May 31, 2001

I changed schools in third grade. On the first day, one of the bigger kids in the class picked me up, turned me upside down and put me in a trash can. The teacher was out of the room. I was surprised; I didn't think anyone could do that to me. I brushed myself off and went back to my desk. A few kids asked me if I was all right and I told them I was fine. There wasn't anything I could do about it. I remember I went home and spent time in my room thinking about it, about why doing something like that would make someone happy.

In the fourth grade, the same kid dropped me in a dumpster. I didn't figure it was worth making a scene. That's one of the things about a bully - they feed on the attention.

Elliott Decker was shy as a boy, and slight. He didn't like meeting people much, preferring the company of his parents' friends - and the imaginary pal he kept close by for much of his childhood. No wonder: The incidents kept recurring. He didn't hide it from his parents; he told them if they asked. But who, when asking a child what he learned in school tday, is going to add, "And by the way, did you get tossed in the trash?"

Now 23 and eagerly awaiting his first son, Decker says he's come to grips with this child-hood trauma. It's made him stronger, he says, and he's proud that he never fought back or violated his nonviolent beliefs. But he doesn't talk about it much, either. "I did what I had to do. I ignored it." Did he mind that no one helped him? "I didn't want help. I wanted to handle it on my own. I knew if I ignored them, they'd stop. It took years, but they stopped." Now, he says, the two kids who tormented him are in dead-end jobs, and one is so debilitated by alcoholism that he seldom leaves home.

Many of us have bully stories, if not from our childhoods then from our children or friends. Kids get smashed in the head in the schoolyard, hit by snowballs, harassed on the bus. They're attacked on the way to school, afraid to go to the bathroom, insulted in the cafeteria line.
It's not just in the United States. In traditional Africa, sophisticated Scandinavia, in Australia and Canada, all over the globe, thoughtful, quiet, physically small children like Decker are often targets for bullies. Frequently, they're smart, too, or else just different. But experts use other words. They describe these kids as weak, anxious, easily intimidated, though some may grow up to be artists. Think of little Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man getting pushed into a slimy, rat-infested ditch, then having his glasses trampled by the schoolyard bully. Each time, he agrees not to tell. But not all children deal with the trauma artistically or philosophically. Frequently, bullied kids are already suffering low self-esteem. Now that a handful of the hundreds of thousands who have been bullied have taken revenge, packing guns to school and using them, bullying has hit the news.

Ironically, homicidal violence in schools has actually decreased, despite high-profile school shootings. (And not all researchers agree there's a connection. Youth violence expert James Garbarino of Cornell suggests that the school shooters may actually be bullies claiming to have been victimized.) But why bullying has come to the attention of the nation isn't as important as the fact that this insidious, violent behavior is finally being taken seriously. At risk are not just the kids who are targeted, or even those doing the bullying, but also bystanders - which means entire school communities are affected, intimidated into feeling helpless, afraid and guilty.

Yet ask kids if they've been bullied and they may well shrug it off. They string out the platitudes: Bullying is human nature, a fact of life. It makes men out of boys and toughens up girls.

But in the last four years, many schools have recognized that these familiar excuses mask an abuse of power as harmful as any domestic abuse. Bullying is defined as intentional, harmful behavior based on an imbalance of power over time. Remember the saying, "Pick on someone your own size"? They never do. Because there's an imbalance of power, bullying cannot be worked out between kids. A targeted child can't go up to a bully and ask him or her to stop it, and teachers can't expect kids to resolve such issues alone. Bullies pick their targets too well.

"If I'm a bully, I don't need to get near you to be a bully," says guidance counselor Chuck Saufler, recently hired in West Bath. "I can give you the finger across the room and you'll live in fear for the rest of the day."

Another breakthrough comes in realizing how pervasive bullying is. In creating its report, Standards for Ethical and Responsible Behavior, released this January, the Department of Education noted that nearly 50 percent of students are targets of verbal violence; 20 percent feel unsafe at school. A 1998 survey of third-graders conducted by Saufler in association with the University of Southern Maine found that 40 percent of these 8- and 9-year-olds felt that they were targets of bullying.

One-quarter of them said they were frequently threatened or teased in a mean way, and a third said the violence got physical, that they were hit, pushed or kicked.

Nationwide, 7 percent of all eighth-graders say they miss at least one day of school each month because of shifting, undiagnosed illnesses, aches of internalized misery brought on because they are terrified that just being themselves will catapult them into the mocking reach of some child who craves power and attention and has learned how satisfying it is to achieve this at the expense of others.

Still, these statistics may be low. Recent hidden-camera studies of school playgrounds conducted by Canadian professors Wendy Craig and Debra Peplar identified a bullying incident happening on the schoolyard every seven minutes. While teachers frequently believe they catch most such incidents, this study has the supervisors seeing only 4 percent of them.

But this is not really surprising. Kids who bully are like warped mothers: They have eyes in back of their heads and on their ears and all around their bodies. They know when they're being watched and when they're free to sidle up to a child with a nasty insult or a kick to the groin. They're so good at stealth moves that most adults feel powerless to deal with them. They go scot-free.

What if the police had such an attitude? asks bullying expert Stan Davis. What if they only prosecuted one bank heist in 10 and wouldn't investigate an assault unless they saw it first-hand? Criminals would have the run of the town. In many schools, their counterparts do. We don't call them criminals; indeed, it feels unfair to label kids at all. But kids who act as bullies are six times more likely to wind up in jail than your regular schoolmate.

Though the research is there, most schools have not caught up. While Maine is perceived as a leader in this field, the state does not mandate anti-bullying programs, choosing instead to launch a more general and more diffuse "Taking Responsibility" campaign, in which schools are to create their own standards for ethical and responsible behavior.

There are some state programs, however, and principal Carl Lusby of the Bryant E. Moore school in Ellsworth is looking into them. Having dealt unsuccessfully with bullying for his entire 30-year career, he now wants to do something about it. It's gotten worse, he says, while the stakes have gotten higher. "As we do more brain research we are learning that if we can reduce obstacles to learning we can be more effective," he says. School climate does matter. His school is one of several that has received a federal grant to work with Saufler and the University of Southern Maine Law School's program, Excellence in Citizen Education through the Law, or EXCEL. Sometime next year, they hope to launch a bullying prevention program at their upper primary-aged school. As one of their initial activities, Lusby sent a team to central Maine, where they spent the morning at the James H. Bean School in Sidney.

The Bean school is 1950s vintage: long, low and familiar with wide, gray hallways and a playground filled with young kids who are fierce about their play, throwing basketballs, clambering over monkey bars, going for movement with all the gusto of kids cooped up on a spring morning. But beneath the typical activity, the Ellsworth teachers found something that astounded them: Common decency has taken back the schoolyard - and the buses and the cafeteria and the bathrooms, too.

It took compassionate leadership and a concerted effort by the whole school, but the Bean school proves not only that it can be done, but that it makes a difference.

On a recent May morning, a handful of adults are out in the schoolyard. Among them is Stan Davis. A small, forlorn boy makes a beeline for him. "Mr. Davis? No one wants to play with me. " After hanging his head, he looks up at Davis with great hope.

"Oh, we'll find someone," says Davis, heading him to the playset. There a boy climbing a ladder by himself lights up at the sight of this tall man with his shock of deep black hair. "Would you like to play?" Davis asks unnecessarily. The two go off.

Officially, Davis is the school guidance counselor, though that morning a new substitute who called him that was corrected. "He's not the guidance counselor," her student said. "His job is to make the school a better place."

In this rural community, with its farms and trailer parks and commuters to Augusta and Waterville, Davis has launched one of the most successful anti-bullying programs in the nation. In three years he has reduced bullying at his school, reached out to schools across the state and region. He has made over 300 presentations and worked directly with 40 schools in six states, hosting delegations from Ellsworth's Moore school and many others.

Davis began working on bullying four years ago, when trying to help one badly tormented child. He began to research bullying, but there wasn't much written then. What there was came from Dan Olweus, a Norwegian psychology professor who got into his work in the 1980s, after three Norwegian boys, aged 10 to 14, committed suicide as a result of ceaseless bullying. Olweus developed a plan that reduced bullying by 50 percent, first in Bergen, Norway, then in many other European schools. Seeing this, Davis realized that while bullying may be as basic to human nature as the pecking order in a hen house, it is still not insurmountable.

But he'd need the involvement of the entire school. With the support of principal Alan Pfeiffer, he got it. Janitors, teachers, bus drivers, administrators, parents and kids were enlisted to prevent bullying, which they defined, together, as repeated harassment. They decided not only that bullying wasn't going to be allowed, but that kids would need to come to an adult with the problem. Every incident would be investigated.

First, they went after the overt, physical harassment. It wasn't easy. Children reported incidents to their teachers; the teachers filled out forms; the forms went to Davis or Pfeiffer; and every incident was researched, no matter how small, how obscure or how time-consuming. Soon kids knew that if they harassed another kid, they would be caught. They also knew that they would be punished and that the consequences would escalate. Parents were called and rules were read; the child was told what would happen next time; and parent and child signed a document acknowledging that they understood this.

"They'll come to me and I'll ask them what happened and they'll say, 'I was teasing,'" says Davis. "I don't ask them why. I ask, 'What were you trying to accomplish?' - 'I wanted my friends to laugh and be impressed.' - So then I ask them, what else could you do? - 'I know a lot of jokes.' Once we help them think about what they were trying to accomplish, they can figure it out themselves," concludes Davis.

The program started three years ago, when today's sixth-graders were in third grade. Now, come lunchtime, the boys cluster together. Bright-eyed and eager, they have no problem talking about bullying.
"I was a bully," says one boy. The three friends surrounding him chime in:

"I was, too," "Yeah, I was." In fact, all these boys - whose names Davis has asked us not to use - had been. They had beaten up on each other, on others in their class and on kids much smaller than they were.

"I got started by a kid who threw me against a wall and called me hamburger," says one boy enthusiastically. His friends join in, talking about their past. They are proud not of being bullies, it seems, but of being reformed. Life is just that much better without it, they say.

"I got suspended four times," says one child. "Every time, my mom would make me do every chore for a month." They got bored of the trouble, tired having a reputation. It grew less rewarding. "I think it's wrong to beat people up," says one former bully.

They do not know the gift they have been given. While victims get depressed and suicidal, 60 percent of those who are characterized as bullies in middle school have at least one felony conviction by age 24.

There's an interesting converse to that, says Denise Bishop, who, as assistant director of school services to the Windham school department, is heading the city's anti-bullying program. "Those being chronically harassed have a lower than average rate of criminal conviction. They are taking personal responsibility for solving the problem, not getting into trouble."

So what makes a bully? Like domestic abuse, it is cyclical. Abusive parents model bullying; abused kids hurt other kids. But bullies come from "good" homes, too. Sometimes, says Bishop, they learn their power play from siblings. At a recent anti-bullying workshop, she reminded parents to look at how their kids treat each other. "Parents will tolerate sibling teasing and taunting, but they'd be horrified if they saw their child doing that to a neighbor's kid." To bully-proof her school, she suggests parents help their kids practice standing up to bullies.

That's not the way most experts go, because bullies choose their targets well. Better to get friends, classmates, neutral bystanders to speak up for them.

Bystander training is central to Davis' program, which is modeled on Olweus' work. Each year he teaches a third-grade unit on the 1944 Eleanor Estes book The Hundred Dresses, about an immigrant girl who is picked on for her poor clothing by a popular, wealthy child. Maddie, the popular girl's best friend, is the bystander. She hates what she sees happening but is afraid that if she speaks up, she'll be next. Third-graders look at this knot and act out how it feels to be mean, to be passive, to act out of fear. Then, they figure out alternatives and role play them. By acting empowered, Davis is charging these kids - even at age 8 - to take a stand against injustice. As bystanders, says Davis, they hold the power.

Day after day, Davis repeats the words of Martin Luther King, words that are displayed on posters around the school: "In the end we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends."

What teachers are amazed to find is not only that it works, but that with much of the fear of being ridiculed absent, students are genuinely different. They're not afraid of talking about their emotions - their fears, their hurt, their dismay. They speak such things to Davis and to each other, knowing, for the most part, that they are safe. Second-graders seek adult help if they need a playmate. Third-graders take seriously homework that asks them to stand up for others. Fourth-grade boys eagerly make videos about their responses to difficult situations, examining why they get mad, why they lash out, how they might respond differently to hurt. Fifth-graders, too, are looking out for others. Though the school hasn't kept thorough records, three years ago last November, 50 kids had to stay in from recess because of various infractions. This November, only 12 stayed in.

But Davis still hasn't licked the problem of pre-adolescent girls and their particular form of exclusionary bullying. There's name calling, harassment, unfriendly demands. Kids are being teased in subtle, shifting ways that are hard to pin down. It's not as bad as in other schools, where knots of girls practice roving bullying, singling out one child for the day or the week, leaving an entire grade in terror, but it's not good.
At this age, says Davis, they don't come to him until, as one girl reports, "it gets worse and worse and I don't want to hold it in." Sixth-graders like to handle things themselves. Davis doesn't expect everyone to get along. They don't have to be friends. They just can't be enemies.

But even kids ready to claw each other's eyes out still seek friendships, so Davis' office, which is hardly more than a large storage closet, is festooned with peace treaties, much of it from older girls who lay out quick, precise rules like, "I want to be friends with K.H., which means I don't want her to talk behind my back."
After doing this for three years, Davis has his systems in place. These treaties take five minutes. "I ask them what they want, they figure it out. We meet once a week to see how they're doing. In four weeks, they get ice cream."

The Bean school proves that bullying can be limited, though perhaps not eliminated. But how much of it depends on a charismatic magician of a guidance counselor, able to cleanly, swiftly douse emotional fires? Or, how much depends on having a guidance counselor four days a week - instead of two half-days, as at Ellsworth's Moore School? Though Lusby is committed to an anti-bullying program, he is worried he won't have the staff to commit to Davis' investigative intensity. Saufler, too, has a program he takes around, one that focuses more on preventative presentations, less on adult investigations.

But what of schools that look at the effort any program takes and demur? What of guidance counselors who despair at the time they have with students and hope that the work can be done at home? What about those who still don't believe it matters so much - or worse, what of schools who now fear not the bully but the target? Armed with the knowledge that years of bullying can make people snap, they hound not the bully but the victim. Did she snarl at another child? Was he playing a war game? Did she try to get back at her bully? Once? Twice? Should we suspend him the next time? After all, he's a loner and makes intricate illustrations of catapults, swords and shields.

Ahead stands the possibility for change. Will schools have the commitment to make the journey? Once they embark, will they bring along all children, whether quiet or boisterous, aggressive or meek, troubled or troubling, offering their community as havens that, indeed, offer justice for all?

As a parent, I should have known right away that something was wrong. I should have known it from the nightly melt-downs when I asked my son to practice the piano. From the way he lost interest in learning new things. But kids change; I thought this was a stage, a rather selfish and spoiled one. I got angry, impatient. But then I could see the piano being something of a burden to him, and I had just added Hebrew lessons. He's a boy, after all. Ten years old. None of his friends had these kinds of burdens. Of course he wants to practice.

Still, I was concerned. Maybe the stomach aches he was getting really were bad. Maybe it was early puberty. I'd mentioned this to his guidance counselor months before, in fourth grade. She looked concerned, I remembered. And she didn't think it was puberty. We left it at that.

In October, we took a family trip away from piano and Hebrew and this usually cheerful, confident child couldn't be left alone to sleep. One night, he paced the room, as agitated as if he were reporting some horrible crime to which he had been sworn to secrecy on pain of his life. In a way, he was. He had been watching a friend in pain but hadn't done a thing because kids don't tell. That's a cardinal schoolyard rule. What he was revealing was about a friend who was being insulted, harassed, confronted with all sorts of attacks. Teachers were participating, too, he said.

It was unbearable for him. He told me he had created charts marking the numbers of insults and the person responsible. Daily, the numbers went off the chart.

I felt bad, but I still didn't get it. It wasn't about him. How involved should I get? The very next day, after his stomach hurt him yet again, I drove over to the local clinic and committed the hundred dollars to have him tested for giardia and parasites, despite the doubt of the doctor. Might there be trouble in school? she asked. No, it was his friend who was having trouble. Not him. Neither of us believed his helplessness could be turning his stomach.
Then he decided to do something. First he made a club with only one rule - they had to be kind to this other child. One of the offenders even joined, but didn't last the week. So my son decided that anyone insulting his friend, he'd insult back. I was horrified; there are other ways, I said, risking his anger. Finally, scared for my own child, I called the guidance counselor about the bullying of his friend.
She sounded somewhat abashed. She'd been watching the classroom for over a year, she said, and had been meaning to go in, do what she called "an intervention." She didn't realize it had gotten so bad. I had no idea what she meant, but a few days later my son returned from school as the excited, alive child that had been buried for months. That day, the first words out of his mouth weren't "What can I eat?" but an amazing tale about how his friend had bravely stood in front of the class, and with the support of the guidance counselor, had told them all what it was like to be attacked, insulted, demeaned and reviled day after day. My son called that Tuesday the best of his school life. And the bullying stopped.
For a week.
Then my son became the target. Intuitively aware of when the teacher wasn't looking, this gang that consisted of most of the boys in his grade plus the approving laughter of many of the girls, would surround him on line, gather around him on bus trips, push him, goad him and ensnare him with insults. I'd have quit my job were my days like that, and yet I was telling him to shrug it off. Ignore it. It'll stop. With his dad, we practiced morphing insults into jokes. My 86-year-old father offered boxing lessons. After all, as the only Jew in an Italian neighborhood in the Bronx, he had fought his way to respect as a child. Eventually, this gang became his bodyguard.
But times had changed. Fighting was out of the question. Rendered helpless again, this bright, optimistic child who had always been able to hold his own began to shatter at the slightest hint of opposition. Anything beyond his routine of eating, reading or playing computer games made him miserable. Meanwhile, the stomach aches grew worse. I still didn't get it. Maybe he really was sick. I tested him again for parasites, worrying whether it was Crohn's disease, cancer. Four different doctors asked how things were in school. It wasn't that bad, we said each time. After all, isn't bullying one of those childhood events, like getting the chicken pox? You go through it, you get stronger. You lick it by ignoring it, using humor. If it's bad enough, tell a teacher, though I feared that would only make matters worse. And it did. Both kids got in trouble. It takes two to start a fight, doesn't it?
Like us, his teachers were assuming that my son could handle it. He's pretty mature for his age, robust, and something of a peacemaker - not your typical victim. Even when balls were pounded against his head on the playground we were telling him to grin and bear it. Then I happened to walk into the school just moments after he was punched in the chest and kicked in the groin, right in the classroom, in front of everyone - though behind the back of the substitute teacher. "I don't want to talk about it," he said to me, his face closed. I found the first teacher I could and began talking. The next day, I told everyone else.
My son's story has a happy ending, but not before his stomach aches got so bad he stopped going to school. We said he was trying home-schooling, but really he was on strike. Fortunately, we have a compassionate guidance counselor, someone we both trust. With my son's permission, she told the classroom that sometimes words and deeds can make people sick, had made my son sick, too sick to come to school. She worked with the perpetrators and the bystanders so they would see that it wasn't cool to seek power at others' expense. This defused the issue so by the time school resumed after the December break, my son was again bouncing off to school, his humorous, open self. He even enjoys playing the piano, and this summer he wants to learn yet another language, but informally. He doesn't want to work too hard. He's still 10 after all.
I, too, have learned another language, though I could have used it a full year ago. Here I was, this aware, proactive, close mother, or so I thought, believing I had a strong relationship with my son and still missing every sign. My son was screaming for help, but I didn't know it and neither did he.
Which brings me back to my day at Sidney's James H. Bean School. Stan Davis is not only the school guidance counselor, he's also a magician. For him, magic is a language, one that's as deeply metaphoric as my son's nightly miseries. Davis tried a trick on me when I visited his school. Insisting I keep my eyes closed, he wrapped impenetrable hangers around my arms. He fooled me, all right; he also taught me. If your eyes are closed to an issue, you can't tell what is happening, can you?
If you don't believe bullying is happening, open your eyes. It's everywhere, and it penetrates deeper than you know. If you suspect bullying, be an advocate - for the target, for his or her friends, and for the bully. No one deserves to grow up with that burden.

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