“TV and movies have convinced all of us that standing up to bullying means standing up to the bullies,” Baldwin said to a full school assembly at BJHS on Monday. “Obviously, the people who write these stories have never been to a junior high school or high school in America.”
Encouraging students to stand up to bullies, he said, is not the goal and is not effective. Supporting someone victimized by bullying works better, according to Baldwin.
“It isn’t so you can change the bullies and make them stop,” Baldwin said. “Instead, rather than focusing on changing them, our focus should be on making the (victim) feel better about themselves or showing them that they could stand up, too.”
Baldwin laid out a scenario in which a person is bullied and a group of witnesses chooses not to interfere.
He’s been in that situation himself, Baldwin said, and the chance to make a difference is not lost.
“You can talk to the person afterward to tell them, ‘I saw what happened and we don’t all think that about you,’” Baldwin said.
Taking that action, he said, can be tough when it requires breaking the silence of that group of witnesses.
“We behave differently around other people,” Baldwin said.
Studies and psychological experiments confirm that a silent group alters a per- son’s judgment or brought them to conform with a majority that was clearly wrong, Baldwin said, as with the Solomon Asch experiments judging the length of three lines.
“We want to fit in with the group,” Baldwin said. “If the group is silent, we feel like we should be silent, too.”
Opening discussion with the victim or the witnesses is just one way to stand up to bullying without encountering all of the difficulties of standing up to a bully, Baldwin said.
Eighth-grader Courtney Grimes, a member of the Civil Rights Team, said before Baldwin’s talk that she hopes the event and her group’s week of activities will empower students to “know that they have the ability to stop bullying.”
“I think this week really focuses on kids knowing that they can stop the bullying and help victims of bullying by just doing simple acts of kindness,” Grimes said.
On Monday, students in the club said they are working to keep those conversations going at the school with a “No Name-Calling Week” earlier in the year and other activities for “Stand Up to Bullying Week” that seventh-grader Sophia Borie said she hopes will help students become more aware of “what is bullying and what is not.”
Sometimes, students said, that can include indirect bullying such as writing on bathroom and Facebook walls, that students might play off as “just kidding.”
Eighth-grader Mikayla Williams said she hopes that more students will see those kinds of acts as bullying and that “just kidding” can be just as hurtful.
At the end of his talk, Baldwin commended the group for providing a venue for students to stand up appropriately against bullying.
“It’s hard to stand up for other people, especially if no one else is doing it,” Baldwin said.
But bullying and other types of harassment and discrimination are receiving more attention through groups like that at BJHS, where Civil Rights Teams are at work.
Baldwin said that there are more than 200 such teams supported statewide through the Attorney General’s Office.
He added that the program aims to prevent future violations of the Maine Civil Rights Act and to make schools safer. This is the first year that he has delivered talks to students around the state on the topic, he said.
Team members also said that their goals extend beyond stopping bullying.
“We don’t just want the bullying to stop,” eighth-grader Emily Austin said. “We’re not expecting to have people be best friends with each other, but to say hello in the hallways and be nice to each other.”
While hard to gauge the progress of the group, it is winning over some students, like eighth-grader Mikayla Bouchard, who said she joined this year.
“All of the members looked like they were having fun helping out other people and that they actually, genuinely care,” Bouchard said.
Bouchard said she focused her efforts during “Stand Up to Bullying Week” on trying “to inspire people the same way that the Civil Rights Team inspired me.”
In part, Bouchard said the goal of the group is to open dialogue about bullying and provide support for students.
“Everyone has some kind of bullying situation at some point in their life, so I want people to be able to trust me if they want to talk about it or if they need help,” Bouchard said.
On Monday, students showed that support by wearing pink shirts, a symbol of the international “Stand Up to Bullying Day,” which is taken from the story of two high school seniors in Nova Scotia who saw a freshman student bullied for wearing a pink shirt. The two seniors organized 50 students to wear pink shirts to school the next day.
That stand, Grimes said, was a subtle but important one.
“It showed students that the smallest things make a big difference to victims of bullying,” Grimes said.
dfishell@timesrecord.com
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