The manner by which social media has pounced on that Ateneo Junior High School bully and his family is one that has wounded our sense of reason. In our earnest desire to shame the bully for his abominable acts, we ended up shaming ourselves.
And people who tried to call for sanity are painted as defenders of bullying, and are themselves viciously attacked. Keyboards went overdrive in expressing expletives and ad hominem attacks, not only toward the bully and his family, but also toward those who would stand their ground and remind people that we could not fight bullying by bullying the bully.
A bully is not produced in an instant. Many bullies are themselves bullied, or are victims of child abuse. Most would probably live in contexts where violence is a norm. Others would have insecurities, and are surrounded by adults who do not provide a sheltering social space. For every bully, there is a failed parenting somewhere around the corner.
One needs to be aware of the fact that our proclivities as adults are always tied to our childhood experiences. The anti-Catholic Church stance of the President, for example is, according to him, mainly due to his being sexually molested by a priest. It is, therefore, not farfetched that older children and younger adults who manifest adverse behavior, such as bullying, have lived through, or continue to live through, experiences that make them develop problematic perspectives on life, and worse, can even turn them into juvenile delinquents.
This is precisely why the points where we need to intervene to curb bullying are in the family, and in the school environment. It is easy to focus on the bully and use up all our rage in demonizing him. But demonizing the bully, without addressing the root causes in the family and school environments that enable his bullying, will not cure the problem. Dismissing the offending child from school will simply relocate the problem to another school; expelling him from the educational system and, therefore, preventing him from enrolling in any other school may only exacerbate his anti-social tendencies, and could even transform his delinquency into a social pathology.
Bullies are not born, they become what they are. And what makes them bullies is a combination of factors that range from how they are raised by their families, to how their behavior has been reinforced by their peers and tolerated by their social environments. Thus, it takes a village to produce a bully, and it will also take a village to reform him.
Therefore, both the family and the school will have to be in focus when they draw up a reform plan. That should include family therapy and schools employing mechanisms to monitor the behavior and activities of children. If circumstances warrant it, the effort may even have to include installing CCTV cameras. Under the law, schools are required to devise mechanisms to address bullying, and penalties are meted out for those who fail to institute these mechanisms.
Some people argue that the best way to prevent bullying is to teach children to defend themselves from bullies. To many, this entails teaching their children martial arts skills so that they can fight back. But this may not necessarily be the best option to take. Without proper guidance and nurturing, and without the positive reinforcements that a loving and caring family can offer, what might be initially intended as self-defense skills could easily become weapons for aggression. This Ateneo bully is, in fact, a taekwondo champion who ended up using his skills to hurt others, instead of defending himself.
At the end of the day, the best defense against bullying is to teach our children confidence and social skills, and to keep our communication channels with them always open to encourage them to let us know right away when they are being bullied. Certainly, the first step to address bullying is to bully-proof our children, and this doesn’t necessarily mean only teaching them physical combat, but also social survival skills.
Unfortunately, these measures are lost in the rage that consumes people when they see violence inflicted by bullies on their victims, particularly on social media. Reason yields to passion, even as those who hate bullies do not realize it when their behavior online starts turning into the very act of cyberbullying itself. They justify their actions as righteous anger, as a form of rage to shame not only the boy, in the case of the Ateneo student, but also his family, and for some, even his school.
Angry netizens shared the videos of the bullying, spreading the rage like wildfire in cyberspace. In their desire to shame the bully, they forgot to think about the bully’s victims, and that sharing the videos would also shame them. Some even went to the extent of sharing the family pictures of the bully, which included that of his younger sister who most likely had nothing to do with the abominable actions of her brother. Fake Facebook accounts of the boy, and even of his father, were created to further ridicule and shame them. Someone even posted the alleged residential address of the boy and his family, and this was widely shared by many.
What we now have, in effect, is a cyber-lynch mob. And lynch mobs are by nature irrational, and their main logic is only as expressions of collective hatred and rage, and the desire for vengeance.
What is saddening here is that what became of primordial interest is simply to punish the bully and his family, but not to cure or rehabilitate. This logic is a mirror of opting for the death penalty instead of rehabilitating the criminal, or of killing drug users instead of rehabilitating them.
As it turned out, the address widely shared in social media, which allegedly was the residence of the Ateneo bully and his family, was in fact that of a pastor’s family, with no relation to the target. The family living there, as a result, was also subjected to bullying. Fast food deliveries and that for orders to online shopping site Lazada were sent to the address, as a form of revenge, hoping they would be made to pay for the items.
And the lynch mob, from the instigator who first posted the wrong address, to those who shared it, do not even find it in their hearts to apologize to their victims. But then again, lynch mobs never apologize. It is not what they live for. It is not in their nature. They always go for the kill.
https://www.manilatimes.net/of-bullies-and-cyber-lynch-mobs/488343/
https://www.manilatimes.net/of-bullies-and-cyber-lynch-mobs/488343/
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