Who will stand up to the bullies of the Anti-Bullying Alliance?
Do you ever look around you in mystification and wonder what it is that other people do for a living? Our manufacturing industry has deliquesced into nothing; we no longer dig coal or smelt iron, and the clamorous workshops of Asia take care of our textiles. Sure, we market plenty of stuff and there seem to be a lot more lawyers around these days than before — and, what’s more, they seem to have single-handedly defied the laws of supply and demand. By which I mean that there are more lawyers per head of population and they charge more. But even the wild profusion of these well-dressed jackals cannot account for the fact that today we have almost full employment, despite losing two million or so manufacturing jobs in the last 15 years. What is everybody doing? How do they earn a crust? I think I’ve found out.
They are, all of them, staffing anti-bullying hotlines, anti-bullying call centres, anti-bullying help and advice desks. The war against bullying now seems to provide as many jobs as once did those great shipyards on the Tyne and the Clyde. The war against bullying may be an altogether more ectoplasmic conflict than, say, the war against Hitler although there are, I suppose, parallels. But ectoplasmic or not, there is a clear public appetite for this war. We have become a nation of obsessives and each new obsession needs an industry to provide it with succour. Right now we are obsessed with bullying. And, believe me, we’ve got our industry.
If you’ve recently been bullied and you turn to the internet in search of help, you might well be intimidated — bullied, in fact — by the sheer number of organisations dedicated to making you feel a bit better about yourself and punish your oppressor. There is, for example, the Swan Hunter of anti-bullying organisations, the Anti-Bullying Alliance, replete with its £600,000 worth of public funding. Then there’s Bullying On Line and Childline’s Bullying Index. And there’s Kidscape and Antibully.org.uk and the UK National Bullying Advice Line and FullStop2Bullying (mission aim: a world free from bullying), AdviceHQ, Bullyonline (which is an institution pledged to oppose bullying, rather than an ingenious national retail service offering to send you a bully, should you need one), the SCRE, the Safe Schools Coalition, Support4Learning, iVillage ... oh, listen, you get the picture. There are sackloads of them, all pledged to fighting this war against bullying, this war which some of you may not have realised was actually being fought. Well, it is.
And, as in most wars, we are beginning to notice a degree of mission creep. And, as in most wars, there are squabbles between the allied powers. Just this week the Guardian reported that the Anti-Bullying Alliance had been accused, effectively, of, er, bullying by some of the anti-bullying organisations which do not fall within its remit. (The ABA has responsibility for only 60 — yes, 60 — anti-bullying organisations in the UK.) Apparently a ‘senior’ member of one of the ABA’s member organisations has been bunging down emails dissing Bullying Online, an institution which remains outside the alliance. Jeepers. I won’t deter you with more details; suffice to say, it’s got really bloody nasty and now the Liberal Democrats are involved.
Bullying, of course, is only one of our current national obsessions. Another one is obesity. And, of course, it was only a matter of time in this frenetic growth industry, before some sharp, entrepreneurial individual linked the two. A recent study suggested that fat kids get bullied more than thin kids and that ‘these tendencies may hinder the shortand long-term social and psychological development of overweight and obese youth’. Sometimes, occasionally, fat kids get punched. But more often they are subjected to what the report calls ‘overt verbal bullying’ — e.g., the shouting of such humiliating remarks as ‘Oi, you fat git, why don’t you lay off the Turkey Twizzlers for an hour or so?’ And so on.
But there is also something called ‘relational’ bullying. Now, you may have an idea in your mind as to what constitutes bullying, and my guess is that it is pretty similar to mine. But we are both wrong; we have not cast our net widely enough. Because now we get to that thing I mentioned before mission creep. ‘Relational’ bullying is, pri marily, the ‘withdrawal of friendship’. It can, on occasion, be accompanied by its more extreme form — the spreading of gossip, whispered asides and even sending people to Coventry. That stuff is considered, by the experts from within the bullying industry, to be a prima facie case of bullying.
Then there’s gender-based bullying. A new report funded in part by the militant gay organisation Stonewall discovered the astonishing fact that in primary schools the words ‘gay’ and indeed ‘girl’ are sometimes used as insults among boys. This, too, we are assured, is de facto bullying and ‘intervention’ needs to occur at the ‘earliest possible stage’ to stamp it out. If you are eight years old and sufficiently uncouth and rude to call one of your classmates a ‘fat poof’, you’re likely to cop it from the authorities on three different counts. Is that sort of thing really ‘bullying’, though? It may not be very nice behaviour and we should undoubtedly sanction our children against it — but bullying? And are we not getting ourselves into very deep waters when we decide that a child who for whatever reasons does not wish to continue his friendship with another child is, per se, a bully?
We have not reached the stage, over here, where there are coloured bracelets available to be worn by kids who wish to show their very real opposition to the act of bullying. They have that in the USA, natch, so I daresay it will be with us soon. Our bullying industry is doing very well in a competitive market; it is fighting its corner — but it is not quite the world leader.
We do, however, have a government which takes bullying very seriously indeed and has produced a video, featuring the footballer Rio Ferdinand and the semi-cool pop group the Sugababes, telling you how bad bullying is. And the government has a helpline to ring ‘if you experience bullying by mobile-phone text messages or email’.
I wonder if we are approaching a time when ‘bullying’ will become as devalued and in the end as meaningless a concept as ‘racist’. Both bullying and racism are, in the forms in which normal people understand them, revolting and even sociopathic states of mind. But the industries which spring up to counter such tendencies seem always to end up feeding off them. And as a result they draw the parameters too broadly; they overstate the case. They end up, in short, by bullying us — and we start to resent it.
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