Stopping Cyber-bullying Now and Forever

Politics and Culture, , , , ,

The recent suicide of Rutgers University freshman, Tyler Clementi, who killed himself after his roommate used a hidden webcam to record his sexual encounter with another male student and posted it on Twitter, was hardly the first case of a teenager driven to suicide by cyber-bullies.

Cyber-bullying has been blamed for several recent deaths, but most of these incidents start off-line, in classrooms, cafeterias, or schoolyards.  Bullying is mostly a school problem, but there doesn’t seem to be any widespread adoption of consistent policies that involve “best practices” for prevention in schools.  Victims still wind up feeling isolated and unable to tell anyone.  Schools are usually reactive.  Many still use a mediation model that makes bullying seem like a problem between kids and not a crime against a child.

Because of the high profile cases, more laws are being written to punish bullying especially the cyber kind. The Internet magnifies the effects of bullying and cuts off the idea of any safe haven.

But will new laws actually prevent tragedies?  We need to remember that we are for the most part talking about teenagers here — teenaged perpetuators and teenaged victims.   Teenagers think differently than adults.  Victims don’t handle stressful situation as well in part because their brains aren’t fully developed and in part perhaps because they lack the life experience to do so.  Perpetrators don’t take into account the consequences of their actions — not only the impact on the victim, but the punishment for themselves.

In the Rutgers case, the roommate and his friend have already been charged with a felony — invasion of privacy — for recording the sexual encounter and making it public.   They may be charged with a bias crime or possibly reckless homicide.  No matter what they are charged with, it’s easy to imagine their defense.  They are impressionable eighteen year olds who have seen prank shows on television.  They have no criminal histories.  They simply exercised very bad judgment and had no way of imagining that what they did would lead to a young man’s death.

Unlike the case of Megan Meier, where an adult mother of another teenager, posed as an adolescent boy online in order to attract and then reject Megan, there’s no smoking gun here where the perpetrators actually suggested that “the world would be a better place” without their victim in it.  They didn’t physically drive him to the bridge from which he jumped.

While a jury may decide that a lengthy-prison sentence equals justice for Tyler, the truth is that preventing future tragedies will be a much bigger job.

As an educational grant-writer, I know there are requests for funding, both private and public, for after school programs that address bullying.  But even if a district or school gets an award, only a fraction of children will attend these programs.  Schools must develop proactive, comprehensive strategies beginning in the earliest grades.

Prevention programs can be adjusted for the needs of children as they grow.  Compassion is hard to teach and we can’t force everyone to play nice all the time, but we can begin in the early grades to develop effective strategies to teach young people to both take responsibility for their behaviors and think about how they impact others.  Instead of a teacher reactively telling parents that their isolated child may need counseling or that their outgoing one has a tendency to tease, let’s teach all kids social skills.  Kids love learning about “psychology” and how socialization works.   Learning to think critically and reflect on one’s own actions is a transferable cognitive skill.  Using role-plays engages children and can enhance communication and literacy skills.  Bullying prevention programs can and should be fused into elementary and middle school curriculum.   They can be generalized, presented from books and websites with scenarios such as dealing with peer pressure to isolate or bully “the new kid.”  In that way, the material is not “about” a situation that may be ongoing within that particular classroom, but can allow the teacher to address similar issues, and help all students practice social problem solving and gain a deeper understanding of the impact of their actions on others.

With a push towards service learning, older high school students can play a role by visiting elementary schools and presenting skits and workshops to educate younger children about bullying and what they can do to stop, prevent, and resolve it.   (Programs such as these exist and are being utilized not only to prevent bullying, but also to help kids learn good decision making in a variety of areas.  They involve the secondary gain engaging high school students, which prevents their dropping out.)

Once we define actual bullying as threats, intimidation — both physical and psychological, spreading rumors, organized isolation of individuals with threats to those who befriend them, use of telephone or computers to intimidate, etc. — then the next step is figuring out policies and punishments.   What you can’t have is a mishmash where Student A is lucky enough to go to Lincoln High School where he’ll find that all students are aware of the policies, know to whom to go for help, and know when they go for that help they will get it, while Student B goes to Washington High School where she finds herself in a conference with the Principal who tries to work out an “agreement” between her and her and her torturers who can’t wait for the meeting to end so they can tweet to the world, and start a really ugly new rumor through an anonymous Facebook account while planning the next girl’s room attack.  Kids need limits to be clear and concrete.  Potential perpetrators need to be aware of the consequences for their actions. Schools must make sure their policies are clear to all kids — victims, perpetrators, witnesses, and bystanders — as well as to their parents.

Another missing piece in addressing bullying involves preventing victims from reacting by self-harm or lashing out at others..  On the one hand, victims are not responsible for their abuse, and should never be made to feel like they brought it on themselves.  We’ll never be able to prevent 100% of bullying anymore than we’ll be able to prevent all robberies or other crime.  Therefore, in addition to policies that make it easier to report bullying before it escalates, all young people must also learn how to deal with a worst-case bullying event.  It’s similar to the need to teach survival skills for escaping a molester, or practicing how to leave a burning school building.

I once took a workshop at The Albert Ellis Institute.  The Institute practices a form of cognitive therapy known as “rational-emotive” therapy.  At the workshop we were asked to imagine the following scenario:  “You have been vigorously masturbating in a room.  You have just been told that a group of people including everyone you know has been watching through a hidden camera.  You are a now about to go out to another room where all those people are waiting.  What will you say to them?”

Given that I was an adult with an MSW and some experience as a clinician, I was able to come up with my answer:  “Good evening ladies and gentleman.  First, let me start by addressing your embarrassment.  Voyeurism is a natural tendency, and I forgive those of you who chose not to look away…”

Most teenagers would not come up with that kind of reply, but allowing them to visualize the most humiliating thing and imagine coping with it, might just give them enough time after a real life crisis to not embark on a permanent solution to a temporary problem.  It might increase their awareness of how overwhelmed they would be, so that they could come up with an emergency safety plan.

While comprehensive prevention programs and legal remedies might eventually make bullying less acceptable and frequent, there will always be people whose cruelty is reckless and without bounds.  In order to prevent young victims from turning their anger on themselves or others, we must act proactively to help them develop the skills to realize that even having your sex life revealed on the Internet or being told by your cyber-boyfriend that the world would be better off without you, is survivable and not a reason to take your own life.

(Marion Stein also writes fiction. You can find her books here.)

The Deification of Momdom or Why Christine O’Donnell is No Sarah Palin

Politics and Culture, , , , ,

Christine O or Pristine the Virgin Queen as she’s dubbed in some corners of the Internets, is the new “it” girl.  Since her surprise victory in the Republican senate primary in Delaware, she’s all over the headlines the youtube and the cable.

We see and hear her in many incarnations.  There she is in the 1990’s on Politically Incorrect, a woman in her thirties who still looks childlike and has big curly hair leftover from her college days in the 1980’s, promoting chastity and discussing her brief flirtation with Satan.  In more modern times, when asked about the whisper campaign started by her supporters that her primary opponent is secretly gay, O’Donnell replies that the opponent needs to “put his man-pants on.”

You can listen to a radio interview where a conservative announcer loses patience as she insists that in a previous senate bid, she  “tied” Biden in two counties that she clearly lost.

Post primary, she’s been handled, dressing now in Palin red and even adding eyeglasses to give her gravitas.  She skips Meet the Press, but stops in to visit the friendlier Scarborough Country because she had “business in New York.”  Pristine has now been parodied on SNL and been the subject of countless masturbation and witchcraft jokes.

Is it ok to laugh or should we be taking her more seriously?

After all Palin was funny at first.  Remember the good old days when she spectacularly messed up with Katy Couric and Charlie Gibson?  She might not have cost McCain the presidency; his complete befuddlement at the economic collapse probably sealed his doom, but she certainly didn’t help.  She should have retreated after the election, but instead she quit her job, went to work for Fox, got a fat advance on her book published by another Murdoch entity, and is now being touted as a likely contender for the Republican presidential nomination.

The joke has worn thin, and those of us who believe in evolution, like social security and understand that regulating health insurance companies does not mean “death panels,” are all a bit nervous and have stopped laughing.  Even if she can’t get elected, Sarah can certainly rile up her base.  Does Pristine represent a similar threat?

Probably not.

Is it because unlike Palin, O’Donnell has never actually been elected to anything?  Nope.  Is it because she’s dumber than Palin, more gaffe prone?  Doubtful.

It’s because she’s an unmarried woman with no kids who talks about chastity and decries masturbation while shaking her long locks and looking like an overage cheerleader.

There’s something just too weirdly jarring about this.  All we can do is wonder about what’s really in her dirty drawer or what led her while in college to give up her sexy ways and become a celibacy crusader.   Lots of spiritually seeking young people get religion.  Some may become missionaries in foreign lands, feed the hungry, go into seminary or join a religious order, but few translate their fervor into founding an organization devoted to promoting abstinence.

Maybe something happened.  It’s hard to look at her, especially in those clips from the 90’s when the bloom was still on the rose, and not wonder.  Was there some football hero she had a crush on who got her drunk and cruelly pimped out an incapacitated Pristine to his friends?  Was she too guilt-ridden and perhaps disturbed by her own vulnerability to call it rape?  Was her decision to be chaste a way of empowerment, keeping herself from ever feeling so used again?

That’s where my mind goes.  Others may have their own theories.  You can’t help having a theory.  Closet lesbian?  Out and out hypocrite?  Hormonally challenged?  Tease?

Rush Limbaugh and Jon Stewart both think her opponents will make too much out of Pristine’s anti-masturbation stand and the voters won’t care.   They may be right in that the jokes will become silly and her opponent can’t run on being the pro-jerk-off candidate.

But maybe Limbaugh is just trying to change the subject, canny enough to know that there’s something about Pristine that doesn’t make sense and won’t resonate with voters.

Palin may be a phony who uses her kids as election props, but she has kids to use.  Most of us don’t buy her narrative, but her audience does.  She’s a “mom”.  She’s not only a “mom,” but a “special needs mom.”  One of her sons is a veteran.  Her daughter made a mistake, but chose life and responsibility.

Palin gets that her audience isn’t anti-sex. They simply believe sex should be heterosexual and within the context of marriage.  Outside of that it’s sin.  They understand that human being are prone to sin and no one is perfect.  Thus Sarah’s daughter Bristol can be forgiven as long as she’s learned her lesson and has the baby.  An abortion would have been unforgivable, but “choosing life” is brave and they love her for it.  Doesn’t matter that who knows who is actually raising the baby while Bristol dances with the stars and collects fees for lecturing other teens.  Doesn’t matter that we were treated to a fake engagement during the Republican National Convention.  It’s the myth that counts.  Sarah’s “momma grizzly” rhetoric hits home especially for woman who’ve succeeded at little else in their lives besides having children.

Pristine is something else.  There’s a strangeness to a woman who extols traditional values but is unmarried, childless and chaste at forty-one.  We could take it if she looked more like the repressed lesbian/nun types with which we are familiar.   If she resembled your mustached, never married great-aunt, the one who sacrificed her youth taking care of her widowed mother while buying generous gifts for her nieces and nephews, voters might buy it. They’ve heard that story.  They could even feel a little sorry for poor Pristine, too plain to ever catch a man.  But the problem is Christine is just too sexy for her celibacy.

She comes off at best as a scold, a high-maintenance prude who never met a man who could measure up to her ideal husband — Jesus Christ.

There are of course women who do marry Christ.  They are called nuns.  But they choose the veil and not politics and cut off their locks.  Pristine is a Catholic while the majority Tea Partiers including Palin are Protestants.  Catholicism despite JFK and Joe Biden is still viewed by many “real” Americans as a foreign church.  The scandals haven’t helped. Joan of Arc may have led France, but there is no American mythological equivalent and real America disdain the French.  Our nuns may be beautiful like Ingrid Bergman or even cute and feisty and fly like Sally Fields, but they don’t rule.  Moms rule.

Real American women leaders aren’t nuns, they’re moms.

New Opportunities in Tough Times

Politics and Culture, , ,

According to this morning’s Wonkette (the website of record), a think tank called The Roosevelt Institute issued a report, The Stagnating Labor Market,  stating that most of those currently unemployed will never work again.

Pessimism will not help us in the current situation.  In fact, many Americans have not given up but are actively getting rid of old junk in the attic like jewelry that probably hasn’t been worn since granny’s day.  They are the new entrepreneurs creating a greener future by selling off their goods rather than simply disposing of them when they are forced to leave their homes.  Others have learned to make do by taking three or four part-time jobs, discovering that one can function fine on four hours a night of sleep (or rather a day since the break between jobs is often in the morning or afternoon).

But the Roosevelt report also misses the many opportunities for growth that will occur as the middle-class continues to shrink, especially if the Tea Party revolution succeeds and people are freed from the yoke of government interference.  We need only look at some of our neighbors in the developing world to see where the new jobs will come from and how people function without the so-called “safety net” of benefits like unemployment insurance, Medicare and social security.

Kidnapping is a growth industry and will soon offer many opportunities.  This is a labor-intensive field, requiring teamwork and several distinct skill-sets.  It’s not simply about raw strength.  There are leadership roles for those with communication and  people skills as well as  the ability to think strategically.  At the entry level there’s a need for drivers, clean up crews, guards, cooks, etc.

Increases in kidnapping mean that all types of security services will mushroom, from higher-level consultants, to construction opportunities in renovating homes to include gates, panic rooms etc.  The need for bodyguards, private negotiators, and private police will be astronomical.

Meantime, the unemployed should protect their remaining assets, especially their kidneys. You can function fine with just one and the sacrifice of even a small piece of liver could help with heating bills. Corneas are also valuable and depth perception is over-rated.  (In a pinch those with supportive spouses can sacrifice both corneas which may increase earnings in the panhandling field considerably.) With new technologies making transplant of hands and other extremities easier, there will be growth in this segment as well.

The last thing we can afford as we move forward and seize the future is the continued interference of a government that seeks to “protect” us  by making us completely dependent on it for basic services and a safety net.

Write a Novel in 3 Days? Why Not?

Authonomy Related, New York Stories, Travel Blog, true story, writing/blogging/publishing related, , ,

For the past 3 years, I’ve been booked Labor Day weekend — no picnics, barbecues, hikes or drives to the country.  You’ll find me out on my balcony (weather permitting) with my laptop and a cup of weak coffee by my side, churning out a mini-masterpiece for the  International 3 Day Novel Contest.  It’s a simple premise — start and complete a novel over the 72 hour holiday weekend.

On the honor system.  It’s Canadian.

The first year I entered, I did  hope to achieve the ultimate prize: publication.  The first prize is a book contract with a small press.  They don’t announce the winners till January.  I drove myself nuts waiting.  It was a more intense experience than any previous contest I’d ever entered before.  The reason now seems clear.  This isn’t a normal situation where you enter using something that’ you wrote long ago.  The 3-Day demands that you create something new and create it under intense pressure.  You are allowed to write an outline in advance though mine have proven useless once I started.  One emerges at the end with a sense that one has been through, if not an ordeal, then at least an intense ritualistic experience.

In my case, I’m not the only one going through it.  My better half  has been a devoted partner, acting as a caregiver, cook, sounding board,  personal assistant , and massage therapist.   He’s also signed off on the “affirmation” statement that the novel was started and completed within the time frame.

This year life issues were getting in the way of the creative flow. Ten days before the big day, I had no clear idea about what I even wanted to write.  The BH demanded I show him some outlines and pick a plot so that I would not spend the first few hours staring in horror at blank screen.  I came up with two ideas — one was a sort of As I Lay Dying set in present day Queens, the other a strangely lighthearted lad-lit tale of a youngish man getting romantic advice from an old man/ghost haunting his basement apartment.   Thank goodness, he advised me to go for the latter.

Have I ever won?  Not exactly.  But winning isn’t everything; in fact, it’s not even relevant.  I’d compare it to entering the New York City Marathon.  It’s much more about personal best and achievement than it is about getting first place.  (Though it would be nice if like a marathon they gave prizes in categories.  I’d settle for best novel in the under 25k words category by a woman over 40.)  However, that’s not how I felt the first time I entered.

My first entry, The Death Trip came in at a bit above 20,000 words, barely a novella.  They say size doesn’t matter, but then they say it might be a factor.  I didn’t even make the shortlist.  My better-half who loved the story, is still bitter.  But here’s what I did get out of it:  I got a novella draft in need of little (but not much) revision.  I not only got it quick, but I got it with a story that I might never have bothered with otherwise.  I learned that I could crank out something coherent in 3 days.  I also used the obsession I developed waiting for the results as the basis for a story I told at the Narativ Story Workshop which was filmed, and then used by 3Day on their website.

I revised the novella and realized after a couple of rejections there wasn’t a big market for it at that length.  I had no desire to either shorten or expand it, so I decided to put it out as an e-book. To date I’ve had over 1,800 downloads.

My effort the second time around, Hungry Ghosts, actually made the short-list.  It too barely made it to 20k, but I fell in love with the story and although other projects have gotten in the way, I’m still working on expanding it to a full novel length.  With its combination of erotica and horror, I’m hoping it may even be commercially viable.   I’m sure it never would have been written without the contest. All I had of it before Labor Day was a first line (which I wound up changing), a premise that wasn’t completely thought out, and a list of characters.

This year, I promised myself I would somehow get up to 27k, and somehow made it to just that point.   Of course I’m still hoping that the third time is the charm, but even if I don’t make this year’s short list, I’m still feeling high from the writing.  As a way to jump start a first draft, the 3 Day can’t be beat.

It hasn’t gotten easier over time.  I had a tough first night or more literally morning this go-round,  but the spirit of the thing kicked in — the idea that in some way, I’d been “preparing,” anticipating this special weekend, reserving it for a purpose.   I felt like I had nothing to lose by continuing, so there was no reason not to push on to the end.

I wound up with something unlike anything I’d written before — a lighthearted view of gentrification that almost celebrates the entrepreneurial spirit of people who buy and develop property, a romance that might even work, a happy ending!

The process allows writers to take risks and encourages them to follow Elmore Leonard’s maxim and “skip the boring parts” because there’s simply no time to write them.  Whatever I think I learned getting my MFA is useless.  More useful is the storytelling  technique practiced at Narativ.  Although that method was designed for oral storytelling of true stories, the method of focusing on “what happened” and not explaining it, kept me from getting lost in my story and forced me to keep going, even when I wasn’t sure of where.

Thanks to the contest, I now have one novella out in the world attracting a little bit of attention, and I have two projects  that need development and expansion, so I don’t have to face the dreaded blank page.   I have confidence in my ability to crank out material under pressure and I’ve further honed my skills.  The contest allows you to turn your home into a writer’s retreat at a much lower cost than actually traveling to one.  It costs $50 to enter, waived if you got a prize or honorable mention the previous year.

So to anyone who writes fiction or has even thought about writing fiction mark your calendar now and start thinking  about the book you’ll be writing Labor Day Weekend 2011 (thinking is not against the rules).

Here’s the clip of me talking about my first  3- Day experience: