anywhere
in misc.legal. I have seen a couple of posts discussing the use of
laws based on "difference," things like the legal notion of
"assault on a female" and the use of civil rights statues, in this
case those based on race, to protect persons from violence, but no
one ever follows them up.

The cross-posting in misc.kids will be understandable to anyone
reading that Newsgroup.  Oddly enough the instances in the current
thread on bullying -- there are several experiences being
discussed -- nearly all involve boys picking on girls, but none
explicitly referring to the victim's gender.

The reason for cross-posting to alt.postmodern is that the people
who read and post in that Newsgroup tend to share a common
perspective which emphasizes ("foregrounds," to use a postmodern
term) the narrative aspects of a thought sequence.  It is as if we
have two stories (narratives), each with its own cast of
characters (actants or archetypes, to use terms the people in
alt.postmodern would be comfortable with).  Here the effect of
changing narratives is so clear and apparent that it almost feels
like viewing something through two different lenses or filters.
If we look at it one way we see the bully myth.  We can picture
the fictional Laura Ingalls standing up to the bully and see him
back down.  All the trappings of that pre-structured narrative
come into play.  Then, almost effortlessly, we can view the same
events through the newer sexual harassment narrative lens.  The
core events are the same only now we imagine such peripheral
events as the boy hearing his sexist father denigrate women.  We
can even imagine his long-suffering mother, long past being able
to cope with her sexist husband.  Now when assistance from
"outside" the dyad arrives, appropriate in the sexual harassment
narrative but inappropriate in the bully narrative, perhaps in the
form of a guidance counselor or even an attorney, we applaud it.

Of course postmodern thought is concerned generally with the
vagaries of difference and the fuzziness of categories, which also
makes it a logical place to play with these paradigms.

Finally I also posted into sci.pschology because one would suppose
psychologists -- particularly social and educational psychologists
-- would have an interest in the interpersonal dynamics involved
in such situations, although in practice there is not much.

Have we found an area here where research on bullies interfaces
with constitutional law theory and legal empowerment on the one
hand, and with the refractions through various narrative lenses on
the other?

--
Richard Carlson
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