{"id":91137,"date":"2024-02-27T12:25:43","date_gmt":"2024-02-27T17:25:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/?p=91137"},"modified":"2024-09-01T09:54:23","modified_gmt":"2024-09-01T13:54:23","slug":"opinion-tony-volk-discusses-bullying-and-pink-shirt-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/2024\/02\/opinion-tony-volk-discusses-bullying-and-pink-shirt-day\/","title":{"rendered":"OPINION: Tony Volk discusses bullying and Pink Shirt Day"},"content":{"rendered":"

This article written by Tony Volk, Professor of Child and Youth Studies at Brock University, originally appeared in The Conversation<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n

As the last few days of February draw near, we will soon be called to think about bullying on\u00a0Pink Shirt Day\u00a0on the last Wednesday of the month. Pink Shirt Day was started by Grade 12 Nova Scotia students David Shepherd and Travis Price who wanted to show their solidarity for a victim of bullying who was targeted, in part, for wearing a pink shirt.<\/p>\n

This initial show of solidarity has been a recognized day of action in Canada since 2007, and was adopted in New Zealand in 2009.<\/p>\n

This means that we\u2019ve had over 15 Pink Shirt Days. What have they done beyond raising awareness? Sadly, the answer is not much. Research shows that\u00a0the number of youth who report being a victim of bullying hasn\u2019t changed at all. The calls to action haven\u2019t resulted in much change. We need to do better. The stakes are enormous.<\/p>\n

Impacts of bullying<\/strong><\/p>\n

First the bad news: Bullying is\u00a0notoriously difficult to prevent or reduce. Bullying is too often viewed as a rite of passage \u2014 the ability to overcome harassment and bad peer interactions. And it\u2019s true that\u00a0some stress is helpful in forging stronger social and emotional skills.<\/p>\n

The same thing is true for bones that benefit from stressful exercise. But too much stress causes a bone to break, leaving behind a permanent weakness. The same is true for too much social and emotional stress.<\/p>\n

Children are suffering decades-long negative\u00a0physical\u00a0and\u00a0mental health\u00a0outcomes because of stress caused by bullying. It changes the way the body reads its own\u00a0DNA in response\u00a0to stress\u00a0well into one\u2019s 50s.<\/p>\n

These effects are actually worse for children in\u00a0classes that otherwise have low levels of bullying. Those lone victims heartbreakingly feel even more isolated and to blame for their sole victimization. And for some, it can tragically result in\u00a0taking their own lives.<\/p>\n

Why people bully<\/strong><\/p>\n

Bullying, appears to be, at least in part,\u00a0an evolutionary adaptation\u00a0that can offer its users important benefits.\u00a0First up\u00a0are material benefits like the best spot on the playground, lunch money or a coveted scholarship. Even more appealing are the strong, consistent,\u00a0longitudinal\u00a0and\u00a0cross-cultural ties\u00a0between bullying and popularity. Bullying leads to gains in popularity and, sadly,\u00a0popularity tends to lead to bullying.<\/p>\n

Perhaps most salient of all, for both boys and girls, and both younger and older adolescents, bullying is associated with\u00a0increased dating and sexual opportunities. Material benefits, popularity and sex are difficult motives to fight against. It gets even harder when we recognize that bullies are\u00a0not socially unintelligent, they do not have lower self-esteem and they may not even lack emotional empathy.<\/p>\n

They are often simply\u00a0individuals who willingly choose to use power for their own benefit and to the detriment of others. And unfortunately, they get plenty of examples from adults about how bullying can\u00a0get you what you want with few consequences\u00a0so long as you\u2019re powerful, rich or famous.<\/p>\n

So if bullying is really so awful why has Pink Shirt Day not led to meaningful change?<\/p>\n

Tackling bullying<\/strong><\/p>\n

Bullying is a facultative adaptation \u2014 that means it depends on the costs and benefits an environment affords. So even if it has a biological basis, its expression depends on the environmental context. And we know that\u00a0different cultures,\u00a0different classrooms\u00a0and\u00a0different peers\u00a0can all change the equation of bullying so that its costs start to outweigh its benefits.<\/p>\n

Critically, while data indicates bullies gain popularity and dominance,\u00a0the same data shows that they lose out on being liked\u00a0and on being sought out as a friend. People respect and fear a bully\u2019s ability to violently wield power, but they don\u2019t like it.<\/p>\n

While bullying is hard to catch and harder to punish, we can look at changing the carrot instead of the stick. If\u00a0peers stop rewarding bullies, and if adults create environments that\u00a0foster prosocial co-operation rather than selfish competition, we can make bullying less appealing.<\/p>\n

Doing so is hard. It requires real work from youth, teachers, schools, parents, governments and the general public. We can\u2019t expect youth to stop rewarding bullying if we continue to reward bullies as adults. We can\u2019t expect youth to\u00a0stand up to the most popular kids on their own.<\/p>\n

We need to find the right ways to encourage the positive uses of power. Bullying may be an evolutionary adaptation, but it\u2019s not genetically determined, so we should not accept it as an inevitable rite of passage.<\/p>\n

This Pink Shirt Day, do more than just think about bullying. Think about how you can get involved and make a positive difference. Talk to your children, talk to their schools, talk to teachers that you know, stand up to bullies in your workplace. Pink Shirt Day started as a gesture of solidarity, as a means of taking back some of the power from bullies.<\/p>\n

If we can view Pink Shirt Day as a call to action, instead of just another reminder, we can start changing things so that bullying becomes associated with another evolutionary term \u2014 extinction.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tony Volk, Professor of Child and Youth Studies at Brock University, wrote a piece recently published in The Conversation about bullying and the need to take action beyond Pink Shirt Day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":91138,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7,6,38],"tags":[522,4951,5512,3502],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91137"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91137"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91137\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":91151,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91137\/revisions\/91151"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/91138"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}