Abstract
School bullying is a complex phenomenon to define and understand, as it involves a wide range of behaviours that stem from relationships, social interactions and processes that intersect and interplay within different interpersonal and socio-cultural contexts. Most attempts to grasp the inherent difficulties and dynamics of school bullying and thus determine effective ways of properly addressing it have failed. This has been attributed to the lack of a critical and informed dialogue provided by the news media and other powerful claimsmakers regarding what has come to be considered as a serious social problem and criminal behaviour.
In Confronting School Bullying, Jeffrey W. Cohen and Robert A. Brooks shed light on school bullying and fathom the reasons why it remains prevalent and unabated in American schools. They do so by unravelling and explaining the processes underlying the news media construction of school bullying as a social phenomenon, problematising the socio-cultural structures that enable bullying and highlighting the reasons why punitive anti-bullying practices fail to address school bullying effectively. As a result, the authors offer an insightful, detailed and critical discussion on the social construction of school bullying by the media as well as the contributory role of socio-cultural ideologies regarding gender, sexuality and youth violence in the emergence and perpetuation of the problem. They also refer to the need to adopt a holistic and responsible societal stance by taking into account the lived realities of those mostly affected by this ubiquitous form of interpersonal abuse and whose voices are often muted within the ‘moral panic’ news media discourses.
The book consists of eight chapters and an appendix that explains the methodology of the study on which the book is based. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the scope, rationale and structure of the book and a summary of its main issues and theses. The authors explain the origins of their three-year study, which involved the analysis of media accounts between 1992 and 2013 using a social constructivist approach. The aim of the study was to examine the process through which school bullying was constructed as a serious social problem, a ‘signal crime’ and an epidemic by the news media in the USA. The authors stress that their analysis not only describes the mechanisms (oversimplification, domain expansion and explanatory shift) through which the news media constructed school bullying as a serious social problem but also uses broader socio-cultural understandings about youth aggression, gender and sexuality as ‘interpretive resources’ (p. 17) to contextualise and understand the meaning of this construction. The main thesis of the book is that bullying is employed by youth as an informal social control mechanism to ensure conformity with culturally ascribed norms and behaviours regarding gender and sexuality. Interestingly, the authors posit that young people internalise and reproduce forms of social control imposed on them by adults on their peers also as a way of gaining control over their lives.
Chapter 2 discusses the ‘bully/victim’ categories constructed by the news media based on explanations of bullying as the result of individual pathology. Chapter 3 explains the way in which the news media built up and consolidated the notion of bullying as an epidemic and elevated its status to a public health threat through repetition and manipulation of the limited, often inconsistent statistical data regarding the prevalence of school bullying and the increased coverage of suicides related to bullying (‘bullycides’). Similarly, Chapter 4 illustrates how the media expanded the narrative of school bullying as an epidemic by incorporating families, schools and culture into the existing explanatory frameworks, pointing out different sources of accountability and producing confusing and competing narratives (e.g. parental vs. cultural failure).
In Chapters 5 and 6 the authors use the suicide-related bullying cases of two students, Phoebe Prince and Tyler Clementi, to demonstrate the way bullying is used by youth as a mechanism of ‘policing’ conformity with established gendered norms regarding beauty, appearance, sexual behaviour and hetero-masculinity among their peers and to ensure that the boundaries of gender normativity remain intact. Notably, the authors maintain that while the construction of the ‘gay victim’ by the media helped to highlight the problem of anti-gay and LGBT-related bullying and its consequences, it also focused on LGBT suicides in a deterministic manner, concentrating only on the behaviour of the victim and eschewing problematisation of the broader socio-cultural ideologies that facilitate and condone the harassment of those who are perceived as deviating from stereotypical gendered behaviours.
Chapter 7 introduces the readers to the world of news production and its terminology and processes. It highlights that there has been a pattern of media attention to bullying wherein ‘media waves’, ‘positive feedback loops’ and ‘interactive momentum’ gave rise to moral outrage and calls for punitive action. It also explains how the expansion and oversimplification of school bullying led to its commercialisation and the creation of an ‘anti-bullying’ industry composed of advocates, experts and consultants who often provide de-contextualised accounts regarding the aetiology of school bullying.
Finally, Chapter 8 examines the different formal social control mechanisms used by parents, schools, the different states and the federal government to tackle school bullying, such as vigilantism, school-based interventions and legal measures (e.g. zero-tolerance policies, fines, mandatory reporting), and assesses their limited effectiveness. The authors conclude that, given the complexity of school bullying, these remedies are not effective because they do not take into account socio-cultural factors. They therefore argue that school bullying needs to be addressed on several interrelated levels (familial, social, institutional). Importantly, they stress the need for a re-definition of school bullying based on the perspectives of children who are subjected to bullying, thus enabling a more nuanced understanding of the phenomenon.
Overall this book offers a compelling and thought-provoking read and constitutes an excellent addition to the literature on news media construction of social problems and school bullying. Not only does it shed light on the pervasive but unknown phenomenon of interpersonal aggression in schools; it also raises questions about the responsibility of society in the genesis of this violence, and invites its readers and the ‘silent majority’ (‘bystanders’; p. 94) to confront their own preconceptions and ‘find ways to confront the bully’ in themselves in order to bring about some social change.