Bullying Prevention and Boyhood

Abstract

IntroductionA desire to reduce bullying in schools and to create safer and healthier school cultures has driven an anti-bullying movement characterized by significant reform in school programs and practices, as well as legislative reform and policy articulation in every state. A desire to improve school outcomes for boys has generated a number of programmatic proposals and responses in public and private education. Most notably, single-sex programming in public schools has been facilitated by the 2006 change to Title IX regulations setting out the criteria for permissible single-sex public school programs.1 These two recent movements in K-12 schooling spring from new urgency around each social problem: bullying and boys' relatively worse school outcomes. This new urgency has shaped new research questions in both cases. The discourse includes both grave concerns about these primary social problems, as well as backlash questions such as whether these issues are really new or worse than before and whether the reforms are worsening the problems they seek to address. This Essay asks how the two movements interact and suggests that they may be at cross-purposes in some significant ways.Attempts to intervene on the "boy question" ordinarily begin with ideas about boys' differences and the need to understand, accept, and support boys for who they are: rough-and-tumble players with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) who are hunters rather than gatherers and are noncompliant, competitive, and physically charged. In other words, attempts to intervene on the "boy question" tend to honor gender stereotypes and masculinities and to approach them without the judgments against boyhood that are allegedly part of the education system.2Attempts to intervene on the bullying problem, on the other hand, begin with a different idea. They begin with the premise that gender stereotyping can be terribly dangerous to the wellbeing and sense of belonging of large swaths of children who do not conform perfectly to normative boy or girl behavior. These children will be disciplined into understanding the parameters of a gender stereotype by their peers. Children are most often bullied based on characteristics that can be understood to be gender nonconformity. Gender nonconformity ranges from the more obvious cases of bullying LGBT or "questioning" youth to more subtle but nonetheless gendered characteristics like appearance or athletic ability. The best practices in anti-bullying work focus on establishing a culture of inclusion without regard to conformity and work to disrupt stereotype expectations.3 In particular, this school-climate work contains a social-emotional learning component that teaches social-competence skills. These skills include learning to identify and communicate about feelings directly, rather than channeling the feelings into either aggressive or self-destructive behavior.4 Unwittingly, this bullying reform agenda seeks to create school cultures that do not honor stereotypical masculinities, but instead teach nonviolent ways to stay connected within the school community. To the extent that solutions to the "boy question" work to embrace, highlight, or honor stereotypical boy behavior, they are in some tension with increasingly widespread solutions to the bullying problem.I. The Boy QuestionOthers have described the "boy question" and provided excellent critical perspective on the discourse.5 In schools, boys are underperforming compared to girls on a number of measures that Michael Kimmel has summarized as "numbers, achievement, and behavior."6 The "numbers" aspect of boys' underperformance is problematic across several axes. Because boys drop out of or are expelled from school at higher rates than girls, fewer boys graduate from high school, enroll in college, finish college, and enroll in graduate school.7 This is especially true for boys of color.8 The "achievement" part of boys' underperformance is evidenced in boys' lower performance on a variety of language-arts measures, lower GPAs, and lower test scores in some subjects. …