Culture of Cruelty

From: Hartford Courant, CT - 17 Dec 2002

By ANDREW JULIEN, Courant Staff Writer

Some adolescents turn inward when they're angry or frustrated. But others turn outward - bullying their peers to compensate for their own insecurity. Experts say kids are becoming harsher judges of each other, and more vulnerable to feeling out of the loop, as they are bombarded with cultural images of perfection and conformity.

• • •

"Deaf girl" was one of the nicknames the kids used to slap on Mallory DiStefano. She doesn't especially like talking about the others.

Mallory is hard of hearing and tends to talk a little louder than you might expect, the way tourists in a foreign country often raise their voices. Her voice is a touch jarring at first, but she is thoughtful and articulate, and it just takes a little patience to get used to the way she speaks.

The kids at middle school weren't quite so patient. Mallory's disability made her a subject of frequent teasing, the way she spoke and the hearing aid she wore making her an easy mark. A lot of kids get teased in middle school - fat kids, slow kids, kids who speak with accents, kids who wear the wrong clothes.

Many children go home and lick their wounds, ride it out and get on with their lives. As long as there have been schools, there have been kids who bully and tease others.

But Mallory didn't get over it. Like a 2-year-old trying to hide from a nighttime monster, Mallory would race home from school and bury herself under the bed, or under the covers, or in the basement. She put away her stuffed animals and stripped the posters off the walls of her room because anything that looked at her made her feel small and sad.

"I started to hate myself, as much as the other kids did. I started driving myself crazy," said Mallory, now 16. "When each person started to hate me, I hated myself more."

Bullying is now widespread in schools across the nation, affecting one in every six schoolchildren. Public health officials and educators have stepped up their efforts to stem this dangerous tide as the damaging effects on the victims become clear.

What is less clear - and more troubling - is why children in America have become so mean. Many experts see the propensity to tease or victimize others as a symptom of a broader problem - an increasingly cruel and intolerant culture.

In interviews with more than 100 psychiatrists, parents and children across the country, the refrain was constant: America's children are so bombarded with slick images of what their lives should look like - and how they themselves should look - that many feel something is wrong with them if they don't live up to that standard.

Some turn their frustration inward. Teenagers who suffer from depression frequently complain that they have trouble fitting in at school, and that being a social outcast makes them feel worthless or angry. The struggle to attain the popular version of beauty also leads to eating disorders in many young women - an illness with an astonishingly high death rate.

Other kids turn their frustration outward, lashing out at their peers in a bid to soothe their own feelings of inadequacy. The premium on conformity makes it easier for children to identify - and isolate - those who fail to fit the mold.

"We let kids determine the tone of who's a loser and who's not," said Gary Isenberg, a West Hartford psychologist. "We can't let them set the tone. Then it becomes like `Lord of the Flies.'"

• • •

Somewhere along the way, it became not only socially acceptable to insult others in public, but socially desirable.

TV sitcoms are littered with scenes where casual cruelty drives the humor. Rap music is infused with hostility. Sports heroes are teaching a new generation the value of talking trash.

The fallout is obvious. Kids used to call each other jerks; now they call each other losers. Kids who used to be left alone quietly on the fringes now are singled out for humiliation. The hostility has intensified.

"Why is it that on every playground there is all this teasing, bullying and victimization that goes on that is allowed to happen?" asked Chris Hayward, chief of hospital services in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University Hospital in California.

"I mainly blame it on us - our values, the media, less family orientation, the impact of the peer group," he said. "It's so pervasive - and it's so awful for the kids who experience it. We turn such a blind eye."

Many experts believe that children are more vulnerable to the effects of bullying and teasing because the erosion of family has magnified the importance of a child's peers. What might have been shrugged off in the past now takes on a wildly exaggerated significance.

Laurie Gibbons was stunned by the level of abuse her son endured at a shoreline middle school. In a series of incidents that eventually prompted her to withdraw her son from school, the boy was pushed into a closet, shoved to the floor in gym and punched and kicked in the stomach while he lay curled up on the ground.

"No child should ever have to go through what my son went through," said Gibbons, of Branford. "We had bullies when we were kids. I believe this is well above what we had to go through when we were younger. I don't know why, but I don't think it's the same bullying that went on."

A 2001 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that 16 percent of children reported being bullied in American schools. In a telling finding, children said they were bullied more because of their looks or their speech than because of their religion or race.

There are few statistics on what sort of child is more likely to become a victim, but parents, educators and psychologists say it is not unusual for a child who already suffers from some sort of emotional turmoil to become a target.

The effects are clear. Bullied children often become depressed and angry, according to numerous studies.

The journal's study, for example, found that victims of bullying are liable to have social and psychological adjustment problems, including feelings of loneliness and trouble making friends.

Daniel Scruggs, a 12-year-old from Meriden, hanged himself in a closet after enduring scathing teasing and harassment from his peers at middle school - a tragedy that prompted a state law requiring school districts to better track and report episodes of bullying.

The 1999 massacre at Columbine High was a painful illustration of how far children who feel victimized and excluded are willing to go. The two gunmen, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, apparently felt they were alienated from the mainstream and targeted for abuse and humiliation.

Children such as Mallory say they are often pushed to the point of desperation by the cruelty of their peers.

"You just want to be in a dark room, under the covers, and you just want to sleep," she said. "You don't want to talk to anybody, be with anybody. You just want to sleep."

• • •

On a warm night in late spring, hundreds of giggling teenage girls crowd into the Oakdale Theatre in Wallingford for a concert by the pop diva Pink. They are wearing the standard uniform of their generation: jeans rolled up to the ankle, Nikes or the increasingly popular plain white sneaker, tight shirts with a little belly showing.

"She's not fake. She shows girls how to be themselves. She's real," one Pink fan proclaims. "Britney Spears is so fake."

Pink is clearly the anti-Britney. Her ballads of adolescent angst have a little edge to them. Her hit, "Don't Let Me Get Me," is all about being unpopular and wanting to hurt yourself ("Doctor, doctor won't you please prescribe me something ... "). "Family Portrait" recounts the pain of watching your family fall apart.

The singer's message of nonconformity may be quite slick (T-shirts: $27), but it has struck a chord among teenage girls who have grown weary of being pounded with messages in music videos, on television, in films and elsewhere that the secret to happiness is having a perfect body and smile.

A young girl named Rachel, eyeing the T-shirts, said she often gets teased because of her weight. For her, Pink delivers a message that girls like her are desperate to hear in a world focused on status and appearances.

"If she doesn't care how she looks, and she's a huge rock star, I shouldn't care about how I look," Rachel said. " I've been made fun of forever - why should I care? You don't need to be perfect to feel good about yourself."

That's not an easy truth for kids to believe. Every year, advertisers spend billions to influence the buying habits of children, making them care passionately about how they look, what brands they wear and how they stack up against other kids in the quest for cool.

"The way you look is really who you are," said Ruth Striegel-Moore, a professor of psychology at Wesleyan University. "It's no longer character traits that define you, but what you wear. It's your outer self that defines your identity."

At Southington High School, Meghan Attreed said it is so important to differentiate between who is popular and who isn't that some kids use a grading system to maintain order.

"Our school is fixated on popularity," said Attreed, who graduated last spring. "If you're a `C,' don't even bother talking to a `B' or an `A' person. It's so, like, `Varsity Blues.'"

Struggling with a world of conspicuous consumption can be challenging enough for adults. But for teenagers, who are desperate to define who they are, the pressure to conform and consume can derail their quest to carve out their own identity, experts say.

"Kids are hollow, all too often," said James Garbarino, co-director of the Family Life Development Center and a professor of human development at Cornell University. "When push comes to shove, Britney Spears is not enough."

Peter Yarrow, the Peter in the classic folk trio of Peter, Paul and Mary, tells a story about a kid who is ashamed to wear the wrong sneakers, ashamed of having his friends over to his home for a birthday party, ashamed of his dad picking him up in front of school.

All because the child fears his friends will tease him.

It's a pretty typical suburban story. But Yarrow, the founder of Operation Respect, an educational organization geared toward preventing bullying among children, said it speaks to the values and attitudes of so many children today.

"If self-respect and self-esteem is tied to the competitive model, and related to the acquisition of material goods or the acquisition of power ... then that's the way kids will look at life," Yarrow said.

"If a child does not look upon himself or herself as being valuable because of their goodness and kindness," Yarrow said, "they are far more likely to be insensitive to the effects of their being mean-spirited or ridiculing."

• • •

Elizabeth Franas was a gymnast with a nice body, the kind of body that drew the keen interest of the boys at her high school in Dearborn, Mich.

She enjoyed their glances and their attentions, not realizing the trap she was falling into. Over time, Elizabeth came to see herself the same way many of those boys did - as someone to be admired more for how she looked than who she was.

"I thought I was only valuable because I had this nice body that guys wanted," she said. "I can't deny I enjoyed it at the time. I just didn't realize how harmful what I was being accepted for would be to me."

If some children turn their frustration outward by bullying their peers, others turn those same feelings in on themselves. At 16, Franas began cutting herself - a dangerous rage among young women seeking an avenue to relieve stress and tension in their lives.

At first she just scratched the skin. Then she graduated to broken glass and razor blades, cutting the skin deep enough on three occasions to require stitches. Many experts believe teenagers cut themselves because the physical pain acts as a release from the emotional pain that is crushing them.

"I don't think adults realize the power of peer interactions and how important that is to adolescents - the stuff that goes on in high school," said Elizabeth, now a junior at Central Michigan University. "Our peer culture has much more of an influence. They say ignore it or turn the other cheek, but you can't. Everyone wants to belong."

Eating disorders are another common response to pressure. The girls Sally Nelson helps care for in the child and adolescent psychiatric unit at Children's Hospital in Boston are often middle-class kids striving for perfection.

"They are first in their class and are very hard on themselves and definitely overachievers," said Nelson, program director for inpatient psychiatry at the hospital. "And so what they perceive as a way of taking some control over all these pressures is they control their diet, they control their weight."

Children are bombarded by a slew of images, some violent, some sexual, some overtly materialistic: Abercrombie. Gap. Averil. MTV. Eminem. VH-1. J-Lo. Dawson's Creek. Mortal Kombat. TRL. Nike. American Pie. AOL.

Some of the effects are fairly obvious. Numerous studies link graphic violence on television and in movies to aggressive behavior. Psychiatrists say many children, especially younger kids, are unable to handle provocative sexual images and can become anxious or tense.

It is trickier to quantify the impact of living in a culture surrounded by reminders of how beautiful, rich, tough or sexy you're supposed to be.

But Kimberly, a young woman from Rocky Hill, remembers well the feelings of inadequacy and isolation that gripped her as she tried to wrap herself in the image of what a teenager at her high school was supposed to look like, act like and talk like.

"You're supposed to have what you see in the movies. You want that - and if you can't have it, there's something missing in your life," said Kimberly, who asked that her last name not be published.

Kimberly struggled to fit in, but it was always hard, and she slipped deeper and deeper into anxiety and despair.

"You just become part of the scene, and when you recognize it, you hate it. I always hated that, I always did. Being the person I am, I turned it around. And I hated myself - for not being able to be part of that and be happy."

And even when children break free of the unrelenting pressure to conform, America's ubiquitous consumer culture has an uncanny way of co-opting symbols of individuality or rebellion and putting them on sale.

"There seems to be a pressure to be a certain way. It's peers, it's adults, it's the educational system. There's not a message out there to accept yourself," Kimberly said. "Anything original teens started to do got taken over by MTV, or played to death. The grunge movement, the skaters ... it all got capitalized.

"And then it's at the Gap."

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