By By JOHN EBY / Dowagiac Daily News
Adults would never give a battered woman the kind of well-meaning, but misguided, advice they bestow on bullied boys.
Peter, an eighth grader, attends a new middle school because of his father's job transfer, relates Grand Rapids psychologist Marcia McEvoy, Ph.D., the violence prevention expert working with Dowagiac public schools.
Peter's small and doesn't play sports very well, but he's an accomplished musician on saxophone and piano and enjoys drawing.
His ultimate ambition lies in architecture or engineering.
Bigger boys grow bolder with their intimidation tactics and taunts of "faggot," "homo" and "gay boy."
Adolescent boys tend to suck it up and take their torment in silence.
By January Peter is suicidal and has reduced his options to killing himself or confiding in an adult.
But those professionals, from his counselor to his band director, tell Peter to ignore the bullies, to pretend that their harassment doesn't rile him and even suggest he must be doing something to "set them off."
McEvoy began training the staff in February, met with students during her second visit in April and returned Oct. 4 to involve parents in the district's new early-intervention approach for discouraging aggression.
For Dowagiac, McEvoy "took a very research-based approach" developed in Norway by Dan Olweus after three student suicides related to school bullying.
His four-pronged approach is what Dowagiac is implementing. "You're being extremely pro-active," McEvoy said. "First, you do staff in-service training, which I did last February. Second, help schools develop policies and procedures for how they're going to respond to this kind of aggressive behavior. Third, parent information - exactly what we're doing here tonight. Fourth, giving kids strategies and teaching them how to respond if somebody's bullying them."
In Norway, Olweus reduced aggression by more than 50 percent in schools across the country relying on the four-pronged approach. "He found out something really interesting as a result of his work," McEvoy said. "Schools that were the most successful in reducing aggression were the schools that were really paying attention to mild forms of aggression - opening moves. Quick, dirty looks. Rude gestures. Putdowns. Name-calling. Mild stuff that can very quickly escalate inte more serious acts of violence."
Students fall at the other end of the spectrum, describing violence as gunplay, stabbing or clubbing someone with a baseball bat.
One of the first things she did in April was to "resensitize them to this broader definition. In this process, if I roll my eyes at her, later in the day she'll say something meaner to me and I'm going to escalate and shove her and pretty soon we've got a fight on our hands. Words can be violent - stupid, ugly, fat, dweeb, geek, gay, slut. Spreading rumors that someone's doing something sexual is common at middle school and high school. We also talked to students about talking behind people's backs and trying to get other kids not to like somebody - to achieve rejection of a target by the whole group because someone is bad-mouthing that person. Violence can be emotional blackmail - and this starts in kindergarten, where kids say to each other, 'If you don't do what I say, you can't be in my club.' It gets more sophisticated, until all of a sudden in high school the girl who's hanging around with someone I don't like doesn't get called for the parties."
Bullying is defined as a form of violence with three distinct features: it's always repeated, it's never a one-time event; it's intentional, never accidental; and it always involves an imbalance of power between the tormentors and their target.
Students initially defined power in terms of bigger, older and stronger kids, then broadened it to include the popular crowd, the affluent students and those with physical beauty, verbal skills that allow them quick comebacks and those who excel at sports.
Intervention is necessary because being bullied "is never forgotten."
McEvoy's own experiences as a target influenced her interest in research on reducing aggression. "When I was 14, I was 89 pounds and 4-foot-11. I didn't hit puberty until I was 16, a junior in high school. I looked like I was 10 when I started high school. This group of boys gave me a really hard time. They called me names - 'Weed,' because I was so skinny. They commented on my 'sunken treasure' because I was so flat-chested. They made fun of my glasses and my braces. They called me a dog and barked at me as I walked down the hall. They knocked my books out of my hands and kicked them down the hall. I finally grew six inches and developed my junior year and these guys finally left me alone."
Ironically, years go by. She's 22 and meets a cute guy at a party. McEvoy marries him even though his cousin was the ringleader of her tormentors. At their wedding, emboldened by a couple of glasses of wine and her white bridal gown, she confronts the cousin and imagines accepting a Ferrari as a token of his remorse. But Mark just replies, "Oh, Marcia, that was then, this is now. Get a life and move on." She returns from her honeymoon to learn that he moved to Fairbanks, Alaska.
Role-playing with audience volunteers, McEvoy demonstrates how to "draw a line in the sand and establish a new expectation" with such phrases as "we don't do that here" or "I would never let someone do that to you."