Diversity might be the answer to bullying

Bullying has always been a problem in schools and even Gov. David Paterson wasn’t immune. As a young boy he was the victim of bullies until one day, he hit one of his attackers with his metal lunch box.

Now the governor has taken another sort of action against bullying. On September 8, Paterson signed the anti-bullying bill, the Dignity of All Students Act. Under this law, school officials are obligated to report bullying related incidents at school premises to state education department administrators.

Arne Duncan, secretary of U.S. Department Education hosted the first ever Bullying Prevention Summit in August. It gathered teachers, psychologists, and anti-bullying program professionals. Mr. Duncan pointed out that bullying is “ultimately an issue of school safety.”

New York City Department of Education stepped up, too. DOE proposed to toughen the discipline code on cyber bullying this semester. If a student cyber-bullies, he or she faces possible suspension.

Bullying is not foreign to Korean students. According to a recent report by Korean American Behavioral Health Association, one out of three said they have experienced bullying. This report is based on the survey of 295 Korean kids in New York metro area.

Korean students’ bullying situation is not worse than for average Americans; however, the reasons why they are being bullied are different. The majority of victims said they were bullied because of their nationality (29.1 percent), followed by harassment because of their appearance (24.4 percent). When bullies were questioned, their response was different: they bullied kids because they were cowards.

Korean culture and cowardliness somehow merge when you consider that the prevalent stereotype of Asian kids is that they are shy, quiet, and easily embarrassed. These characteristics have long made Korean kids victims of bullying. They just endure the pain in silence.

Cyber bullying is also on the rise with 24 percent of the respondents admitting they were bullied online or via text messages. These findings confirm the results of a Pew Research Center survey that found one in four kids reported they were cyber bullied.

The problem is that kids don’t necessarily know if they are bullied or not when it happens online. Most kids associate bullying with physical attacks or public embarrassment. Sung Min Yoon, a counselor who mainly works with Korean-American youngsters, thinks this is a real problem. One kid told him that she received online messages related to her boyfriend. Her friend wrote “You’re so stupid to have him as a boyfriend.” She didn’t think it was bullying, but Mr. Yoon thinks it is, especially when he anticipates its long term affect on her self esteem.

Even “de-friending” on Facebook could be considered cyber bullying. Dr. Dorothy Espelage, a scholar at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign who studies bullying, says the definition of cyber bullying is still in formation. “Is de-friending cyber bullying or is it just freedom of expression? Lots of research needs to be done,” she explains.

Bullying gets complicated when dating comes into question. Recently, a teen from New York city sent a picture of his ex-girlfriend naked through a text message and got in trouble. The media called it as cyber bullying, but for Dr. Espelage it was sexual harassment.

“It’s illegal. I-L-L-E-G-A-L. I often advise kids that they can’t do this kind of thing if they want to go to college. If you’re a criminal, your future isn’t going to be easy,” she said.

The NYC DOE has a pretty strong discipline code on bullying, which prohibits students from bullying for any reason, including race, religion, gender or sexual orientation. Bullying includes both physical intimidation and intimidation through the use of epithets or slurs. The DOE is developing a special curriculum – the so-called “legal curriculum” – to teach kids what type of behavior is unlawful. They try to teach students to recognize the border line between the legal and illegal.

Like this curriculum, prevention might be better than intervention. But how can that happen? Dr. Jin Yong Shin, who has looked at bullying of Korean-American students, suggests that exposing kids to diversity might be the answer. She points to Queens and its low rate of bullying compared to Long Island and attributes it to the character of Queens, a mosaic of the greatest diversity in the five boroughs. She said

“Discrimination comes from how we define ‘difference.’ So, when students experience a diversity of cultures, people, races, religions and more, the inclination to bully might be decreasing,” she explained.

This article was written as part of New York Community Media Alliance’s Ethnic and Community Media Press Fellowship Developing an Education Beat.

Jinhwa Jo, Korea Daily, 13 October 2010. Translated from Korean by Jinhwa Jo.