Opposing views: The bullying crisis in America

The documentary “Bully” presents a horrifying look at what life is like for students who are bullied, and claims 13 million kids will be bullied in the U.S. this year. Yet some say the bullying crisis exaggerated by busy bodies and bureaucrats who forget “kids will be kids and boys will be boys.”

Here are two perspectives on bullying.

The first from Nick Gillespie from Reason.com which describes itself as a website that “provides a refreshing alternative to right-wing and left-wing opinion magazines by making a principled case for liberty and individual choice in all areas of human activity.”

Gillespie wrote an opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal that contends over-protective parents and a rising wave of laws and regulation related to bullying don’t really reflect a boom in meanness among kids. He says kids may be better behaved than ever.

“I have no interest in defending the bullies who dominate sandboxes, extort lunch money and use Twitter to taunt their classmates. But there is no growing crisis. Childhood and adolescence in America have never been less brutal. Even as the country’s over-protective parents whip themselves up into a moral panic about kid-on-kid cruelty, the numbers don’t point to any explosion of abuse,” Gillespie says.

He says we live in an age of helicopter, pushy parents and we’re too willing to treat kids like “delicate flowers.”

“Now that schools are peanut-free, latex-free and soda-free, parents, administrators and teachers have got to worry about something,” he says. “Since most kids now have access to cable TV, the Internet, unlimited talk and texting, college and a world of opportunities that was unimaginable even 20 years ago, it seems that adults have responded by becoming ever more overprotective and thin-skinned.”

By most standards, he says, kids are “safer and better-behaved than they were when I was growing up in the 1970s and ’80s” and young people are far more accepting of homosexuals than they used to be.

He concludes bullying – as defined by the Department of Health and Human Services defines as “teasing,” “name-calling,” “taunting,” “leaving someone out on purpose,” “telling other children not to be friends with someone,” “spreading rumors about someone,” “hitting/kicking/pinching,” “spitting” and “making mean or rude hand gestures” – is not a growing problem in America.

So take a deep breath and realize there aren’t that many bullies and most kids are okay.

Filmmaker Lee Hirsch doesn’t see it that way. He’s the documentary filmmaker who spent a year at three schools in Sioux City, Iowa, following five kids and families who have been impacted by bullying for his nonfiction movie “Bully.” (Trailer below)

The movie, which opened over the weekend and comes to Seattle on April 13, features stories about Tyler who hanged himself in his bedroom closet, Alex who is so starved for friendship he tolerates daily physical abuse on a bus.

When a mother confronts a school leader about her child’s terrible treatment on the bus, the administrator says, “I’ve been on that bus and those boys are as good as gold.”

It also follows an Oklahoma lesbian teen who tries to take a stand at her high school, a 14-year-old who took her mother’s gun and brandished it at her tormenters on a school bus, and an 11-year-old whose farmer father becomes an antibullying activist.

Bullying is real for them and from his view it is a crisis for young people in America.

Hirsch says he was bullied “hard core” through elementary and middle school. Gangs of boys would be figuring out how to cut him off and beat him up. Many people have a story about being bullied, and somehow, most of them got through it. That’s part of the problem. Because it’s something adults think they understand, they also think it’s not that big of a deal.

“I remember being very ashamed. You ask for help a couple of times and you don’t get it, then you clam up,” Hirsch says. “It’s like torture when it goes on day after day after day.”

One’s perspective on whether bullying is a crisis often depends on whether it’s happening to you, your kid, or someone you know. What’s your story? Do you think it’s a crisis, or overblown?

By LINDA THOMAS

Photos from the movie “Bully”