Stacy Keligian

Ella Pastor sits crossed legged on the floor of her two-bedroom apartment that she shares with her boyfriend Eric and leans against the foot of her red couch.  As she sits, she protectively plays with the ends of her sweater, pulling them over her knuckles, then back up to her forearms. Once she rests her hands in the center of her lap, she looks straight ahead and says, “Okay, you can see it.”

She rotates her palms and forearms up and the faded scars along her inner left wrist emerge to the bare eye. The seven, white in color, scars vary in length – some cover the length of her whole wrist, others stop right after reaching the middle, and one is four centimeters long, at most. Pastor, a 24-year-old from Yorba Linda, California, describes these scars as battle wounds, a time in her life where she struggled to find happiness because of the physical and emotional bullying she had endured. Pastors not ashamed of her scars, but she doesn’t flaunt them either. 

She is beautiful. Her black skin glows against her piercing brown eyes, and she has wild and free curls. When she smiles, her mouth and teeth take over her face, lighting up her cheeks, her eyes, and even gives her, as she describes, those dreaded happy lines along her forehead. She exhumes confidence and it’s addictive. 

But the woman that sits in front of me wasn’t always as confident as she is today. Pastor tried committing suicide when she was 20-years-old after she was aggressively cyber bullied on a website called juicycampus.com. She said the bullying started when someone made an anonymous post about her personality online, but then the comments grew from 20 posts, to 30, and then 40. The posts attacked her skin color, her sex life, and her intelligence. She had no idea people were talking behind her back, until three months after the first comment was posted, after a friend brought it to her attention. “It was humiliating, a group of people, my peers from my school, were writing awful things about me behind my back. And, I didn’t know,” Pastor says.

So when she took the razor blade to her wrist in the winter of 2009, Pastor says, at that moment, she did not see any other option, other than to end her own life in order to end the bullying. Pastor has suffered from bullying since elementary school, when a small boy ran up to her, pushed her on the ground, and said, “I don’t like black people.” The attacks progressed from simple shoves, to being completely isolated from the students in her school for the color of her skin, to being called ‘Ella the Fella’ when she cut her hair short. “I was even teased, endlessly, for being pigeon-toed. Kids are ruthless, teenagers are ruthless, and so are young adults. Between my past and this cyber bullying, I was miserable,” she says.

Pastor is not alone in her suffering. Although it’s difficult to put a number on bullying accounts throughout the United States because it’s an action almost impossible to study over a period of time, the figure considered most reliable is from a study published by UCLA in May 2014. The study suggests that 160,000 teens skip school every day because of bullying and there are over 3.2 million students nationwide that are victims of bullying each year. Let’s say this number is pervasive if anyone can remember bullying incidents from their childhood. 

However, until now, bullying has always been a difficult act to find an acceptable punishment for because like studying the action, bullying varies from individual to individual. In attempt to solve this problem, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the Department of Education released the first federal definition of bullying in the beginning of the year, so that bullying can be better treated and managed. According to the CDC website, the definition states bullying is considered “unwanted aggressive behavior; observed or perceived power imbalance and repetition of behaviors or high likelihood of repetition.”

Similar to Pastor’s bullying in college, one type of bullying that is present in todays society is cyber bullying. Cyber bullying is vicious; it can be done on an anonymous platform through the black hole of the Internet, and can have a tremendous effect on the victim. One famous example of cyber bullying is Megan Meler, a 13-year-old who committed suicide by hanging herself in her bedroom closet after being told “the world would be a better place without you” by someone she believed to be a young boy named Josh. However, it wasn’t until later that Meler’s neighbor informed her parents that Josh was not a real person, but two teenage girls created his account to make fun of Meler. 

Although cyber bullying is the newest form of bullying that emerged in the early 2000’s when technology started taking on a life of its own, there are three other typologies of bullying that are widely accepted by experts and academics. Suzanne SooHoo, a professor at Chapman University in Orange County, California, and the author “Taking Leaves,” a book that discusses the multiple forms of bullying, says bullying can also be physical, verbal, and hidden. Physical bullying is what you see in movies or picture when you hear the term ‘bully’ – it’s putting someone’s head in a toilet, punching them, and damaging their property. Verbal bullying happens when someone attacks another person directly to their face by using hateful words. And hidden bullying is a little bit trickier. It’s like verbal bullying, but instead of the victim being attacked to their face, the bully spreads rumors behind their back. “All these types of bullying are present in todays society, and it’s important for everyone to know what they look like,” SooHoo says. And according to the same UCLA psychology study, hidden bullying – unsurprisingly – happens way more than it should. The report says 87 percent of students, grades 9-12, have experienced name-calling behind their back.

While there are the these other three types of bullying, cyber bullying has been front and center in the headlines in recent years. This could be because the bullying is done on the internet and the world can have access to it, or it could be because it’s the most foreign type of bullying, but regardless, there’s been a lot more attention put on terrible consequences that victims go through after being cyber bullied. 

Another example of cyber bullying, one that made national headlines and had celebrities like the Harry Potter star, Daniel Radcliffe, or the TV personality, Ellen DeGeneres, pleading to the world to end this phenomenon of bullying is Tyler Clementi. Clementi was an 18-year-old student at Rutgers University and jumped to his death from the George Washington Bridge after his roommate and fellow hall mate used a webcam to video Clementi kissing another man. In the last year alone, the Cyber Bullying Research Center, a forum dedicated to proving up-to-date information about the nature, extent, causes, and consensus of cyber bulling among adolescents, reported that 75 percent of individuals have been cyber bullied in the 2014. 

While bullying can occur in multiple ways and on multiple mediums, unfortunately, bullying does not target one specific individual – it doesn’t discriminate. “Bullying can happen in a number of places, to a number of people,” SooHoo says. “There’s not one targeted youth, or adult that is bullied. Bullying, I guess, is circumstantial.” 

While the victims of bullying may be dependent on the bully itself, the impacts it can have are relatively universal. Laura Bogart, a researcher at Boston Children’s Hospital, says that research today shows that bullying can have a significant short or long-term effect on a person’s education, health, and safety. “The health and safety of bully victims are the biggest concern for a lot of researchers, or even parents,” she says. Bullying, too often, causes physical and mental problems, as well as successful, or like Pastor, unsuccessful suicides. Her theory suggests that kids that experienced any type bullying, or peer victimization, had worse mental and physical health than children that were not bullied at all.  While this seems obvious, Bogart also says the researchers from her theory suggests that bullying does have long-term effects, but only a few studies have looked at the period from elementary school to high school.. “Some may still consider bullying a harmless part of growing up, but mounting evidence suggests that the adverse effects of being bullied aren’t something kids can just shake off. The psychological and physical tolls, like anxiety and depression, can follow a person into early adulthood and even well into the adults’ 40s or 50s,” Bogart says.

But to understand why people bully, it’s important to understand the origins and history of the action The term bully has been invading newspaper headlines, evening news, and has even dominated the best seller lists. Emily Bazelon’s 2013 book “Stick and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Discovering the Power of Character and Empathy” is one of the latest examples of anti-bullying resources. Other examples are the 2011 documentary “Bully,” and the 2010 children’s book “Confessions of a Teenage Bully.” But as it turns out, the word bully wasn’t always meant as someone who is mean to another person. For English speakers in the 16^th century, the term bully referred to “sweetheart.” Several centuries later, the term transformed from “sweetheart” to “blusterer” – meaning someone full of hot air and threats. And in the mid 1800’s, the term morphed even further into “harasser of the weak.” 

It wasn’t until the 20^th century did the word take on the meaning that we use for today. Dr. Peter Paul Heinemann, a physician and Holocaust survivor, developed the theory about bullying after witnessing the local communities hostility towards his adopted son, who was black. To develop his theory, he looked to the behavior of animals, specifically birds that assault their weaker members of their own species – and in turn, applied the concept to a group’s aggression against a particular child. 

Like Heinemann’s animal theory, many experts and studies have suggested that bullying is a part of human nature, and as Adrienne Nishina suggests, a part of evolution. Nishina, a professor at the University of California, Davis, published a study in the American Psychology Association that says social hierarchy is similar to the animal hierarchy: everyone is always competing for a higher position. Bullying can relate to primates because humans and animals dance in the same way – the athletic clique intimidates everyone by their athletic ability, and the smart kids create their own academic group.  While humans and animals may have the same type of dance, Ninisha suggests that bullying can be a part of internal, or human, instinct that all species throughout the world experience at some points in their life.  This idea may sound simplistic, but it’s difficult to determine if, in fact, there is a relationship between the bully next door and the homo Africanus subspecies a million years ago. However, experts and researchers have found convincingly by using academic literature that evidence of bullying can trait back to animals, like chimpanzees, rats, and mice, along with the cavemen era. “The interactions with primates generally look very much like bullying,” Ninisha says. “They really focus more on the physical type of bullying, but they choose aggressive behavior to establish some sort of hierarchy within their group.”

While these instincts may be a part of human nature, the violence in response to bullying has increased drastically since the shooting at Columbine High School in 1999. Since that shooting, Make Beats Not Beat Downs, a non-profit dedicated to presenting alternative help to bullies and bullied youth, suggests that 87 percent of students said school shootings are motivated by a desire to “get back at those who hurt them.” While cyber and verbal bullying might be something of human instinct, it’s a word or sentence mumbled without much thought. Physical bullying is premeditated and rarely spontaneous, according to Ninisha, and it’s meant to be hurtful, and the message is meant to be clear.

In response to the increased violent acts as a result of bullying in the United States, local, regional and federal efforts have been made to demolish bullying nationwide. Working groups, task forces, and non-profits have all been established, whether it’s through the government or an independent contractor, to try to find a cure to the social scourge that is bullying. These groups all have one common goal: to educate the youth on what constitutes as bullying and to bring an end to the epidemic. But it’s interesting – the groups say they want to educate the youth on bullying, but it’s worth asking if there is a need for this. Is bullying simply an example of moral panic like the alleged consequences of comic books in the 50s? 

Cameron Hamilton, the mayor of Porterville, California, thinks bullying, as a phenomenon, is an example of moral panic. In May, during the Porterville City Council meeting, the council was discussing a proposed anti-bullying ‘Safe Zone,’ and Hamilton voiced his controversial opinion by saying “I’m against bullying, but I’m getting damn tired of it being used as a mantra for everything, and the ills of the world. When all most people just have to grow a pair, and stick up for them damn selves.” In response to his opinion, councilwoman Virginia Gurrola said “It’s hard to stand up and grow a pair when you’re maybe a 10-year-old little girl.” But Hamilton responded, “then maybe the other 10-year-olds that think that they want to stop bullying will stand up for her, instead of a safe zone with a placard and a bunch of training that goes on.” 

While some council members may feel that bullying is a part of human nature and the nation has gotten carried away trying to find a solution to it, the federal government still is trying to end the epidemic. They created stopbullying.gov, a federal government website managed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that gives suggestions for anti-bullying program that people can incorporate in schools, homes, or any other type of situation that bullying occurs. While there isn’t a one size fit all program that the government wants to use throughout the nation, the website gives numbers to contact when someone is bullied – like 911, the national suicide prevention lifeline, or the State Department of Education.  Though the government wants this website to be the go-to source for all things bullying, taking to the Internet personally doesn’t seem like the right solution. 

While the federal government is participating in eliminating this phenomenon, non-profits and other companies are teaming together and creating alternative anti-bullying programs that go directly into the schools and offer therapeutic responses for the victims of bullying. One of these anti-bullying groups, called the Kind Campaign, is a movement that aims to teach girls to stop bullying and to be kind to one another through untraditional responses. Molly Thompson, a 27-year old living in Los Angeles, California and her partner Lauren Parsekian created the campaign when they were seniors at Pepperdine University in Southern California. The campaign started as a documentary for the girl’s senior thesis, but soon turned into an anti-bullying program that focuses specifically on girls. The documentary, called Finding Kind was released to the public in 2011 and followed Thompson and Parsekian across the nation as they worked to expose girl-on-girl violence. The duo also urged young adults to stop bullying altogether by having the young girls make pledges to themselves to stop participating in actions that have negative effects on other people.

I saw the Kind Campaign in action on a Tuesday morning in Southern California. Thompson entered the student-packed auditorium at Dana Point High School and all 25 rows of the bleachers are down, and filled with female students of all grade levels. 

After entertaining the auditorium and grabbing a microphone, Thompson says, “Hi, I’m with the Kind Campaign. I’m going to play a documentary for you guys, then we’ll get into the reason that I’m here today.” She then walks to the back of the auditorium and dims the lights. After the auditorium goes dark, she turns on the documentary. 

When the documentary goes live, we see the two founders sitting with four young girls in a classroom somewhere in Minnesota. The four girls split into groups of two, and face each other. Thompson hands two of the girls piece of paper, and tells them write down what they feel when they are bullied, and why being bullied is hurtful. Then she hands the other two girls the same paper, and tells them to write down how they feel when they make fun of others, and why they do it. Once the four girls are finished writing down their thoughts, they are asked to share their words to the girl sitting directly in front of them. 

Lily, one of the participants, looks down at her paper and says, “When you bully me, it hurts my feelings. It makes me feel like no one likes me, and that you are trying to make people not like me either. When you call me fat, I feel like I want to skip my next meal, so I can be skinnier. Being bullied by you is hurtful, it makes me sad.” When Lily finishes, the girl in front of her, Jules, then gets to read. She says, “I don’t know why I bully you, but when I do, I feel powerful. I feel like I get more friends and become more popular. I’m sorry.” Once the girls finish reading their letters to one another, Thompson tells the girls to give each other a hug, and then write down a pledge to promise being nicer to their peers. 

As the students watch the film, Thompson grabs a basket of white papers and passes them out to the students. She gives a stack to the first row of students, tells them to pass them down, and repeats with the other rows. The paper she passed out to the crowd was simply labeled “Your Pledge.” The paper was plain, lined, and had an “X” at the end for a signature. 

Today, the Kind Campaign is a 501 (c)(3) non-profit organization that was established in 2009, after the founders graduated with their bachelor’s from college. The company’s mission statement says that the “Kind Campaign is an internally recognized movement, documentary, and school program, based upon the powerful beliefs in KINDness that brings awareness, and healing to the negative and lasting effects of girl-against-girl crime,” according to their website. 

Since the duo started touring across the nation, in a program they call Kind Country, to speak with students about the ideas behind the Kind Campaign, they have visited over 300 schools – from elementary to college – and spoken at countless community events. Their documentary has also been screened in thousands of schools and venues, and their Kind Campaign has become the premiere anti-bullying program for girls across the nation. Thompson says they are successful in teaching young females how the power of kindness can eliminate bullying within young cliques because the girls can relate to them. “ We aren’t just informative, we speak from our own experiences from when we were bullied,” Thompson says. “Because of those experiences, we were able to relate to each other in college, and because of those experiences, that’s why we decided to try to stop bullying for future generations.”

As the Finding Kind documentary comes to an end, Thompson turns the lights back on and walks to the front of the bleachers, with her microphone in the hand. “While you were watching the documentary, I passed out a Kind Pledge I would like you all to make,” she says. “Write down what you hope to accomplish this year. Whether it’s to be nicer to someone, to apologize for bullying someone or to forgive someone for bullying you. Whatever it might be, make the pledge so you can be a better person tomorrow.”

Anti-bullying programs, like the Kind Campaign, are becoming a key focus in schools across the nation. These focus groups are important in school systems because there are currently no federal laws that directly address bullying. “Bullying is often overlapped with other forms of harassment, like discriminatory, sexual preference, disability, or religion. When the bullying involves those types of harassment, it can be charged federally,” SooHoo says. But just because bullying is not yet considered a federal violation, states are beginning to exhibit the human panic of the phenomenon and are creating their own state laws to address bullying and an appropriate punishment. As of this year, all the states, except Montana, have adopted anti-bullying laws as a universal form of punishment, but within those anti-bullying laws, Alaska is the only state to not cover electronic harassment, or cyber bullying. These laws seem important, especially with the increased violence of cyber bullying in the last few years, but unfortunately, these laws are probably not going to dissolve bullying all together. 

To compliment the bullying state laws, schools nationwide have started to adopt anti-bullying programs within their school systems. Research suggests that it’s often believed that the big setbacks with bullying in the school systems are the teachers and faculty. “I wondered why female teachers, in particular, did not see the cultural dominance that the girls wield in the hallways,” SooHoo says. “I have connected with colleagues who were researching the bullying of students in schools, and we came to terms that the faculty in the schools need to be aware of their settings.”

Pastor says her school would have benefited from anti-bullying educational programs. She says she felt like the teachers were partly responsible for her bullying in elementary school because they turned a blind eye to the peer-victimization. “The worst part was that teachers at my school, a private school where my parents spent money for their child to be ‘safe’ never brought any incidents to the attention of victim’s parents or the bully’s parents.”

Despite the apparent need for these anti-bullying programs in the school systems to teach both faculty and students the importance of eliminating bullying, anti-bullying programs are still being questioned for their effectiveness. A study published in 2013 by researchers at the University of Texas and Michigan State University found that “students that attended schools with bullying-prevention programs were more likely to have reported experiencing victimization themselves.” This seems counter productive, but nonetheless, the study also said that even though the programs may be educating students on the negative effects bullying can have, education does not always equal prevention. 

Anti-bullying programs and the needed solutions to end the phenomenon seems to be a bit of a controversial subject within the Department of Education. It’s widely accepted among researchers and experts that education programs need to take a different approach to their anti-bullying teaching techniques. The 2013 study mentioned above says that bringing in anti-bullying programs that were not developed in schools often have a higher success rate than the school lecture programs because the students can often get a more personal connection with the program leaders. It states “the schools who have successfully used programs outside the school to reduce bullying are living proof that some approaches to bullying prevention work.” 

Similar to the Kind Campaign, other programs that are taking an alternative approach to bullying are Choose to be Nice and It Gets Better Project. Choose to be Nice is an organization that lectures on the power of kindness in person’s every day like. This program is similar to any other anti-bullying campaign, however, the founder Dina Creiger, would call it a movement. “Choose to be Nice definitely focuses on bullying and ways to improve on bullying in social settings, but its message of this program is simple,” Creiger says. “We just want to tell people to think about their words and to be kind to one another.” Like the Kind Campaign, participants sign a pledge on the Choose to be Nice website to be a better person tomorrow, and they hope that by pledging, participants will be able to make people consciously think about their words when speaking with others. 

The other program, It Gets Better Project, started when columnist and author Dan Savage created a YouTube video with his partner Terry Miller to reach out to young people facing harassment. The video was directed to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth in response to the increase of suicides from bullying. To participate in the project, individuals take to YouTube and post a video of them making a pledge to get involved to help spread the word about the LGBT youth to try to decrease the amount of suicides occurring yearly. 

Currently, there are over 450 anti-bullying programs throughout the United States, according to government website stopbullying.com. Although each of these programs may focus on a different aspect of bullying, kindness, or the impact of bullying, they all universally try to eliminate a behavior that is arguably part of evolution. And in the wake of these attacks, like the Boston Marathon Bombings, and school shootings, it becomes more and more apparent that Nishina’s theory about bullying being a part of human nature could possibly be right. 

While there are these people, like Thompson, Creiger, and Savage that are trying to eliminate bullying as a character trait in human nature, often enough people don’t go to the extremes that the Tsarnaev brothers did in Boston, or Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold with the Columbine High School shootings, or most recently, Elliot Rodger in Santa Barbara. Bridget Roberts-Pittsman, a researcher and professor at Indiana State University, suggests that although, yes, it might be a part of human nature to bully, it’s important not to confuse human nature with murder and terrorist attacks. “It’s interesting because those people that do awful things are, by the bully definition, considered bullies, but I wouldn’t give them that title. They shouldn’t be linked together with people that may just push someone, or spread a rumor,” Robert-Pittsman says. 

While it is discouraging that these anti-bullying prevention programs are necessary is today’s society, celebrities have stepped up on the cause platform to bring awareness to todays bullies. President Barack Obama, during a MTV’s A Conversation With President Obama in 2010 stated, “All of us have an obligation to think about how we’re treating other people. What we may think if funny or cute may end up being powerfully hurtful,” and after experiencing her own bullying when she was a young adult, the singer Lady Gaga, has stood up on the platform to become a spokesperson against bullying. In 2012, she set up the Born This Way Foundation, a movement that reminds youths to believe they are perfect just the way they are. She officially launched the foundation at Harvard University and found that it had a ripple effect as it moved from school to school, and from star to star. She said, “no matter all the fame and fortune, the praise you receive, something inside of you is always scarred by those experiences. And I work every day to become a more confident human being. But there are moments when you wonder if it’s true, was it true? Something like [bullying] stays in your life forever.”

“These influences can really impact a victim’s life,” Nishina says. “If you think you’re the only one being bullied, it can be really damaging. But learning that other people are bullied as well, or listening to celebrities’ stories, a victim can see that they are not alone and have a better chance at moving past their peer-victimization.

Anti-bullying programs, like The Kind Campaign, Choose to be Nice, and It Get’s Better Project may sound simple, but they may be able to have ability to replace hatefulness and mistreatment that people with kindness. The impacts of bullying has been proven tremendous, and like mentioned earlier, can have lasting effects on a victim as they move into adulthood. Even though bullying can merely be a characteristic trait that humans possess, or a moral panic that has sent the nation into a solution-finding frenzy, anti-bullying programs seem to be the best approach to attempt to eliminate this undesired action in today’s youth.