University of Florida Thesis Or Dissertation Formatting

Home , Cycle of abuse, Egocentrism, Sexual violence in Haiti, Suicide of Jadin Bell, Suicide of Phoebe Prince

STICKS AND STONES: THE SOCIOCULTURAL CONSTRUCTION OF INTERPERSONAL SOCIAL VIOLENCE

V. RACHEL WAYNE

A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2018

To my parents, who endlessly support me

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I thank my parents, who supported my academic and professional pursuits and instilled a curiosity and love of learning in me. I thank my partner Dan, who always greets me with love and support. I thank all my friends and colleagues who encouraged me to stick with it. I thank my excellent professors and mentors at the University of

Florida.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... 4

LIST OF TABLES ...... 8

LIST OF TERMS ...... 10

ABSTRACT ...... 11

CHAPTER

1 INTRODUCTION ...... 13

2 OVERVIEW OF TOPIC ...... 16

A Brief History of Interpersonal Social Violence in the U.S...... 16 Bullying as a Social Problem ...... 16 “Bullycide”: The Apparent Rise in Teen Suicides ...... 17 “The Culture of Mean” ...... 19 “That’s So Gay”: Homophobic Bullying ...... 20 Zero Tolerance ...... 21 Around the World: Bullying ...... 22 Sexual Assault and Intimate Partner Abuse as Social Problems ...... 22 “Just How Things Are”: Sexual Harassment ...... 22 “She Said No, but She Meant Yes”: Sexual Assault, Battery, and Rape ...... 24 Me Too But Not Me ...... 25 Hashtag Movements and Cyber Harassment ...... 26 “Why Didn’t She Leave?”: Intimate Partner Abuse ...... 27 Around the World: Intimate Partner Abuse and Domestic Violence ...... 29 The Prosecution of Abusers ...... 31 Anti-Bullying Law ...... 31 Sexual Harassment and Assault Law ...... 34 Around the World: Criminalization ...... 34 American(?) Psycho...... 36 Cluster B ...... 36 Empathy...... 37

3 LITERATURE REVIEW: THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF BAD BEHAVIOR ...... 41

Bullying ...... 41 Sexual Violence ...... 44 The Effects of Media ...... 53

4 THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES ...... 58

Violence as Instrumental ...... 58 “School’s Out”: Overview of Bullying as Adaptive Aggression ...... 60 Violence in the Social Milieu ...... 60 Abnormality and Adaptation ...... 64 The Institutional Environment ...... 66 Children ...... 72 That’s So Wrong: Overview of Bullying and Violence in Social Discourse ...... 77 Violence as Symbolic ...... 77 Violence as Criminal ...... 81 Morality and Rights ...... 84 Whose Line Is It Anyway? ...... 85 Mean Girls (and Boys, and Kids in General): Children’s Social Roles ...... 85 Men Are From Mars ...... 87 “Boys Will Be Boys”: Gender Perspectives on Interpersonal Social Violence ... 89 The 10 O’Clock News: The Public...... 92

5 RESEARCH QUESTIONS AND METHODS ...... 97

Legal and Discourse Artifacts ...... 97 First Stage ...... 99 Public’s Perception of Bullying ...... 99 Methods of Semantic Analysis of News Media ...... 99 Second Stage...... 101 The Legal Aspects of Bullying ...... 101 Methods of Semantic Analysis of Legal Artifacts ...... 102 Third Stage ...... 103 Social Context and Sociopsychology ...... 103 Socioecology ...... 104 Methods of Ethnographic and Socioecological Study ...... 105 Media Effects on Perception of Interpersonal Social Violence ...... 107 Media and Violence ...... 107 Methods of Media Effects Study ...... 108

6 FINDINGS ...... 111

First Stage ...... 111 News Content Analysis Findings ...... 111 Discussion of First Stage Findings ...... 112 Second Stage...... 113 Legal Content Analysis Findings ...... 113 Discussion of Second Stage Findings ...... 116 Third Stage ...... 118 Educator Interviews ...... 118 Discussion of Third Stage Findings ...... 125 Fourth Stage ...... 126 Fifth Stage ...... 130

7 CONCLUSION ...... 131

APPENDIX

A GOOGLE SEARCH RESULTS ...... 134

B SEMANTIC ANALYSIS CUE WORDS ...... 136

C DIGITAL INTERVIEW SCHEDULE ...... 137

D SURVEY SCHEDULE ...... 138

E VIDEO SCHEDULE ...... 146

Research Survey ...... 146 Qualitative Interview ...... 147

LIST OF REFERENCES ...... 148

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 162

LIST OF TABLES

Table page

6-1 Comparison of test and control groups’ definitions of ISV behaviors ...... 127

6-2 Relationship between Viewing Video of ISV and Perceptions of Impact on Victim ...... 128

LIST OF FIGURES Figure page A-1 Google search results for search term: bullying ...... 134

A-2 Google search results for search term: teen bullying ...... 134

A-3 Google search results for search term: teen suicide ...... 135

LIST OF TERMS

Bullying The repeated use of intentional and instrumental aggression comprising insults, social exclusion, and/or verbal or physical assault for the purpose of creating or maintaining a power imbalance, perpetuated by one individual or a small group against another individual or small group, typically youth, in an institutional context.

Harassment The repeated or one-time use of intentional and instrumental aggression comprising insults, attempts to cause discomfort, and/or verbal or physical assault for the purpose of creating or maintaining a power imbalance, perpetuated by one individual or a small group against another individual or small group, typically youth, in an institutional context.

Interpersonal The use of intentional and instrumental aggression comprising social violence social–emotional manipualation and/or for the purpose of creating or maintaining a power imbalance, perpetuated by one individual or a small group against another individual or small group.

Abstract of Thesis Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts

STICKS AND STONES: THE SOCIOCULTURAL CONSTRUCTION OF INTERPERSONAL SOCIAL VIOLENCE

V. Rachel Wayne

December 2018

Chair: Christopher McCarty Major: Anthropology

Humans have aggressive impulses that are filtered through their encultured brain to produce instrumental aggression, including the use of violence in a social context to maintain, attain, or divert power. This so-called interpersonal social violence (ISV) includes bullying, harassment, and strategic violence, including domestic and sexual violence. As bullying, harassment, and strategic violence are increasingly discussed in the mediated public discourse and legal artifacts, they are conceptualized by the public in the context of institutional affect and the sociocultural construction of behavior, roles, and deviancy. The present research includes a literature review of the sociocultural, psychological, and communicative aspects of interpersonal social violence and examines the role of law, news media, entertainment media, and popular culture in perpetuating and shaping expectations and definitions of this type of violence among the public, including ISV’s victims and perpetrators. According to the semantic analysis of news media and legal artifacts, quantitative research on violent media’s effects on cognition and conceptualization, and interviews with individuals who come into daily contact with ISV presented in this paper, the perception and perpetuation of bullying, harassment, and strategic violence are highly social in their function, and furthermore

shaped and reproduced by the media, which influences how individuals assign blame and define the behavior.

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

Aggression is a natural part of human nature, and indeed an important element of predation and defense in most animals. The American culture seems to acknowledge this, with colloquialisms such as “It’s a jungle out there,” “His bark is worse than his bite,” and the like. Despite—or perhaps because of—humankind’s long history of aggression that exceeds defensive or hunting needs, it has become highly socially regularly in Western society (and explicitly adopted as a means of state defense). And yet it occurs regularly. Why, if it is generally unacceptable to intentionally harm others, do people bully or harass others? The intent behind such aggression must serve a societal or individual purpose, or more likely both.

Indeed, intentional aggression in children has been identified as the root cause of bullying, which is now regarded as an aggressive behavior with harmful intent rather than a function of immaturity or unregulated impulses (see Due et al. 2005; Felix et al.

2011). Similarly, intentional aggression has been identified as the root cause of sexual harassment and assault, two distinct forms of violence that share a horrifying spectrum.

The evolving concepts of both childhood aggression and sexual harassment attest to the socially mediated nature of human aggression and responses thereto. The intent of aggression occurs within a sociopsychological framework of norms, expectations, rules, and perceived outcomes, that are specific to a culture and vary according to additional subcultural or institutional factors. This research will explore the intersections of the ethos and ecology of the American school institution and aggressive behavior in children, particularly that which is called “bullying.” Moreover, this research will demonstrate that there is a complex yet clear linkage among bullying behavior and

the perpetration of sexual violence (SV), in a milieu of instrumental violence, mediated by cultural attitudes, social mores, laws, and personal experience. This milieu entails violence performed—in the sense of being for an audience and in the sense of being cultural, not innate or unregulated aggression—for the purposes of attaining and/or maintaining power, especially in a socioecological situation, i.e. the social and psychological demands placed upon social actors in an institution. Given this, this research revolves around a subset of violence called interpersonal social violence.

The conflicting narratives and social norms about this form of violence echo a larger sociocultural shift in the social negotiations of American society, which is beyond the scope of the present research; it suffices to note that the media maelstrom and shifts in anti-violence laws are important factors in the ISV phenomena, and to return our focus to the biological and ecological factors of instrumental aggression and its

Janus-faced social response, of taboo and excusal.

The research applies the epistemologies and methodologies of anthropology to interpersonal social violence, especially bullying, harassing, and abusive behaviors, to demonstrate their function of instrumental, symbolic aggression. These phenomena shall be analyzed for their cognitive perception politics and their systemic preconceptions in a socio-ecological pattern through the Western educational institution in North America. Bullying and sexual violence typically have been studied through psychological surveys, social network analysis, or educational survey research (see

Literature Review). The combination of cognitive–anthropological and symbolic–social inquiry allows one to elucidate the specific institutional and media effects on the perpetration, perception, and penalization of bullying and sexual violence. The goal of

anthropology is not to produce a perfect world, but to explain why humans do the things they do. It is the specific goal of this research to understand the complexities of intentional aggression to inform the application of anthropology to improving the conditions of institutional culture, specifically schools and for vulnerable youth populations.

CHAPTER 2 OVERVIEW OF TOPIC

A Brief History of Interpersonal Social Violence in the U.S.

Bullying as a Social Problem

Over the past 15 years, with every high-profile case of bullying, new laws have been enacted, and existing laws strengthened, to address what is increasingly perceived as an epidemic. The names of the victims have been attached to both legislative bills (such as the Tyler Clementi Higher Education Anti-Harassment Act and

Phoebe’s Law) and awareness foundations (such as the Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover

Foundation). In the wake of well-distributed books by American Barbara Coloroso and

Norwegian Dan Olweus, information clearinghouses and educational projects have been established.

The national conversation about bullying was invigorated by the revelation after

1999’s Columbine High School shooting that the shooters had been victims of bullying and were purportedly seeking revenge on their tormentors. Programs such as the

Empower Project in D.C. and Operation Respect in New York, and awareness events such as National Bullying Prevention Week and No-Name-Calling Week, developed after extensive news coverage of the shooting. Georgia also enacted the nation’s first anti-bullying law.

Between 1999 and 2005, only 15 states had anti-bullying laws. In 2005, another watershed moment for educational policymakers occurred with the high-profile lawsuit against the Tonganoxie, Kansas school board (filed in 2004, plaintiff Dylan Theno eventually settled for $440,000) and the Red Lake High shooting (on March 21, 2005 in

Minnesota, by Jeff Weise). Concerned over possible litigation, shootings, or both, eight

states added anti-bullying laws. More laws have been passed or modified each year; currently all states but Colorado and California have such laws, which prohibit the act of bullying, require school boards to implement prevention and reporting methods, and in some states, require teachers and administrators to report incidents to police.

Moreover, many states enacted cyberbullying laws or modified existing law to add such provisions. Ryan Halligan’s case in 2003 inspired many legislators to take action. Unfortunately, cyberbullying continues, and is considered a factor in other high- profile cases, as noted below.

The news coverage and legislative discussions about bullying in this six-year period constituted a vibrant ethnopsychological public discourse, in which bullying was considered a social ill and a predictor of school violence. The verbiage suggested that bullying was a matter of concern because it could lead to school shootings and thus constituted a public danger. This perspective on bullying is reflected in the considerable amount of research on the negative effects of violent music and video games that was published during these years (See Literature Review: The Effects of Media). Indeed, news coverage of the school shooters focused on his preoccupation with the Internet,

Nazism, and Goth culture. Although the sociological study of bullying and its emotional effects had begun in the 1970s with the pioneering work of Dan Olweus, any such studies were not often included in news coverage of this period.

“Bullycide”: The Apparent Rise in Teen Suicides

The tide shifted again in 2006 with the high-profile cyberbullying case of Megan

Meier. The incident inspired a new harassment proscription of the Computer Fraud and

Abuse Act in the Missouri statute 565-090 and brought the public’s burgeoning

awareness of the volatile border between social media and violence into the bullying conversation. The news media gave this nexus a salient label: “the MySpace suicide.”

That same year, another lawsuit against a school board was placed; the parents of suicide victim Brandon Myers sued the Blue Springs, Kansas school board, following the precedent of the Tonganoxie case. Brandon Myers was not a deviant teenager according to the prevailing concerns about Nazi sympathies or Goth inclinations, well inculcated in school dress codes. In short, there were no tropes into which the news media could fit Meier’s or Myers’ story. Bullying had led to self-harm, with few other mitigating factors in this new model.

Between 2008 and 2011, there were at least 50 suicides by children who had been bullied. Over 30 bullying-related suicides were reported in 2010 alone. It is important to note that bullying is a predictor of depression and other mental health issues (Due et al 2005, 129; Felix et al. 2011, 244), however there is no reliable data on the rate of correlation. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which catalogue suicide incidents, do not include the reported causes of suicide. Only in the past decade have news articles about child suicides begun to discuss bullying as a factor; before 2008, the concurrence of the keywords “bullying” and “suicide” in news articles falls to the point of insignificance. Moreover, the “newsworthiness” of individual suicides may be heightened by the suggestion that bullying is a factor. The measure of

“newsworthiness” has a feedback relationship with public interest, which may be measured in one way by Internet search analysis, the Google search terms “bullying + suicide” were entered more often during March and April of 2005 (the Jeff Weise shooting and fallout), April 2009 (the Mohats sued for the suicide of their son Eric), and

has not since fallen below the threshold reached in 2010, with peaks at April and

October of 2010 (on the heels of the charges against Prince’s and Clementi’s bullies, respectively), and November 2011 (Jamey Rodemeyer’s suicide and its celebrity response) . The trend of the term “bullying” by itself follows a similar temporal pattern to its concurrent use with “teen,” confirming that bullying is associated with children and teens.

“The Culture of Mean”

Bullying expert Barbara Coloroso coined the term “culture of mean” to refer to the set of socialized attitudes and behaviors in American society that enable insults and cruel remarks, as well as social exclusion and other relationally aggressive behaviors.

Some experts blame the rise of reality TV, which typically includes insults for the purpose of entertainment, as an apparently “real” source for modeling behavior for youths. Coyne et al (2010) found that reality TV included on average 84 insults per hour, and some commentators suggested that young people watching shows like

American Idol were subject to the Simon Cowell effect, believing that it was acceptable and even fun to make insulting remarks.

More than a decade later, the Cowell effect gave way to the Trump effect; similarly, Donald Trump’s strategic use of insults during his presidential campaign was thought to normalize such remarks among young people. To wit, the Southern Poverty

Law Center released a whitepaper called “The Trump Effect.” The authors state,

We heard reports that both elementary and middle school students have taken to chanting, ‘Trump! Trump! Trump!’ in a ‘taunting tone.’ Others cited an increase in the use of [Trump’s common campaign] words like ‘loser’ and ‘deadbeat.’ The bullying crosses party lines. An

Albuquerque, New Mexico, middle school teacher identified ‘an anti- Trump bias’ among her students, ‘and ridicule for those who might support Trump.’ [11] Meanwhile, the most popular bullying film is clearly Mean Girls, which has even launched a national holiday. The film follows a young woman who leaves her homeschooled life in Africa for an affluent high school, and falls in with the “mean girls,” much to the chagrin of her teachers and friends. The film, written and produced by comedian Tina Fey, is widely considered a culture classic, and its dialogue has been distilled into countless memes. However, the film greatly sensationalizes “mean girl” behavior and uses it as both a source of humor and the primary plot line. The film’s conclusion uncritically portrays bullying as a matter of competition and jealousy among girls, easily resolved by self-empowerment. On Google, the search term “mean girls” hit its peak in May 2004, immediately after the film’s release. Both “mean girls” and

“bullying” have followed similar trends in Google search results ever since.

“That’s So Gay”: Homophobic Bullying

Efforts to curb LGBTQ suicides, especially those influenced by bullying, began in

1998 with The Trevor Project. Unfortunately, LGBTQ youth remain particularly vulnerable to both bullying and suicidal thoughts.

On January 14, 2013, 15-year-old Jadin Bell hanged himself in an Oregon elementary school. He had been experiencing intense bullying at school and online for being gay, reported his father Joe Bell, who launched the Faces for Change anti- bullying organization and began a cross-country walk for awareness. Major media outlets picked up the story and helped establish in the public’s eye a perceived linkage between homophobic taunting and the risk of suicide, which is already higher among

LGBTQ youth. Research has supported a link between homophobic teasing and more severe bullying; this linkage likely mediates the relationship between the experience of homophobia and suicide risk for LGBTQ youth.

In 2012, 14-year-old Kenneth Weishuhn of Iowa also hanged himself after a month of regular cyber-harassment for being gay. This case, along with that of

Canada’s Amanda Todd, who committed suicide after a ruse by bullies had her expose her breasts via webcam, revolved around issues of gender and sexuality and involved intense cyberbullying, prompting continent-wide discussions that ultimately led to the criminalization of cyberbullying. Back in 2003, Ryan Halligan’s suicide after rumors spread that he was gay (unlike Kenneth, he did not identify as such) also came on the heels of intense cyberbullying. Any possible relationship between cyberbullying and homophobic taunting or bullying of a sexual nature has not yet been explored in academic literature.

Zero Tolerance

Discussing Kenneth Weishuhn’s suicide, a USA Today article noted that zero- tolerance stances toward bullying seemed more and more appealing after these cases of “bullycide.” However, zero tolerance began with regard to gun violence, in particular the Columbine High shooting. Typically, it involves expulsion. While it may be a victim’s dream to have their bully booted from school, it rarely pans out that way. Research has identified several common outcomes of zero-tolerance policies, the victim is expelled after they react to a bully’s provocation or framed by a bully; minority students tend to be expelled more often than white students; the bully continues to harass the victim via electronic means; and/or, the bully continues to engage in bullying behavior out of

retaliation or simply because the expulsion had no effect on their desire to bully

(Boccanfuso and Kuhfeld 2011).

Around the World: Bullying

Dan Olweus’ work launched a new era of bullying research, and studies in disparate countries have shown similar results. Around the world, children engage in both physical and relational aggression, largely dependent upon their gender and self- esteem levels, and bullying is shown to have strategic aims. However, there is some evidence that schools in which students are grouped by ability rather than age are less likely to experience bullying (Due et al 2005).

Sexual Assault and Intimate Partner Abuse as Social Problems

Over the past few decades, sexual violence has been reconceptualized and increasingly stigmatized. Movements such as #MeToo, launched in 2006 by activist

Tarana Burke and made viral by actress Alyssa Milano on October 15, 2017, and

#TimesUp, launched by an activist coalition on January 1, 2018, respectively, have been powerful platforms for survivors of sexual assault and sexual workplace harassment, as well as intimate partner abuse. In general, those terms have seen an expansion in their de facto, and following that, de jure definition.

“Just How Things Are”: Sexual Harassment

Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendment not only prohibited sex discrimination in public universities, but also established standards for reporting of and response to sexual assault and harassment. For the latter, a prerequisite of “pervasive” and “severe”

enough to create a “hostile” environment became the standard measure. Unfortunately, this has not assuaged fears by some that giving a valentine to someone inherently constitutes sexual harassment, nor the companion attitude that sexual harassment can be overblown or should be expected as “how things are.” Despite advances in equitable consideration of sexual assault, networks of complicity in a patriarchal culture and persistent enabling myths about the causes and enactment of sexual violence continue to hinder the progress of social movements and occlude the true nature of these problems.

The workplace is particularly susceptible to sexual harassment, and not just for academia, nor Hollywood. When Alyssa Milano revived the #MeToo hashtag, she was referring to mega-producer Harvey Weinstein, accused of sexual harassment, battery, and even assault by multiple women, and the hashtag exploded in growth, with over

30,000 retweets within a day. In the wake of Weinstein’s accusers, other male celebrities — and a few female ones — were identified by both celebrities and non- celebrities as having engaged in lewd, harassing, and deviant behavior with them. And yet public perception tends to divide and rank these offenses, even if de jure harassment, battery, and assault were all conducted by the same person. A 2010 report by the Frameworks Institute found that people tended to divorce sexual harassment from other forms of sexual violence; it would appear that not much has changed, with far more backlash against Weinstein than against comedian Louis C.K., accused of exposing himself to female colleagues.

“She Said No, but She Meant Yes”: Sexual Assault, Battery, and Rape

Psychologist Mary Koss coined the term “date rape” after studying the sexual behavior of male college students and discovering that many of them confessed to holding a woman down in order to penetrate her, although they also claimed that was

“not rape.” And in that time, it may not have been. In the early 2000s, the term “grey rape” came into parlance, reflecting ambiguous situations in which a woman knew and may have been romantically interested in the assailant and the need arose to distinguish rape in those situations from the stereotypical “stranger rape.” Now that studies show that stranger rape comprises a small percentage of all rapes, it’s acceptable to refer to all unwanted, nonconsensual sexual contact as rape. Moreover, feminists have pushed to remove references to penetration from legal definitions of rape, in order to encompass unwanted sexual activity that may not fall into heteronormative contact. Moreover, this expansion prevented any defendant from claiming lack of genital contact as a defense. As an example, Brock Turner was sentenced for, among other things, “assault with intent to rape,” having used his fingers and a beverage bottle to attack his victim, but not for rape, with which he was charged.

Increasingly, like bullying, sexual violence is conceptualized as an effort to target the psychological or social well-being of a victim, particularly to exert power or dominance, rather than a function of unregulated sexual impulse. Even among the uninformed, sexual assault is considered the completion of a social contract of sorts between a man and a woman who “led him on” or engaged in behavior that went against social mores (Grubb and Turner 2012, 446).

This and other persistent rape myths influence both the public and law enforcement (Parratt and Pina 2017). In particular, a celebrity status or the wearing of

clothing that’s tellingly referred to as “provocative” triggers a perception of the victim as either deserving or lying due to her desire for attention. Rape myths additionally enable an excusal of sexual harassment or assault as a “joke.” In both bullying and sexual harassment, the after-the-fact characterization of bad behavior as “just playing around” shifts responsibility to the victim for “taking it too seriously”. Such comments are reminiscent of the public response to #MeToo, and are particularly likely with regard to male victims. Actors Brendan Fraser and Terry Crews were requested to take their experience of sexual battery by other men as teasing, bonding, or otherwise “not serious.” Fraser declined, “I don’t get the joke.”

Me Too But Not Me

A not-small minority of the public has negative notions about #MeToo, calling it a

“witch hunt,” “hysteria,” or simply “going too far.” An April 2018 study from Bucknell

Institute for Public Policy found that of respondents who have heard of the movement,

66 percent were favorable, but the rest, primarily Republicans and men, were unfavorable, with many predicting a breakdown of good working relationships between men and women on the job. A January 2018 study from ABC News and The

Washington Post found similar results, although they also found that in general, people considered workplace sexual harassment a problem. In general, surveys suggest that people easily and widely identify sexual violence as “a problem” or “wrong,” but divide along party and gender lines when characterizing movements intended to stop said violence. As the high-profile trial of actor Bill Cosby showed, even 13 accusers did not sway many people’s confidence in his denial, while, as with Anita Hill accusing Clarence

Thomas in 1991, many attributed the claims to “attention-seeking” or “looking for publicity.”

Hashtag Movements and Cyber Harassment

The internet’s role in sexual harassment and dialogue about it is two-fold, although it provides unprecedented opportunity to express one’s experience, organize for social change, and redefine the very terms at hand, the internet also serves as a powerful and occasionally devastating platform for cyber-harassment and the organization around myths and attitudes that specifically shape sexual violence. In a provocative overview of gendered cyber-harassment, Danielle Citron draws a comparison between gendered workplace aggression, especially jokes and other talk that express perceived male dominance, and online harassment of women. “Cyber- harassment stakes out the internet as a male space in the same way that sexual harassment does in the workplace,” she writes (2009, 391).

Moreover, some male spaces are explicitly organized online as a means of sharing and affirming gender role ideals and rape myths. Most notable is the incel, or

“involuntary celibate” movement, which advocates for harassment and assault of women in order to return society to its “natural order,” while enabling bullying of men deemed to be “beta males,” and the “Men Going Their Own Way” movement, which encourages men to completely separate themselves from women. Far from being tiny fringe movements, these groups have tens of thousands of members in the U.S.

“Why Didn’t She Leave?”: Intimate Partner Abuse

Intimate partner abuse has had its definition expanded from physical abuse (“wife beating”) to include six types of abuse: physical, sexual, emotional, financial, identity

(for LGBTQ survivors), and religious. Unfortunately, law enforcement has been slow to catch up, often limited to arrest for and prosecution of physical or sexual assault, while emotional, financial, identity, and religious abuse are considered unprovable.

Despite the success of #MeToo, intimate partner abuse has not enjoyed the same shift in perception as has sexual assault. In cases ranging from Janay Palmer, whose fiancé, pro football player Ray Rice, was captured on security video beating her unconscious, to Kesha, who accused her producer, Dr. Luke, of multiple types of abuse and sought release from her contract, to Amber Heard, who captured her husband, actor Johnny Depp, on video throwing objects at her and screaming at her, the victim was denigrated by the media as “seeking attention,” even in the presence of video evidence of abuse and intimate terroristic activity. Victims of intimate partner abuse are often considered complicit in their terror, partly due to the expectations and effects of the dating/romantic institution. Persistent expectations of romantic partners to be accommodating and to put forth sustained effort to “make the relationship work” lead to public conception of abusive relationships as resulting from the failure of one party to put forth sufficient effort.

Both cultural expectations and the media portrayal of research of the topic encourage “staying.” According to many volumes of public health data, if sexual activity is occurring outside of a monogamous partnership, it’s supposedly riskier for individuals involved. Anthropologists know that statistics are measures only of certain situations.

For example, reported sexual assault rates for male victims are probably inaccurate

because the social and legal responses and expectations vary by gender. One chart, included in a June 10, 2014 Washington Post article by sociologists W. Bradford Wilcox and Robin Fretwell Wilson making a heartfelt plea for the return to the nuclear family, made the rounds in the #YesAllWomen discussion, and ostensibly shows that rates of domestic violence are lowest for those who are married with children. However, this interpretation of data removes all cultural factors from the equation. For example, reported incidence of violence against women who are cohabiting may be higher than reported incidence against married women because among many cultural groups, such as Catholics, divorce is highly discouraged and victims may feel immense pressure to

“work things out” and seek community support rather than engage law enforcement.

The article also makes preposterous and unfounded claims such as that “women in healthy, safe relationships are more likely to select into marriage, and women in unhealthy, unsafe relationships often lack the power to demand marriage or the desire to marry,” when in fact the decision to get married is highly influenced by cultural, legal, and other factors, and women are not the only gender to “demand” it. To reduce discussion to such “data” implies that if one is being abused, getting married would cause one to be abused less. The chart is simply descriptive but is being offered as a prescription against domestic violence…and that norm of the happy married couple does seem like a solution in situations where one partner is insisting that he or she will

“things will get better” once the other commits. (A report from FiveThirtyEight further debunked the article, but it was widely shared under the #yesallwomen hashtag.)

A study conducted by Anderson (2008) that compared PTSD symptoms with experience of psychological control versus physical violence in intimate relationships

points to a clear distinction between the tormented couples immortalized in songs like

Eminem’s “Love the Way You Lie,” and couples in which the violence is carefully concealed, or just so subtle that it’s invisible to an outside eye. While both types of situations are psychologically damaging, high levels of psychological control numb the effect of more overt violence, while predicting higher levels of depression, impaired stress response, and erratic behaviors, which can make the victim look more like the perpetrator and make any legal redress difficult if not impossible.

Thousands of people tweeted with the #WhyIStayed hashtag, launched by writer

Beverly Gooden in response to backlash against Janay Palmer, who stayed with her fiancé pro football player Ray Rice despite being subject to physical abuse by him. The stories aimed to dispel myths about the nature of domestic violence. Largely due to sensationalized media portrayals of women experiencing constant, savage beating yet being too weak-willed or in love to leave (see: every procedural drama, crime show, or premium television series), many people assume that leaving an abusive relationship should be easy. Yet the #WhyIStayed stories tackled financial dependency, children had with the abuser, threats of retaliation, and numerous other factors that complicated the question of leaving. The movement, although faded, may have had some impact, recent surveys in the U.S. have found that a higher percentage of respondents now identify domestic violence as a problem in their community or among people they know, compared to only a few years ago.

Around the World: Intimate Partner Abuse and Domestic Violence

Multiple research studies have found that victims of abuse tend to avoid using condoms or diaphragms in their abusive relationships, often because to avoid

contraception and STD protection implies trust and possession; in emotionally manipulative situations, the symbolic aspects of those devices are often more pressing than the health aspects. In certain parts of the world, abuse could be considered a factor in the spread of HIV infection. Moreover, sexual assault perpetrators typically do not use condoms (Davis et al 2018).

In their examination of gender ideas and domestic violence among Mexicans and

Mexican-Americans, Sugihara and Warner note that “the Mexico-born, who are closer to traditional Mexican culture, are less likely to be violent than Anglo Americans and U.S.- born Mexican American counterparts; approval of violence towards women is a trait of mainstream American culture and that, in the process of assimilation, individuals are adopting negative American attitudes and behavior rather than affirming negative machismo stereotypes” (2002, 319). Moreover, they found a relationship between low socioeconomic status and perpetuation of violence, supporting resource theory, which holds that instrumental aggression is motivated by the need to resolve perceived or actual inequity in social or real capital.

Studies conducted around the world have tested resource theory and its correlate, the household bargain model (HBM), as a factor in domestic violence. In general, hypotheses revolve around the notion that socioeconomic stress and a dearth of resources contributes to the attempted resolution by violence in the domestic sphere.

Another prominent theory in domestic violence studies is gender-role theory and its correlate, the male backlash model (MBM), which holds that shifting societal expectations with regard to gender roles, especially “breadwinners” is met with men’s attempts to regain power through violence. Both theories and models have found mixed

support, varying somewhat by cultural factors such as patriarchal ideas, religious prescriptions, and the state of law in the hosting nation.

In the Dominican Republic, which has a particularly high rate of femicide due to domestic violence, Bueno and Henderson found that “the HBM seems to better account for IPV experienced by wealthier women, and the MBM better accounts for IPV among poorer women” and that women who earned more money than their husbands or joined a political organization had a higher probability of experiencing intimate partner abuse

(2017, 108-110).

The DR’s neighbor Haiti, however, did not show effects of differential household power on domestic violence; rather, intimate partner abuse was more likely in cases where the woman accepted traditional ideas about a man’s right to beat his spouse

(Gage and Hutchison 2006, 21).

The Prosecution of Abusers

Anti-Bullying Law

In the past decade, the legal avenues against bullying have included several notable performative responses to bullying. Although none of the anti-bullying laws were used to press charges, litigation in bullying cases expanded to include criminal charges.

The precedents established in these cases deliberately challenged the juvenile system’s claims of deterrent and rehabilitative power, by declaring that minors could have reason about their violent behavior, (in other words, that they are held to all legal provisions of good faith; now, the bad behavior of young people could be criminalized (and the use of technology to spy and bully, now prohibited by revised statutes in the wake of the

“MySpace suicide” and similar cases, could be considered a criminal offense).

On January 14, 2010, Phoebe Prince, a student at South Hadley High School in

South Hadley, MA, committed suicide after several months of harassment from fellow students. The public response was swift and palpable, and motivated legislative action against bullying. On May 3, 2010, the Massachusetts General Court passed an anti- bullying law that addressed bullying behavior and required preventative training and avenues for redress. All the same, this law was not invoked by District Attorney

Elizabeth D. Scheibel, who brought harassment, stalking, and statutory rape charges against the six teenagers identified as Prince’s main bullies Two of the five who were minors were charged as adults; that is, they were not given the purported protection of the juvenile court system. Five of the teenagers were sentenced in May 2011 with community service and probation, after the second DA on the case, David Sullivan, dropped the more severe charges, citing the corrective purpose of the trials, “They have paid the price in the media and public arena. … They will have this on their backs for the rest of their lives. Worse, they will have it on their conscience.” This explicit use of the trials to shame and educate reflects the deterrence principle behind prosecution, but works through classification of the perpetrators according to the mediated norms and roles of an institution, in this case, a school.

On September 22, 2010, Tyler Clementi, a student at Rutgers University in

Piscataway, New Jersey, committed suicide after his roommate, Dharun Ravi, created a webcam feed that showed Clementi with a male sex partner and consequently outed him to classmates. The incident reportedly followed a string of harassing or “peeping

Tom” behaviors that the prosecution argued would make any reasonable victim feel targeted. As with previous violent incidents involving young gay people, both the media

and the prosecution marked Ravi’s behavior as a “hate crime,” arguably the criminal end of the spectrum of bullying behaviors. As in Massachusetts, the legislative response was swift and thorough, On January 5, 2011, the New Jersey legislature unanimously passed the Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights Act. Ravi was sentenced to 30 days in jail, after being indicted and convicted on 15 charges, including civil rights violations, bias intimidation, lying to investigators, tampering with evidence, and influencing a witness.

In the wake of Weishuhn’s suicide, O’Brien County Sheriff Michael Anderson said that Iowa law did not cover bullying (an anti-bullying “policy” was enacted in 2007) and discouraged the filing of charges; moreover, local prosecutors could not find sufficient evidence for any specific crimes. Moreover, it remained unclear whether to try alleged bullies as juvenile or adult offenders, or whether or not school administrators should be charged as well. This scenario is far more likely nationwide, as law enforcement officials require explicit criminalization, and prosecutors struggle to find evidence beyond hearsay. With the dawn of new cyberbullying laws, evidence from texts and social media could be considered evidence; however, law enforcement encountered a new problem with the dawn of Instagram and Snapchat stories, which vanish after a certain period of time.

These cases highlighted the tension between socially constructed immorality and explicit law, and between the socially constructed “crime” and the sociolegal structure of criminal prosecution. Because bullying is already regarded as a wrong behavior, it may be punished according to several separate laws. The benefit of anti-bullying laws is in their delineation of social classes and their provisions that allow prosecution of cyberbullying.

Sexual Harassment and Assault Law

Similarly, laws pertaining to sexual violence have changed substantially, albeit over a longer time period than have anti-bullying laws. Many seminal legal changes occurred in the ‘70s, a decade in which the United Nations began to organize and guide international women’s rights policy. Previously, prosecution of rape by law required witness corroboration and the victim’s use of high resistance (see Citron 2009, Kahan

2010). In addition, it was near impossible to prosecute spousal rape, as unwanted sexual contact was considered part of the marriage contract. In 1976, Nebraska abolished the marital exemption for sexual assault provided for by the U.S. Model Penal

Code. It wasn’t until 1984 that the New York Court of Appeals ruled in People v. Liberta that spousal rape should not be legally separated from non-spousal rape. And yet, until the mid-1990s, many states continued to uphold the exemption.

Finally, for many years, most legal definitions of rape involved the use of force by the aggressor. Overall, beginning with the Michigan Criminal Sexual Conduct Statute in

1975, laws have shifted to allow the prosecution of non-forcible nonconsensual sexual contact even inside a marriage or dating relationship. However, there is no federal law governing rape, and many states use less loaded words in their laws. And of course, many prosecutors find rape cases a matter of “he said, she said,” rape kits go untested, and sentencing is often light, especially for white men.

Around the World: Criminalization

In Belize, a former British colony and country nearly infamous for its domestic violence problem, the offense was criminalized in 1992.

Following the UN’s influential ‘Decade of Women’, the Belizean government established its Department of Women’s Affairs in 1978 to specifically address the needs of female citizens. [… The 1992] act declared such violence to be a crime against the state and provided its victims the right to obtain Protection or Occupation Orders which prohibit their perpetrators from entering their living/working spaces. [Beske 2009, 491]

However, while the Belizean state has defined the behavior’s “wrongness,” victims of these crimes often don’t perceive themselves as such, or are unable to navigate or overcome their cultural context to utilize state-sanctioned protections and reprieve. Beske found that not only were officers sparsely assigned to Belize’s geographically and ethnically diverse regions, but also many of them considered domestic violence a personal matter—and many victims agreed and, not unlike in the

U.S., found the stigma and social challenges too burdensome (2009, 492). “It is not an abhorrent behaviour confined to a peripheral few, but rather a mainstream practice that affects all because it is rooted within the social structure,” writes Beske (2009, 493) As such, it is often justified by victims in terms of the Belizean Creole expression, ‘If ih noh beat mi, ih noh lov mi’ (If he doesn’t beat me, he doesn’t love me), thus to suggest that the crime has been normalized as a part of a loving relationship.”

In Australia, also known to have high rates of domestic violence, the legal structure derived from British common law, as in the U.S. Marital rape was fully criminalized by the early 1980s, and domestic violence in general was federally criminalized in 1975. However, research finds that sexual assault and domestic violence are both alarmingly common, and that Australia exhibits a similar preponderance of rape myths to the U.S. (Powell and Webster 2018).

American(?) Psycho

Cluster B

The social construction of bad behavior, in particular the development of psychopathology, is tied to the conception of childhood and its institutions. Write

Fabrega and Miller,

Psychiatric concepts pertaining to moral insanity, sociopathy, psychopathy, conduct disorders, and juvenile delinquency are historically linked and played a central role in psychiatry’s involvement in the criminal justice system and in the evolution of its own language about behavioral anomalies that involve criminality. [1995, 444]

Perhaps it’s no surprise that psychopaths in pop culture are typically portrayed as having been “bad since birth.” And yet, ironically, bad behavior among children that is linked to children’s institutions is considered “part of growing up” and nothing to worry about. (Merten 1994, 40). Of course, in some cultures, aggression is ritually part of growing up, note Fabrega and Miller (1995, 445).

As a psychological construct, psychopathy is deeply tied to social mores. The term is commonly used to describe exceptionally violent, even murderous individuals.

(However, studies show a closer link between psychopathy and relational, not physical, aggression; see Coyne et al 2010). Keesler and Dematteo (2017) note that when media do not sensationalize psychopaths as such, they offer ostensibly “scientific” advice on how to “deal with” the apparently common psychopaths. However, like most psychological conditions, psychopathy is a highly variable, culturally mediated phenomenon.

The triarchic model of psychopathy identifies three aspects of personality and, by extension, behavior that define psychopathy, boldness, meanness, and disinhibition. In a socioecological context, most of these behaviors would have little benefit, meanness

prevents an individual from attaining social cohesion, and disinhibition entails poor impulse control. However, boldness, which here refers to a lack of fear, in turn leads to social assertiveness. Indeed, Almeida et al (2015) found no significant correlation between boldness and disinhibition, although they did find correlation between boldness and meanness. Psychopathic individuals typically have an aversion to authority and direct social connection, yet a feeling of power, even superiority, that means they tend to seek out and occupy leadership roles. In a small environment such as a school, a

“queen bee” may exhibit bold behavior and attain sufficient social capital to mitigate the negative effects of disinhibition and meanness.

Benjamin Karpman proposed two forms of psychopathy: primary, which is a cognitive condition leading to egocentrism, callousness, and manipulative tendencies, and secondary, caused be adverse life experiences such as child abuse and bullying

(the cycle of abuse), which is associated with antisocial behavior. Much of the public health-oriented coverage of bullying and sexual violence relies upon and recommends intervention to disrupt the “cycle of violence.” However, according to Karpman’s model, only individuals with secondary psychopathy would benefit from such intervention.

Moreover, as will be discussed, psychopathy is not a prerequisite for bullying and sexual violence perpetration. Its association with the two is likely via psychopathy’s link to empathy.

Empathy

Empathy stands out as the mediator in interpersonal social violence perpetration and attitudes, within a socioecological context that further shapes behavior. Empathy is among the DSM-IV and DSM-5’s markers for Cluster B personality disorders, with low

empathy being an indicator for narcissism, sociopathy, and psychopathy. It’s important to distinguish between affective empathy and cognitive empathy. Empathy also must not be confused with perspective-taking, as Espelage (2017) notes, nor with sympathy

(Vossen et al 2017). Psychopathy does not affect cognitive empathy, sympathy, or perspective-taking; it does affect affective empathy. Such an association, however weak, can help inhibit ISV; an individual with psychopathic tendencies exhibits disinhibition. Psychopathic traits encourage relational aggression that benefits from low affective empathy (Coyne et al 2010). These effects primarily hold true for secondary psychopathy. Only romantic relational aggression, aka intimate terrorism, is linked to primary psychopathy.

As noted above, meanness is a core component of psychopathy, and meanness is associated with low empathy. However, Almeida et al (2015) found that meanness did not predict antisocial behavior; that is, more than a lack of empathy leads to the perpetration of ISV.

That said, low empathy has been associated with the perpetration of bullying behavior (Espelage 2017 et al). And while media effects studies often gauge negative effects via emotional responses to exposure to media violence, lack of an empathetic response does not necessarily mean increased aggression. Moreover, a lack of emotional regulation among those with psychopathy skews results; unlike individuals with BPD, psychopaths experience hypoarousal when confronted with both frightening and pleasurable stimuli. This may explain high occurrence of premeditated violence, but does not entail a heightened emotional response, due to media or anything else

(Herpertz et al 2001).

According to Almeida et al 2017, perspective-taking is the only dimension of empathy not negatively correlated with boldness, suggesting that bold i.e. socially assertive people may have enhanced perspective-taking skills and are in fact able to understand and predict their victims’ responses. Although Espelage et al say that “[i]t is conceivable that adolescents with perspective-taking skills may have an awareness of the negative consequences bullying may have on the victim which would inhibit them from perpetuating bullying,” it is likely that that understanding may encourage bullying behavior, if the outcome is conceivable to the perpetrator (2017, 12).

While Espelage et al found that perspective-taking was negatively related to non- physical bully perpetration, they also found that empathic concern did not prevent perpetration. “The relation between empathy and bullying may be more complex and it is possible that other traits (e.g., callous-unemotional) might be more important than empathy in predicting bullying involvement” (2017, 12). In other words, Cluster B tendencies likely mediate bullying and other ISV behaviors. Indeed, inconsistent results for low self-esteem and bullying suggest that narcissism is the mediator,

“low self-esteem is more strongly associated with bullying for narcissistic youth. […] Thus, it is possible that highly narcissistic youth with low self- esteem may engage in bullying as a self-enhancing, attention-seeking behavior to increase social status and protect their vulnerable self-image. However, the interactive effect on victimization indicates that such a strategy of self-enhancement might backfire, resulting in decreased social standing, placing highly narcissistic youth with low self-esteem at increased risk of peer victimization over time. [Fanti and Henrich 2015, 20]

In Espelage’s work, a positive attitude toward bullying was not related to non- physical bullying victimization. Given the particular social dynamics involved with non- physical bullying, it seems plausible that (1) bullying is heavily associated with physical violence and (2) a positive attitude toward physical violence doesn’t predict non-physical

bullying because non-physical bullying involves a different schema, and therefore social effects. Moreover, non-physical bullying and its socioecological benefits to the perpetrator might be perfectly acceptable, and even excused because it’s not “violence.”

Using pop culture as a mirror, one might consider the differences between the

“schoolyard bully” e.g. Biff in Back to the Future versus Regina George in Mean Girls.

Biff lacks social skills and enjoys physical violence; Regina has tremendous social skills and is good at manipulation, which she uses rather than physical violence. These archetypes reflect a real-world division between relational and physical aggression;

Grotpeter and Crick found that, as per the movies, relationally aggressive children were aggressive within their friendships, while physically aggressive children roped their friends into their aggression (1996, 2337). It also might be said that Biff has low Theory of Mind, or “ability to attribute mental states to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, intentions, and perspectives that are different from one’s own”

(Espelage et al 2017) and a positive attitude toward violence and therefore bullying, while Regina has high Theory of Mind, yet might not even consider what she’s doing either bullying or violence. Indeed, there are few studies on both perpetrators and victims’ conceptualization of the behavior they’re doing or experiencing. Keesler and

Dematteo found that people more often identified antagonists of films and TV shows who showed extreme psychopathy or behavior not symptomatic of psychology (e.g.

Lecter’s cannibalism) than protagonists who more accurately matched psychologists’ descriptions of psychopaths (2017, 1526). In other words, psychopaths are considered bad, while people are reluctant to characterize “good” characters, or at least those with whom they are expected to identify, as “psychopaths.”

CHAPTER 3 LITERATURE REVIEW: THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF BAD BEHAVIOR

Studies of interpersonal social violence pepper several disciplines and benefit from the full arsenal of research methodologies, including surveys, implicit association tests (IATs), content analysis, social network analysis, and ethnographic work. Overall, the literature supports a new theory of interpersonal social violence, especially with regard to bullying, that expands the sociological dyad to an aggressor-victim-bystander triad, contextualizes the behavior in the sociocultural environment, and operates within certain institutional bounds. What the literature does not precisely answer is how each role in the triad is perpetuated and if, and how, ISV behavior and response are mediated by sociopathic tendencies and/or media effects.

My theoretical approach is further informed by socioecological studies of primate aggression, ethnopsychological studies of mental illness, and ethnographic surveys of youth groups most susceptible to bullying (especially LGTBQIA+ youths). As my level of analysis deepens, I move from the biological questions about aggressive behavior to the social constructionist perspective on instrumental violence, and then analyze ethnographic data on such violence with a dual sociolegal and sociopsychological perspective.

Bullying

Studies of bullying’s incidence, predictors, and factors have stemmed from various complementary disciplines, especially psychology, sociology, and public health, but few have taken an anthropological perspective. Although several cross-cultural studies have been conducted, they involve meta-surveys and/or take a public health

perspective (see Due et al 2005, Hong and Espelage 2012). While important, true cross-cultural studies involving original qualitative and quantitative data are scarce.

Moreover, few studies approach bullying as a cultural phenomenon by examining schemas (“In schematic cognition we find the mechanisms by which culture shapes and biases thought” writes DiMaggio [1997, 269]), belief systems, power dynamics, or impression management by way of ethnographic inquiry, dialogue analysis, visual or semantic analysis, or other qualitative methods that produce a “thick description” of a cultural phenomenon.

Frisén et al (2007) noticed this methodological issue and, noting inconsistencies in results among bullying studies that took the perspective of adults’ questions, chose to tackle bullying from the point of view of the students. In their study of Swedish adolescents, they found two common themes, a view of the bully as having low self- esteem and an opinion that the victim caused the bullying due to their appearance or not taking action to stop it.

Coming from a Canadian perspective, Walton’s discourse-based overview of bullying (2011) and his media analysis (2005) find that bullying is a socially constructed phenomenon, not innately the social ill that it is constructed to be, and it is indeed a normative part of schools.

Social problems are not like physical diseases awaiting identification, from which interventions will follow. Contrary to a disease model, social problems are constructed in response to social conditions that exist prior to their being named. Social problems are deemed in particular ways as problems by people in positions of power who generate and disseminate legitimatized (i.e. scientific) knowledge. [132]

(On that point, Jackman [2002] also noted a bias toward certain types of violence research due to social policy interest and funding.)

In a sense, Walton also affirms the notion that bullying, harassing, and abusive behaviors are similar enough as to be essentially the same aggressive conduct parading under different banners of childhood, adulthood, school, or workplace, noting that adults model this behavior for the children they are insisting should eschew it

(2011, 135).

Walton also criticizes the bully-bullied-bystander triad, noting “such conceptualizations of bullying are focused on psychological motivations and the policing of behaviours, and thus do not address negative perceptions of difference that underlie incidents of bullying” (2011, 135).

On that point, Merten (1994) identifies perceived difference as a source, if unconscious, of bullying behavior (and Frisen et al’s data support his conclusions). He focused on one American school for his thick description of bullying dynamics and impression management, grounded in rich descriptions of subjects’ attitudes and stories. Merten introduces the “Snoopy question”, why does something arbitrary, such as a fondness for Snoopy, trigger an aversive response that’s handled through aggression? (1994, 30). Merten asserts that “aggressors are neither fully aware of why they experience something as aversive and, therefore, why they respond negatively”

(31). Noting that junior high is a time of transition and development, both physiologically and socially, Merten talks to a girl named Hillie who reports being picked on for being a

“goody two-shoes” and not having designer clothes. In collecting multiple students’ accounts, Merten identifies the source of the bullies’ aversive response to Hillie’s behavior and attire,

If one assumes for the moment that her peers attack what they experience as aversive, then one has to consider Hillie’s slacks as a symbol of not

being ‘cool’ and the fact that she does not swear or hug boys in class. What then is the meaning of swearing and hugging in this context, and conversely, what does it mean not to do so? One way to demonstrate independence from adults is to break their rules. […] They pick on her because she symbolizes what they used to be. She, moreover, has the audacity to openly defend her ‘lifestyle,’ and her disapproval of their behavior makes them feel uneasy. [34]

In general, the culture-based literature on bullying suggests that it is a sociocultural phenomenon heavily mediated by both psychopathology and socioecological demands of an institution. Its study must bring perceptions, schemas, attitudes, norms, rules, and talk into dialogue with each other.

Sexual Violence

Research suggests that among children, adolescents, and adults, bullying behavior predicts and/or coincides with sexual violence of multiple types, including sexual harassment, sexual battery and assault, and intimate partner abuse (Falb et al

2011, Basile et al 2009, Pina et al 2009). There is a surprising dearth of literature on the relationship between bullying and sexual violence despite the evidence of a linkage and the severity of each as a public health issue. The concepts “domestic violence” and

“intimate partner violence” are socially constructed as adult phenomena, while bullying is framed in terms of psychological characteristics of problem children. It appears that sociocultural biases are reflected in the very epistemology. Given that, the following three sections of this chapter present an overview of both the literature exploring the connections among different types of interpersonal social violence and the available literature operating from a cultural perspective on those types, in order to identify avenues for future research.

As with the literature on bullying, the bulk of studies on sexual violence stem from a public health or sociopsychological perspective, and as Bonnet notes, many suffer from skewed samples, flawed methodologies, or biased assumptions, or from a confounding of different types of violence (Michalski 2005). Nevertheless, literature reviews and meta-studies have teased out a model that distinguishes “situational couple violence” from “intimate terrorism” (Michalski 2005, 625; Anderson 2008, Johnson

2005).

Moreover, anthropological or other cultural studies of sexual violence have identified several key trends with regard to the cultural context and discursive construction of sexual violence. It is important to note that IPV is not generalizable internationally or cross-culturally; in a survey of participants in 40 countries, Bernards and Graham (2013) found widely varying relationships among gender, marital status, and intimate partner violence, suggesting that cultural factors such as dating practices, spousal ownership, and attitudes toward divorce all have major, but globally inconsistent, effects on IPV.

Burgeoning research from the perspective of gender schema theory is finding that rape myths and other gendered beliefs have a measurable effect on attitudes toward and perception of—and therefore the likelihood of justifying or perpetrating— sexual violence (Grubb and Turner 2012, 445). Noting that previous research showed a correlation between very masculine and very feminine impression management and attitudes toward rape, Barnett et al entered “sexual dysfunction beliefs” into the mix, and found that,

among both men and women, dysfunctional beliefs about gender and sexuality are stronger predictors of rape myth acceptance than an

individual’s masculinity or femininity. In other words, rape myth acceptance is less closely related to how masculine or feminine men and women identify themselves as being and more closely related to their general beliefs about gender and sexuality. [2017, 749]

Moreover, Kopper found that gender role had little to do with victim-blaming, while rape myth acceptance did (1996, 90-91).

Affirming that sexual harassment and rape coexist on the spectrum of sexual violence, research has shown that gendered beliefs have a significant role in mediating attitudes toward both (O’Donohue et al 123). Lonsway et al (2008) produced a comprehensive literature review of not only sexual harassment measures for reporting of both perpetuation and victimization, but also results from a number of previous studies. In their own study presented in the same paper, they identify points of alignment among various cultural scripts, trends in discourse, and prevailing/implicit attitudes related to sexual harassment, sexual assault, and gender roles. They also found that notions of deviancy apparently operate distinctly from those schemas,

Sexual harassment and rape myths seem to diverge, however, in beliefs surrounding the deviancy of the behaviors. Although specific harassment myth items were developed to tap into this category, the items did not function well enough to be included in the final measure. This could reflect an understanding by participants that sexual harassment is far from a deviant event, being quite pervasive in educational and occupational settings. [611]

Notions of deviancy vary widely by culture, but also have a more profound effect in collectivistic cultures, which the literature by and large suggests experience higher rates of intimate partner violence, in part due to the need to maintain family structure

(Cooke and Michie 1999, 65; Ahrens et al 2010, 285). No study has used the bifurcated model of situational couple violence vs. intimate terrorism while operationalizing collectivism vs. individualism in cultures. However, Michalski has found that situational

couple violence tends to occur in situations where there is “a high level of functional interdependence; a relatively high degree of equality or access to similar resources; greater social isolation, or the relative absence of partisans to intervene”, all of which are characteristics of collectivistic cultures, while intimate terrorism is enabled in situations with a higher degree of inequality, social distance, centralization of authority, and violence in other spheres of life, all of which describe individualistic cultures (2005,

632-633).

In addition, any antisocial personality traits of those individualistic cultures have a greater effect on behavior (Catalá-Miñana et al. 2014, 2655, Cooke and Michie 1999,

65). In a cross-cultural comparison of domestic violence offenders in England (an individualistic culture) and Spain (a collectivist culture), Catala-Minana et al’s data affirmed these trends (2014, 2664). However, they found that one component of intimate partner violence, sexual coercion, operated differently, those who are found in collectivist cultures, “Some personality patterns (e.g., Sadistic and Schizotypal) and some clinical disorders (e.g., Anxiety Disorder and Thought Disorder) were found to predict Sexual coercion, independently of culture. These results suggest that Sexual coercion is related to personality factors” (2014, 2664). This relationship might be extrapolated to sexual coercion outside the confines of an institution such as dating or marriage that would invoke the collectivistic vs. individualistic effect.

Although Cooke and Michie focused their cross-cultural study of psychopaths in the U.S. and Scotland, they did find that social norms seem to affect the expression of antisocial personality traits, with Scottish offenders having to express high levels of a

trait before it was scored. They suggest that cultural factors permit expression of those traits at a lower level in the U.S. (1999, 65).

Characteristics of culture played out in Vandello and Cohen’s 2003 comparison of attitudes toward intimate partner abuse among American and Brazilian men. Notably,

American men marked “wife-beaters” as “less manly” than did Brazilian men, although

Brazilian men did condemn the behavior. According to the researchers, the difference lies in a profound honor culture that allows for justification of spousal abuse in the case of shameful or deviant behavior on the part of the woman. Although the U.S. at large is not said to be an honor culture, the researchers’ results found that participants from the

American South, which bears characteristics of an honor culture, were more tolerant of a man’s abusive behavior when, in a staged scenario, his intimate partner said that she was planning to go to an ex-boyfriend’s house to collect a few things. After the “abuser” departed, the actor expressed either self-blame and remorse, or an assertive position in which she planned to leave him. The actors triggered a cultural script in which an untrustworthy woman is cheating on her intimate partner and deserves punishment.

Both Southern and Latinx participants rated the assertive woman as cold and harsh, while rating the remorseful woman better in true “stand by your man” form, and expressed victim-blaming attitudes. What this unique study shows is that bystanders actively construct roles and assign responsibility for violent scenarios they witness, affirming their socialized expectations for behavior and power dynamics. The results also suggest a broad tendency among members of honor cultures to blame the victim of violence. Unfortunately, the study does not examine an inverse scenario in which a female partner is abusive toward her male partner.

Forster et al (2017) found intracultural effects on intimate partner violence, albeit in a small study of young Mexican-descent people in Los Angeles, specifically that ethnic minority-group membership and perceived discrimination thereby increased the likelihood for intimate partner violence. Although the study is limited in its scope by the authors’ own admission, it suggests that negative experiences and societal oppression play a role in the perpetration of intimate partner violence.

Few studies examine the role of media in the public’s and perpetrators’ attitudes toward sexual violence. Szymanski et al (1993) found that participants hearing two hypothetical rape scenarios tended to attribute more responsibility to the victim in an acquaintance-rape scenario than in the stranger rape scenario, which, while less common in the real world, is typically portrayed in the media as the quintessential rape.

Of the studies that do not use media as the means of inquiry, most existing ones revolve around 50 Shades of Grey. Among the more comprehensive works is Laura

Finley’s 2016 book Domestic abuse and sexual assault in popular culture, which gives a cursory overview of sexual violence and stalking as portrayed in films such as The

Accused and Boys Don’t Cry, as well as positively portrayed or diminished in films such as Say Anything. Unfortunately, Finley relies upon a reductive stance on the effects of violent media, namely the “exposure fallacy” of media effects studies, that simply watching a scene that diminishes or romanticizes violence will encourage that behavior in the viewer. Although she states, “It is not that viewing violent media inevitably results in violent thoughts and behaviors. How the violence is presented matters” (xxiv), she then defers to “three scientific commissions [who find that] viewing violence may not only increase violent behavior but also result in desensitization to violence, as viewers

who become accustomed to seeing it depicted in media may hold less empathetic views of victims and be less inclined to provide aid to persons in need” (xxvi). As will be discussed, many media effects studies have measured sympathy, not empathy, or have conflated multiple forms of violence. Regardless of how the violence is presented or scripted, consumers engage with the material with the cultural scripts curated by socialization, institutional affects, psychopathology, and a multitude of other factors (see

DiMaggio 1997). The exposure fallacy ignores these mediating ecological or psychological factors in the perpetuation of violence. The effects of media may better predict attitudes toward violent behavior rather than the behavior itself.

The Spectrum

Bad behavior constituting interpersonal social violence occurs on a spectrum, in both the dimensions of time and activity. All have the function of causing repetitive, lasting harm to another individual on the basis of and through social-emotional manipulation, often with a physical, even sexual, aspect as well. All entail a lack of or willing disregard for empathy that would otherwise mitigate such intention to cause harm. All invoke specific social domains, such as the present institution or realm of activity, and markers, such as gender, ethnicity, or class.

Broadly, ISV covers gender-based violence, which in turn encompasses intimate partner violence (IPV), dating violence, sexual assault and battery, and sexual harassment; domestic violence, which covers situational couple violence (SCV), elder abuse, child abuse; and bullying, which includes name calling, non-reciprocal teasing, physical assault and battery, verbal and cyber-harassment, and companion abuse.

Basile et al’s 2009 literature review found a substantial overlapping of factors in bullying and sexual violence perpetration. Over the past few years, more studies have found that bullying behavior predicts sexual harassment and assault, as well as intimate partner abuse. Espelage et al proposed and found support for a “bully–SV [sexual violence] pathway” among U.S. adolescents with its origins in middle school (2012).

Indeed, a 2017 AP investigation reported that there had been over 17,000 cases of peer sexual assault at U.S. schools between 2011 and 2015, most conducted by middle- schoolers.

Not only do various forms of sexual violence co-occur among perpetrators

(Ybarra and Thompson 2018), but also sexual violence, even behavior on the “low” end of the spectrum,” predicts bullying and harassing behaviors, and vice versa (see

Espelage 2012, 2013, 2015). These linkages suggest that underlying factors in these behaviors are the same. However, different individuals exhibiting antisocial and violent behavior do not necessarily share these common factors. As an example, either or both

Cluster B personality disorders (narcissism, sociopathy, and psychopathy) and socioecological intentional aggression (e.g. strategic bullying designed to enhance popularity) may influence an individual’s decision to engage in interpersonal social violence. As discussed in the next section, different forms of Cluster B influence different behavior patterns.

Although cross-cultural comparisons of both Cluster B behaviors and ISV have discovered some pancultural elements, such as so-called Machiavellian behavior

(Cooke and Michie 1999) and an intent to cause damage to the victim’s self-worth

(Severance et al 2013), the particular modes and methods of “bad behavior” tap into

sociocultural and sociopsychological sets of knowledge and occur within socioecological, especially institutional, contexts. For example, GBV, sexual harassment, and to some extent homophobic name calling in bullying all reflect and perpetuate prevailing beliefs that masculinity is aggressive, heterosexual relations with dominance by males is normative, and unwanted sexual contact is caused by the victim

(Asencio 1999, 108).

Merten notes, drawing from Bandura, Shott, and other theorists, that behaviors on this spectrum, being a function of aversive aggression, may not be knowingly executed even if there is a clear incentive, due to the cultural clouding and physiological response to perceived threat (1994, 30). In other words, the intent to harm may not always be intentional, but often is instrumental. Maass, Cadinu, Guarnieri, and Grasselli

(2003) found that heterosexual men who were told their personalities did not match a normative heterosexual male identity were more likely to sexually harass women. As research has shown, individuals identified as bullies-or sexual assailants, for that matter-by victims and bystanders often do not self-identify as such, but still will admit to the behavior in question. Whether this disconnect is due to semantics or a lack of self- awareness is a continued subject of study.

Not only do these behaviors coexist on a spectrum, but also tend to coincide within an individual, albeit not always at the same age. Farrington 1993, drawing from his body of work, notes that bullying at one age predicts bullying at another. More recently, Espelage et al 2015, in a study of self-reported bad behavior, found that bullying behavior predicted sexually harassing behavior at older ages; this relationship increased when younger individuals also included homophobic name calling behavior.

“To prevent sexual harassment, homophobic name-calling must be addressed” (2554).

The behaviors continue into adulthood, where behaviors often are performed in other institutions, especially the workplace (Farrington 1993), or in pseudo-institutions such as the dating scene and relationships.

Indeed, Carton and Egan (2017) found linkages between Machiavellianism and psychological abuse of a partner that were apparently mediated by narcissism.

“Narcissism and psychopathy were significant predictors of the use of restrictive engulfment,” or the use of controlling tactics to isolate a victim from others, “while psychopathy was the sole predictor for the use of denigration” (2017, 87). It would seem that intimate partner abuse is heavily affected by the type of Cluster B characteristics a perpetrator has.

The Effects of Media

For years, parents, teachers, and researchers have all wondered if the playground violence stemmed from the violence on the television set. Hundreds of studies, some with a clear confirmation bias, have attempted to link exposure to violent media to violent behavior among youth. According to Robertson et al (2013), many studies have shown pre-adolescents exhibited antisocial behavior after having spent time as a preschooler watching violent media; similarly, adolescents exhibited aggressive and antisocial behavior after having watched violent media as a younger child. Yet longitudinal studies have had results almost evenly split between no effect and demonstrable effects. Moreover, the exposure was limited to one or two years of the children’s lives, or used peer nomination or criminal convictions as the proxy for antisocial behavior, neither of which are a conclusive measure. It’s also worth noting

that these studies have been conducted across North America, Europe, and Oceania, with few cross-cultural studies indicating any sort of pancultural validity. (Notably,

Robertson et al did not test for solely violent media, but did find a relationship between excessive TV viewing and antisocial behavior).

In addition, many studies amplify the effects of exposure and demonstrate the difficulty of quantifying exposure. Is one hour spent watching an extremely violent movie depicting murder equivalent to 10 hours watching a mildly violent TV show depicting murder (and typically less vividly, thanks to television regulations)? At what age does violence “sink in”?

It’s commonly assumed that desensitization to violence via media exposure leads to violent behavior, whether by imitation or because sociocultural influences that would temper humans’ aggressive nature are mitigated by violent media. So far, the literature suggests that viewing aggression in the media does prime bad behavior, but in limited form (Browne and Hamilton-Giachritsis 2005). For example, physical aggression in media is more sought out by men with secondary psychopathy (i.e. antisocial characteristics), and these effects are not found for non-psychopathic or primary psychopathic individuals, nor do they suggest that simple exposure engenders bad behavior (Coyne et al 2010, 2012). There is no evidence that desensitization is the direct factor in the perpetration of violence.

There is scant evidence that exposure to media violence actually affects cognitive empathy (Vossen et al 2017); if it did, it would influence psychopathic behavior. Coyne et al found that violent media exposure “did not mediate the

psychopathy and aggression relationship; instead, media aggression appeared to be having an independent direct effect on relationship aggression.”

What violent media does detract from, found Vossen et al, is sympathy (2017).

Previous studies accidentally measured sympathy when attempting to measure the targeted ingredient (empathy), but as it turned out, Vossen et al’s work confirmed that sympathy is negatively impacted by longitudinal exposure to media violence. Low sympathy entails a lack of concern for others’ well-being, rather than a lack of understanding or vicarious experience of others’ emotions. That is, low empathy may be associated with violent behavior among Cluster B individuals, but Cluster B characteristics are not at all required for people to cause harm to others, and indeed, a selfish prerogative might trump an individual’s concern, especially if it’s been lowered.

Moreover, low sympathy could contribute to the bystander effect (Wiedeman et al 2015,

194).

Additionally, the effects are gendered; effects of violent media on youth primarily affect males, while relevant exposure for females is as adults (Glymour et al 2008,

1256). Coyne et al 2010 found a pathway in men from secondary psychopathy to physical aggressive, as well as relationally aggressive, media consumption to physical aggression in relationship. These effects were not found for women, although they did find that viewing relational aggression predicted relational aggression, results they confirmed again in 2012. Slater et al note that lower social disinhibition of aggressive behavior likely explains males’ higher susceptibility to media effects (2003, 731).

It’s worth noting that almost all studies of the effects of violent media have examined physical aggression in response to physical violence. Some have included

fantasy violence or horror gore—implausible real-life scenarios for most viewers—on equal footing with human violence. Many have omitted arguably more devious—and common—forms of violence such as intimate partner abuse or bullying. In fact, emotional violence is among the least represented in these studies.

One notable exception is the work of Coyne et al (2012), who conducted a pilot study on the priming effects of exposure to media depicting both relational aggression and physical aggression. They showed three film clips depicting physical aggression, relational aggression, and no aggression, respectively, and found no difference in level of cognitive excitement, suggesting that media of all types have equally stimulating effects. With that potential bias out of the way, they measured cognitive effects that were primed by the media via an emotional Stroop task. The study was conducted with entirely female subjects, “Women may be of particular interest as relational aggression represents a gender normative type of aggression that may be particularly salient among this group. Furthermore, many media portrayals of relational aggression involve stereotypical portrayals of women” (143). The researchers found that viewing both physical and relational aggression increased relational aggression, but viewing relational aggression did not increase physical aggression. In fact, they found that viewing relational aggression showed no difference in emotional interference between processing words related to that and positive words. “[I]t may be women have generally accepting normative beliefs about relational aggression, and as a result some may even experience positive emotions when witnessing these behaviors in the media,” they conclude (148).

The biases seen in the majority of violent media effects literature exacerbate methodological problems that have complicated the question of which comes first, the violent show or the violent kid (Vossen et al 2017, Robertson et al 2013, Slater et al

2004). Casual observation would suggest that violent TV shows are preferred primarily by individuals with violent tendencies; otherwise, the popularity of Game of Thrones and

Breaking Bad would be cause for alarm. And as noted, the implausible premise of such shows somewhat detract from their real-world reliability; while shows depicting bullying

(Pretty Little Liars, Mean Girls), workplace harassment (The Office, Silicon Valley), and intimate partner abuse (Big Little Lies) arguably could perpetuate and reinforce both perpetrator and bystander behavior. As will later be discussed, this potential effect is the subject of the following research.

CHAPTER 4 THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES

Violence as Instrumental

Aggression that is proactive and/or incentive by definition has an intended effect.

The “instrumentality” of aggression refers to the use of specific symbols that are coded to convey harm; thus, instrumental aggression differs from affective aggression, or aggression that is learned in response to negative stimuli and reproduced in similar situations (Randall 2001, 38). The behaviorist perspective had limited applicability to the study of bullying, abuse, and harassment, because an aspect of the individual victim is a primary stimulus for the aggressive response (Frisén et al. 2007, 754-55; Hauge et al.

2009, 353). Affective aggression is best used to interpret interpersonal social violence in that victims and aggressors overlap to some extent; some of this diffused aggression might be attributed to aversive aggression that has been learned in prior interactions.

However, the incentive for power attainment or harm to others is more salient than the need for deflection or disguise, so passive aggression tends to take place over active aggression in situations with high monitoring (e.g. bullying in the workplace, an abusive partner in public), and aggression tends to be direct more than indirect. Note Faris and

Felmlee,

Little research examines whether aggression is, in fact, an effective way of gaining or maintaining status … but more important for our purposes is whether aggression is believed to increase status. To our knowledge, this question has not been addressed directly, but research has established a correlation between status concerns and aggression. [2011, 50-51]

In an institutional environment, bullying or harassment can fulfill these incentives of status gain, which are enforced by the ideological constraints of power dynamics in those institutions. As the power dynamics are perpetuated and sustained, so too is

incentive aggression that serves the symbolic behavior that would create those dynamics. So, “Bullying is recognized as a subset of peer victimization that is intentional, chronic, and characterized by an imbalance of power between victim and aggressor” (Felix et al. 2011, 234), and “Sexual harassment […] might be chosen as a behavior for enacting retribution not because the injustice was sex-related but because harassment is useful to the actor (e.g., a man whose boss treats him unfairly will harass a woman because it makes him feel powerful again)” (O’Leary-Kelly et al 2000, 376).

Although bullies are commonly assumed to suffer from low self-esteem, Strandell

(2016) notes that studies of the relationship between self-esteem, as well as cheating on tests, have had inconsistent results (see also Fanti and Henrich 2015), likely because self-esteem is not a tank filled to a certain volume (or not), but rather a performance in context of socioecological cues, and one intended to cultivate self-image

(Fanti and Henrich 2015, 8). Self-esteem is a primary motivator in a hierarchy of needs, and is constructed through self-schemas-cognitive models that incorporate knowledge of one’s self, explains Strandell,

The input of the context is vital in determining how the specific schema is constructed as cues from the context provide the initial points of activation in a network, and cognition is therefore always situated and context- dependent. This context of cognition is socio-culturally organized in multiple ways, including the structure, function and esthetics of the physical environment, networks of social relationships, institutionalized practices, and so on. […] Since schemas reflect patterns repeatedly observed in the environment, stable socio-cultural institutions provides [sic] stability to the repeated reproduction of certain schemas, including self-schemas. [2016, 19]

Self-schemas, like any, are subject to cognitive dissonance when experience does not match expectation (see Tavris and Aronson, DiMaggio 1997). Strandell cites two studies observing that being presented with information contrary to one’s

conception of their self led to aggressive behavior; similarly, Merten observed that bullies often targeted peers who challenged their own identity and associated expectations for “growing up.”

Moreover, the institutional environment supports schemas that may empower instrumental aggression. Implicit attitudes toward those who are “different” or governing social interactions that do or don’t go as expected occur within a distributed network of sociopsychological and environmental cues, including institutional affects (see

Shepherd 2011). As Merten (1994) noted, an institution organized around ideas of youths’ progress and development carries significant pressure and associated symbols of “growing up”; being confronted by one who does not match those paradigms challenges the schemas recalled in that cultural context, and the resulting cognitive dissonance inspires an aggressive response. In short, an institutional environment holds different behavior than that which might transpire in the same situation in a different environment; inquiry into interpersonal social violence must be grounded in inquiry into its contextual cueing of instrumental aggression.

“School’s Out”: Overview of Bullying as Adaptive Aggression

Violence in the Social Milieu

To examine social problems that involve violence, we must clarify violence as a cultural phenomenon. Although violence is popularly characterized as warfare, raiding, rape, bloodsport, or murder, any type of instrumental aggression, that is, aggressive behavior that imports cultural norms to have a negative effect, is violence. Moreover, violence occurs within, in response to, and because of economic, physical, and historical factors in a sociological context. Thus, violence may occur specifically and

uniquely in institutions, including schools and workplaces. Such violence can be reinterpreted as ecological-symbolic behaviors rather than social ills or psychological abnormalities.

Therefore, instrumental aggression may be analyzed as a function of human social negotiations. This model has been well explored by paleoanthropologists, who have taken an ecological approach to explain the relationship between violence, as analyzed through osteological study of skeletons from archaeological sites (Tung 2007), and social cohesion or adaptability, as analyzed through historical documents, archaeological excavation, and DNA analysis (Rosenberg 1998; Anestis 2006;

Wrangham 1999).

In particular, aggression may be considered a stress response in a limited environment. Aggression may be dichotomized as aversive or incentive; either may be heightened in response to stress. It’s also notable that learned negative responses to environmental stresses, especially in an institutional environment, can be imported into other stress situations as affective aggression, a corollary of instrumental aggression

(Randall 2001, 38). Bullying, along with other emotional violence such as partner abuse, may be a maladaptive stress response, but is performed with intent to gain power or resources, and thus may be categorized as instrumental aggression.

Moreover, symbolic violence must not be characterized as less “real” than physical violence. This distinction is of central importance in understanding and preventing school bullying, as most of bullying is not physical. Symbolic violence reflects the imbalance of power that Dan Olweus noted as a defining factor of bullying, it is

“instituted through the adherence that the dominated cannot fail to grant to the dominant” (Bourdieu 2004, 339). Indeed,

Aggressive children have been found to increase normative beliefs supporting aggression and these beliefs, in turn, have been linked to increases in aggressive behavior […] Yet, if victims believe that bullying is normative and unlikely to be sanctioned by peers or adults, they may be less likely to report being bullied, increasing the likelihood that they will be repeatedly targeted. [Guerra et al. 2011, 297]

With repeated targeting comes the chronic dimension of aggression that also characterizes bullying. Chronic aggression is not an extended response to a single stimulus, but a sustained nexus of social stimulus, testosterone flood, and cognitive dissonance that emerges from a feedback loop of aversion and defense (Randall 2001,

35-37, Merten 1994, 40; Crick et al. 2002, 1135; see also Tavris and Aronson 2008).

These loops are reproduced in a social situation with shared markers; that is, if a person experiences acute aggression from a stranger on the street, neither person’s response will be extended past the duration of the encounter. It may diffuse to another situation; for example, a proactive aggressive act such as a mugging can engender raised cortisol and testosterone levels in the victim that he may then release as reactive aggression when he gets to work and snaps at a colleague. The workplace, however, has multiple sets of markers that bound the domain and restrict the diffusion of reactive aggression.

Thus, when the mugging victim “takes it out” on a colleague, he is creating a new stimulus to which his colleague responds, according to her relative power in the social world of that workplace, which they have both internalized. If she is either “lower” or

“higher” than he is, one of the persons will probably find themselves penalized by the other. The alternate would be for the mugging victim to not show aggression against anyone else after the interaction with the mugger has ended-i.e. to practice stimulus

control. The theory of deterrence relies on the behaviorist idea that stimulus control is learned by potential punishment. However, in the example above, snapping at a colleague isn’t done after the aggressor evaluates whether or not he would benefit or be penalized. Deterrence theory cannot be applied to proactive aggressive situations, precisely because the incentive of the aggression is the salient internal stimulus. The aggressor cannot have learned a penal response to an internal stimulus. And in reactive or defensive aggression, the adaptive potential is what is learned; deterrence operates on the social actor’s internalized rules of the present situation. The intern whose boss yells at him may “hold his tongue” to avoid negative repercussions of defensive aggression. However, more often than not, the deterrence is perpetuated through the hegemonic aggression of the workplace, not through responses learned in individual interactions. In fact, beyond an existing conflict between the two individuals, the main predictor of workplace bullying is role conflict, that is, mixed authority and group status that leads to cross-group aggression (see Hauge et al. 2009). That is, interns will already “know” to hold their tongue because they are immediately labeled and given a subordination ideology when they begin their position.

Deterrence theory and the frustration-aggression model are both limited in their ability to explain institutional aggression (see Felson 1978, 206). They rely upon reductionist stimulus-response and transfer mechanisms that do not incorporate the complex semiotics and power differentials in social situations. Notes Randall,

It can be argued that since most theories of aggression comes from experimental psychology, where research design has often contrived situations whereby strangers aggress each other, this minimizes their usefulness to the study of bullying in contexts where individuals know each other and modify their interpersonal behaviour accordingly. [2001, 33]

Moreover, that behavior must be modified according to the internalized meaning of the act. Therein lies the juncture between the symbolism of violence and the instrumentality of the aggressive act. Aggressive acts are instrumental but may constitute larger acts of violence in the “theatre” of terror. Whitehead (2004) discourages an emphasis on instrumentality, arguing that the performative power of violence is the draw, especially when the violence is “senseless” (e.g. the 9/11 attacks;

58). However, aggressive acts need not constitute a bullying culture by virtue of their

“performative felicity”; a bully does not usually seek to dump pig’s blood on the head of her victim. In fact, bullies are likely to conceal their behavior except where it is advantageous. Again, aggression is conducted in an environment of evolutionary adaptedness, and the bully must calculate an effect-danger ratio (Randall 2001, 48) to determine whether the risks of being aggressive are less than the power and pleasure derived from it. This thought process suggests that instrumental aggression is not a mere reaction or redirection, and is in itself a performance of ideologies particular to the history and social pressures of the situation (Whitehead 2004, 63).

In summation, “[B]ullying includes several key elements, physical, verbal, or psychological attack or intimidation that is intended to cause fear, distress, or harm to the victim; an imbalance of power, with the more powerful child oppressing the less powerful one; absence of provocation for the victim; and repeated incidents between [or among] the same children over the prolonged period” (Farrington 1993, 384).

Abnormality and Adaptation

It is firstly important to note that abnormalities are assigned to a set of cultural taboos, or inversely to a set of cultural norms. Psychological disorders align with

specific sociocultural views more than the empiricist mental health experts who diagnose them might like to admit; culture is a salient influence on pathologization of social behaviors, as Nancy Scheper-Hughes noted in her examination of schizophrenia in rural Ireland (1976), and the replacement of the term “abnormal” by more politically correct phrases in psychiatry does not change this. Notable bullying expert Barbara

Coloroso (2004) describes bullying as a symptom of a personality disorder (PD), and places responsibilities on the enabling bystanders as well. Her six signs of being a bully seem to be drawn from the DSM-IV’s list of symptoms for psychological disorders

(PDs). Leising et al. analyzed the latent norms expressed in DSM-IV’s PD criteria and found significant clustering that suggested that PDs with a particularly negative association, including schizophrenia and narcissism, were diagnosed based on a high rate of concurrently rejected norms (2009, 231). They characterize aggressive behavior in a way that Coloroso does not, as an adaptation,

The term “adaptive” may be used to identify a psychological mechanism as enhancing fitness in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA). …When used this way, an “adaptation” represents an inherited trait that was created in the process of natural selection, because it helped solving species-typical problems. […]

Different kinds of adaptation may conflict with each other, For example, a person’s behavior may have been adaptive within the EEA, but contradict contemporary cultural expectations. [2009, 232]

Coloroso’s work is effectively prescriptive but does not explore the epidemiology of bullying. Leising et al. are discussing the sociocultural aspects of psychiatric diagnosis and their limitation in regarding undesirable or taboo behaviors as adaptive but note that such assessments of dysfunctional personality connect to interpersonal expectations and apparent functions in the EEA (2009, 234-36). These behaviors encompass both intentional and defensive aggression, according to both the DSM-IV

criteria and the list of norms generated by inverting PD criteria; these behaviors, by virtue of being adaptive, may appear on the neurological level (234). Indeed, primatologists are examining the neurological basis and social function of aggression among chimpanzees, bonobos, and other close relatives of humans (see Wrangham

1999; Anestis 2006).

As discussed above, it is clear that aggressive tendencies are biological and moreover, adaptive. It is also clear that violence is not the same as aggression, although it is frequently an offshoot of aggressive impulses. And if aggression is adaptive, it is likely that violence, or systematic intentional aggression, is a cultural response to environmental pressures.

According to the social algorithm model proposed by Daphne B. Bugental, the uneven or sparse distribution of resources selects for social complexity, which entails her Coalitional and Hierarchical Power algorithms. She notes that testosterone, the primary neurochemical associated with aggression, is linked to grouping and exclusion behaviors, and that children’s social negotiations are an example of this (2000, 197).

Moreover, if a particular social behavior is a phenotype, it may be alternately applied or selected for depending on varying environmental variables (Fuentes 2004, 714); in

Bugental’s terminology, it applies differentially according to social domain (2000, 188).

Thus, violent behavior and intentional aggression are adaptive responses to stimuli in a fluctuating matrix of ecological, social, and genetic variables.

The Institutional Environment

Humans thus are social actors within a socioecological context, and their behaviors are both mediated by and responsive to fluctuating selective pressures.

However, it is important to distinguish social actor from individual, as the former is an epistemological term and the latter is a sociocultural condition. One’s being as an individual is culturally mediated and may change according to the actor’s participation in a given environment (Markus and Kitayama 1991, 226). One must consider an actor’s behavior in context of the prevailing norms, rules, and expectations of an institution, and to consider how the ecology of a sociocultural institution impacts “individual” behavior.

Several psychocultural factors contribute to the prevalence of bullying in U.S. schools, and indeed, in society, but all relate to two major social phenomena, the normalization of violence and aggression on a state level and arrested psychological and economic development on an individual level. These phenomena are not restricted to the United

States, but the Westernized, technological world, as an economic, information, cultural, and scientific superpower with the cultural logic of industry behind it, creates a particular developmental pattern and necessitates a justification ideology that allows the use of state violence to maintain its privileges. U.S. citizens may experience cognitive dissonance produced by the conflict between the ideas of the individualistic, materialistic American Dream and its associated socioeconomic expectations, and the imperialistic, supramoralizing expectations of sociopolitical cohesion. To resolve irreconcilable ethos, they seek to affirm the normalized action of the state, which includes violence. Thus, this resolution entails violent acts of oppression, exclusion, and manipulation that symbolizes that state violence. The United States is a world leader that requires two things. First, citizens are socialized to accept nationalistic ideology while desiring to serve a useful function in society—thus embracing a competitive ethos in their interactions with peers—and youth are expected to develop at a standardized

clockwork buffered by laws and derived from a factory system (see Beane 1979, 212,

Rogoff 2003, 156-58)—the vestiges of which affect how children interact with one another. Second, the U.S. encourages to serve as cultural innovators first, social contributors second.

The sociopolitical ethos and the treatment of youth in American society both inform the development of youth-oriented institutions and their ideologies. Children are discouraged from non-normative aggression, instructed to behave as individuals while conforming to the expectations of group behaviors, encouraged to develop social and professional skills that will make them “informed citizens” suitable for the labor force, as per the capitalist and imperialist ethos of their institutions. Perhaps the most important institution is the school; since children of all socioeconomic status, class, and race, have been integrated into schools and excluded from labor environments, the school has become the singular childhood locale for most American children. This milieu of expectations and rules provides for an especially bounded yet salient environment, which provides significant ecological pressures and a symbolic context for sociopsychological mediation. Moreover, it is ontologically linked to childhood; although adults participate in the institution, its existence is explicitly to govern the intellectual and social development of children. As a species, humans experience a period of arrested development, in which they are born with a relatively large brain and not much else.

They depend entirely on their caretakers for food, shelter, and learning; they have to learn to communicate their needs and wants, and they will not be ready for even basic labor for at least two years. But psychologically, humans mature at vastly different rates

across cultures, because social markers of maturity are set differently in each society, and often have no “psychological” component. Notes Rogoff,

[I]n middle-class communities, the role of a particular culture institution- formal schooling-is so central that its contributions to children’s developmental transitions are often overlooked. […] Differences in development often are considered to be differences in the rate of maturation, along a natural developmental time courses, perhaps sped up or retarded by generic environmental circumstances. [2003, 171]

Among the descendants of the Maya living in southern Belize, children do not absorb information by sitting idly at home staring at a screen. Nor are they viewed as

“schoolchildren,” a significantly Western phrase that describes the expectation to learn for 17 years before applying their knowledge to the real world, meanwhile doing chores in exchange for certain privileges of fun. Mayan children attend school and church, and they do household chores like a typical American child, but they are not children in training for adulthood, but village members who happen to be children. The markers of maturity or socioeconomic contribution are not linked to their age or grade level (Rogoff

2003, 154). As Western ideas of childrearing and leisure time continue to pervade the world, there will be change, as indeed there were hints of when I conducted my fieldwork in Belize in 2007 examining the interaction among traditional forms of agriculture and wildlife use and Westernized practices such as single-cropping for profit and pet-keeping for entertainment.

Of course, Mayan children go to school. The key difference is that their schools are not the markers of their identity, nor do they encompass the factory-influenced metrics or benchmarks for children. The sociopsychological influence of IQ tests, age- based milestones, and ranking among students should not be understated. Recent criticisms of an emphasis on standardized testing in many states only address the tip of

the iceberg of the scientized, industrial system for children’s development (Rogoff 2003,

162-63; see also Hine 2000). Although this approach is not exclusive to the United

States, its combination with the individualistic ethos and post-industrial shift of the early

20th century creates an environment with particular social, psychological, and economic pressures. (See also Fabrega and Miller 1995.)

In particular, as children of all socioeconomic status were increasingly integrated into the urban school systems in the late 19th century, G.S. Hall’s seminal work on anti- individualistic, job-oriented schooling heightened the dissonance between the American ethos and the socioeconomic demands on children. Hall also developed the idea of adolescence as a liminal transition from childhood into maturity, as a prime example of now-defunct biogenetic recapitulation (Hine 1999, 36). Meanwhile, children no longer had an “occupational identity,” and instead were forced to adopt youth culture, and in some cases, a life of crime to meet their economic needs (Hine 1999, 19,293; Rogoff

2003, 173). Because of the rise in teenage crime and the new idea that adolescents were more primitive than adults, non-normative behavior was labeled as abnormal and became aligned with adolescent “tendencies.” Still, the expectation that behavior would necessarily improve upon maturity led to the harmful ideas that violence among children was a natural part of childhood, the idea that “boys will be boys” is entirely drawn from a

Western-centric, evolutionist view of human development that aligned children with

“primitives”-an association woefully repeated through anthropological and sociological texts through the mid-20th century.

Thus, violence among U.S. children did not emerge from the shift of lower-SES children into schools; certainly, intentional aggression occurred in the workhouses and

in domestic settings. However, the dissonance produced by contradictory expectations in a pseudo-Darwinian institutional ethos and a loss of both community integration and occupational identity had to be resolved by dialectical social negotiations, some of which involved intentional aggression. Children’s ideas of social worth and incentive in the new institution were wrought from an emphasis on achievement of milestones and metrics, continually observed and socialized by parents, guardians, and educators and enhanced by the self-esteem movement (Rogoff 2003, 231). The school institution’s combined ideologies and praxis of the educational, labor, political, and social-emotional systems have led to a unique environment that selects for and informs symbolic violence, what we call bullying.

Schools assume an authority over children that is complementary to domestic authority held by parents and guardians. After schools, rather than workhouses, became the normative socioeconomic locale for youths, the general expectation of any such institution to provide for social integration was, for youths, transliterated from an expectation of workforce contribution via labor to such contribution via education (Hine

1999, 289-294), and for social integration via school-based activities (Rogoff 2003, 173-

174). Education became aligned with notions of civil engagement and assimilation into normative psychology. Schools became a venue for sociopsychological education, and school policies and procedures constitute an ideological contract with which youths are expected to engage. For U.S. schools, that hegemony entails a complex set of characteristics derived from the overlapping and sometimes conflicting ethos of consumption, capitalism, individualism, and equality. One can see these institutional effects when American schoolchildren compare report cards or gold stars, vie for spots

on teams at P.E. or in extracurriculars, and adopt some manner, fashion, or celebrity idolatry that “everyone is doing.” Culture is performative, and the school institution provides myriad opportunities for impression management, but in a hierarchical environment that boils under tension between the normative and the deviant.

Thus, bullying is an adaptive behavior that is meant to regulate a social actor’s level of power and resources in a social environment. That is, instrumental aggression is one way to alter one’s own, or others’, levels of social capital. Indeed, Grotpeter and

Crick (1996) found that “relationally aggressive children did not report high levels of self- disclosure to their friends, but rather that their friends could self-disclose to them,

[suggesting] that relationally aggressive children may elicit private information from friends” (2337). Any social behavior imports its expected outcomes and codes of conduct from the prevailing ideologies and norms of the social context in which it occurs. Social capital, as the capacity to influence others’ behavior and to collect social resources (access, support, validation) for oneself, is accumulated, transferred, or maintained within its particular sociocultural context. Social capital may be categorized as information, influence, social credentials, or reinforcement (e.g. in a high school, homework help, student government office, prom dates, positive nicknames); it may be subjected to institutional rules, such as grade level or certification, or (more relevant in bullying) social rules that exist within a given institutional context with its embedded resources (Lin 1999, 30).

Children

On a cellular level, the brains of children are interconnected in a different way from adults’ brains. Grey matter peaks in adolescence, after which the biological

equivalent of maturation, myelination, spurs the development of white matter tracts that serve as major pathways for memory and attention. One major effect of myelination is the improvement of inhibitory mechanisms that temper, among other things, the neurological response to negative stimuli.

In Hummer’s 2015 review of studies of the effects of exposure to media violence on adolescent, he notes a consistent finding that exposure to media violence, especially action-oriented exposure such as playing a first-person shooter game, attenuates the inhibitory mechanisms that essentially temper the “fight or flight” response to negative stimuli. In other words, “desensitization” to violence is essentially the brain reverting to its reptilian form. Hummer’s research group found that frontal cortical myelination was reduced in adolescents with higher exposure to violent media (1796). Of course, media violence is a proxy for any negative stimulus; frequent negative stimuli should have a similar effect on the neural development of children.

Given this and the knowledge that aggression may be aversive or incentive, is evident that aggression in children is a product of a conflicted biocultural state and is only partly due to genetic predisposition; due in part to myelination, as children gain language and social abilities, physical aggression decreases (Alink et al. 2006, 963;

Brendgen et al. 2005, 932), after such overstimulating developments as that of theory of mind (Alink et al. 2006, 962). In other words, up until children are capable of symbolizing their world and empathizing in interpersonal interactions, aggression by children is largely biological, and ought not to be called “bullying” or “violence.” There are no “bad seed” children of a young age who simply desire to hurt others. However, the social learning model as developed by Albert Bandura incorporates the major

sociopsychological factors in intentional aggression through a split aversive-incentive model. Aversion-motivated aggression is a type of defensive response, but while in the animal world it entails stings and bites against a perceived danger, in the human world it operates to relieve cognitive dissonance (Merten 1994, 40; see also Tavris and Aronson

2008). Aversive aggression does not operate outside the genetic and environmental effects on children, although the latter certainly operate on the schemas that define the acceptable experiences. Incentive aggression in the animal world would be attempts to catch prey; “prey” for humans in a socioecological context might include the need to accumulate personal power. Brendgen et al. draft a model that is epistemologically similar to the multiple-variable model of ecologically-mediated sociohistorical factors discussed above,

In the best fitting model, genetic effects accounted for only around 20% of the variance of social aggression, another 20% was explained by shared environmental influences, and about 60% was explained by unique environmental factors. The present study is thus the first to show that […] social aggression seems to be determined to a lesser extent by genetic factors and to a greater extent by environmental factors than physical aggression. [2005, 942]

Moreover, as children’s social knowledge expands and their neural networks are increasingly regulated by learned codes for behavior, their capacity for incentive aggression increases. The weak relationship between genetic predisposition and social aggression, particularly aversive, is reflected in the lack of disparity between male and female aggressors, despite the biological distinctions in testosterone, which is linked to physical aggression in both humans and chimps, but does not determine aggressive behavior (van den Berghe 1974, 782; Anestis 2006, 542; Alink et al. 2006, 956).

The primacy of environmental factors in the development of aggression and the finding that tendencies for physical aggression decline after early childhood

(notwithstanding particularly strong environmental or neurological effects) are reflected in meta-surveys of sociological and psychological research (Alink et al. 2006, 962-63; see also Tremblay 2008). These surveys, as well as Alink et al. in their research, take caution with the classical social learning model of childhood aggression, endorsing a model that combines sociological factors with environmental, genetic, and epigenetic factors, each of which impact the neurological and psychological bases of violence

(Loeber and Pardini 2008, 2492), which, as discussed above, is a complex of socially coded and mediated aggressive behaviors.

It is important to note that violence among children is not synonymous with bullying. Bullying is specifically an aversive-aggressive behavior that dually serves the incentives of affiliation and agonism. According to Due et al.,

bullying is defined as a deliberate, repeated or long-term exposure to negative acts performed by a person or group of persons regarded of higher status or greater strength than the victim. […] Also social acts such as exclusion from the peer group are considered bullying. [2005, 129]

Leising et al. discuss Bugental’s social algorithms as bounded adaptive domains in which problems are solved by various attachment-based behaviors; naturally, not all problems are solved by affiliation (2009, 236). Intentional aggression may enforce present affiliations, secure access to resources, and affirm the actor’s expectations of the present social situation. In an institution where the actor’s conception of identity is tied to structural codes and shared schemata-or the perception thereof-aversive- incentive aggression reinforces the actor’s perceived social positionality. The institutional expectations are thus especially salient in the actor’s interdependent self, and the actor interacts with the situation as a “unit of representation” separate from, and

perhaps more salient than, the representations of the distinct actors (Markus and

Kitayama 1991, 232).

As schools in the United States are youth-oriented institutions with an inclusive child group, exclusionary behaviors operate within a child-specific socioecological context that imparts particular incentives to its members, bullying is a means of adaptive violence that relies upon positionality and the perception thereof. A child’s network centrality may inform his or her choices for social aggression and the affiliation with peers in doing so (a clique), but those choices serve as an individual incentive- defensive behavior, and alliances may be broken at any time to favor the central actor

(see Faris and Felmlee 2011). These behaviors are not always immediately apparent to adults in schools because of important sociocultural differences between the child and adult domains of the school institution. However, bullying behaviors do appear in the adult domain in other institutions, such a workplace, where they have been assigned a different term and definition (harassment, namely). By understanding these fundamental processes as they occur in the childhood period, however, anthropologists may better elucidate the occurrence of violence on a socioecological basis as distinctive from a biological basis.

Thus, in the United States, the phenomenon of bullying is derived from the combination of arrested development (both biological and socioeconomic) with normalized intentional aggression, and entails a sense of entitlement, an acceptance of subpar treatment of those seen as subordinate, inferior, foreign, or weak, and focus on the individual’s interests and promotion, rather than those of the group, or society or world at large. Although these processes occur in all humans, they occur differentially

according to sociocultural context. An interdisciplinary understanding of the institutional, biological, and socioecological factors in bullying can facilitate the application of anthropology to anti-bullying programs, treatment of psychological disorders among children, and conflict mediation techniques for educators.

That’s So Wrong: Overview of Bullying and Violence in Social Discourse

Violence as Symbolic

The human brain is a biological product, but through its chemical processes produces a set of experiential phenomena that are situated in the person’s cultural- linguistic and sociohistorical fields of cognition. This “encultured brain’s” testosterone, cortisol, adrenaline, and oxytocin do not run the brain outside of the “mind,” but rather shape and respond to the cognitive processes through which the person engages with and composes their everyday world.

In applying Charles S. Pierce’s system of semiotics to the performance of these socialized impulses, we see that

[t]he analysis of communicative practice involves minimally a set of three moves, an initiation, a response, and a follow-up that confirms or disconfirms what is said. Interpretation in such exchanges involves two sets of signaling mechanisms, symbolic signs that communicate by grammatical and lexical rules; and indexical signs that communicate by virtue of conventionalized associations between signs and context, associations that have been established through previous communicative practice. [Gumperz and Cook-Gumperz 2005, 282]

Here, practice refers to action mediated by symbols. All performative biological action, for example, sexuality, speech, or violence, are subject to these processes; the social actor initiates a message, which is interpreted in the alter’s mind according to social knowledge (the signs) in an individualized cultural matrix (the index). Moreover,

the message is enforced by its repeated consumption and social dissemination.

Because bullying necessarily has to reach a serious level for an incident to be

“newsworthy,” newswriters must reproduce and resolve the cognitive dissonance produced by the incident through moralization. Hall writes,

New, problematic, or troubling events, which breach our expectations and run counter to our “common-sense” constructs,” to our “taken-for-granted” knowledge of social structures, must be assigned to their discursive domains before they can be said to “make sense.” The most common way of “mapping” them is to assign the new to some domain or other of the existing maps of the “problematic social reality.” [Hall 1980, 134]

For example, most news stories use the narrative form to engage the viewer; tales of bullying and intimate partner abuse have a particular tendency to use tragic tropes. The appearance of abuser and victim archetypes in the entertainment media reflects the social norms that describe the bullying phenomenon, that is, the hero-villain index of Western morality tales. As the characters in news stories are engaged with as symbols, so too are the real-life victims, bullies, and bystanders. Children experiencing a sense of change, or rather development, of self—whether due to puberty, the social demands of the school institution, or more likely, a combination thereof—are working hard to manage this impression for themselves and others. They perceive each other as symbols of these changes, and potentially as threats to their impression management.

Thus, aversive aggression is designed to defend against this (Merten 1994, 40); similarly, workplace aggressors assuage their feelings through aversive aggression that may take on a sexual nature (O’Leary-Kelly et al 2000, 375-376). Moreover, the aggression itself is symbolic in that the people represent social norms and the self- perception of each party (Whitehead 2004, 59; see also Frisén et al. 2007, Felix et al.

2011). Abusers have adopted a normative perspective on aggression, while victims

have normatized their victimization. Victims and bullies are both deviant in each other’s perception but differ in whether their deviance is structural or interpersonal, active or passive.

One might assume that if bullying is considered normative, or at least a normative response to certain stimuli, it has a protective effect for the bullies, and/or the risk of being considered deviant or abnormal for bullying is outweighed by its benefits

(Guerra et al 2011, 297; Frisén et al. 2007, 759). The performance of bullying is intended to both produce a message and reproduce the power dynamic that allows the violence’s benefits to outweigh any negative effects.

Similarly, normalization of sexual assault and intimate partner violence takes the form of what’s often called “rape culture.” The term, somewhat a misnomer, refers to the set of assumptions, biases, ideals, and unspoken rules that mediate, justify, and perpetuate a socioecological framework in which aggressors of this nature can have their behavior excused by bystanders. Write Barnett et al,

From the perspective of gender schema theory, rape myth acceptance may be conceptualized as gender-based cognition in which concepts like social dominance and sexual aggressions are stereotype-consistent for men, while modesty and passivity are stereotype-consistent for women. […] Rape myths may be used as cognitive justifications of the stereotype- consistent behaviors (e.g., excusing male rapists) as well as punishments for stereotype-inconsistent behaviors (e.g., engaging in victim blaming to punish stereotype-inconsistent behaviors such as dressing immodestly, wanting to have sex, or even resisting sexual aggression). [emphasis added; 2017, 743-44]

While the behavior is condemned as “abnormal,” its frequency, compared to low conviction rates and the wide body of qualitative data showing that victims generally feel doubted, ignored, or even harassed, points to a passively normalized paradigm in which victims are typically blamed for the assault or abuse (Grubb and Turner 2012, 444).

Bystanders are subject to “conformity pressure” to adopt and promote attitudes that frequently occur within their social network; in fact, those with strong attitudes against sexual violence may be more susceptible to the conformity pressure (Itaru 2003).

Lonsway et al (2008) concur, noting that rape myths serve important socioecological and psychological functions, providing justification for sexually aggressive behavior. In a review of research on this topic, they find that rape mythology revolves around denial or diminishment of the problem and assignment. However, among respondents in those studies, rape was considered deviant as commonly as it was considered not serious or the victim’s fault. Essentially, the heavily symbolized roles of masculine entitlement and aggression and feminine manipulation and submission guide the script that encourages self-justification in order to preserve cognitive models of a gendered power dynamic. While people are morally against rape, they still place blame on the victim or think only “bad” people rape.

Olson et al, in a 1982 review and subsequent study of advertising effects, found that cognitive responses somewhat flexibly mediate belief systems and (perceived) amount of information about a brand. Extrapolated to a trending topic, their findings suggest that each moment of engagement with news content or social network commentary about interpersonal social violence would trigger an individual’s schema about that topic, and potentially reinforce or change it. In particular, they found that the number of counter arguments produced in a cognitive response has a greater effect on beliefs than the number of support arguments. In this context, counter-arguments are not about the value of a brand, but about the social importance of an idea. That is, when

encountering a narrative about a victim of abuse positive to the victim, a belief that abuse victims somehow “asked for it” would reinforce itself rather than be changed.

Meanwhile, Olson et al found some evidence that support arguments moreso affect overall information; in other words, reading more known information about a topic enforces the individual’s current assumptions of knowledge and, potentially, a confirmation bias comes into play. That is, when encountering a narrative about a perpetrator of abuse negative to the perpetrator, a belief that abuse victims shouldn’t be blamed would be further enforced.

Violence as Criminal

The experience of violence is socially constructed from competing sociological models at each stage, the aggressor experiences the dissonance or perceived conflict and acts upon it according to the present situation, the victim receives the aggression in relation to her self-perception, and the bystander recognizes the event in accordance with his relationship with both the aggressor and the victim. All three parties then report and recall the event within their minds and to others, and build a narrative of the events.

In this way, all three parties are involved in the construction of violence if not aggression.

The secondary effect of this social construction is the assignment of criminality.

How an act of violence is characterized morally, legally, and socially is highly subject to various psychological and socioecological factors. Bullying is frequently regarded as an abnormal and abhorrent sociopsychological phenomenon, its characteristics bear some resemblance to the DSM-5’s antisocial personality disorder, which is a conduct disorder, that is, a disorder that involves legally and socially disruptive behavior. It is considered

by many to be an indicator of a bully’s poor mental health (Frisén et al. 2007, 755-56).

As bullying’s deviance is increased in the public eye, so does its criminality. In response to and through public outcry over youth violence that was motivated by bullying, all states but Colorado, California, and Kansas have enacted laws to prohibit bullying, mostly by creating new standards for schools to correct and prevent bullying behavior, which is often criminalized by the same laws.

Similarly, perpetrators of sexual assault are frequently described as “bad men.”

However, perpetrators with high social standing are treated differently. Deviance is more acceptable when an individual has sufficient social capital that to undermine them would threaten perceptions of the system’s stability.

In the Western perspective, having poor mental health is frequently linked to a limited capacity for reason; this dichotomy informs the “insanity defense” in the courts and the colloquial use of “crazy” to mean “without reason.” In the context of interpersonal social violence, this perspective reflects early definitions of psychopathy that were broad enough to include “moral insanity” as well as low intellectual ability and psychosis, drawing from the ideas of John Locke and James Cowles Prichard (Fabrega and Miller 1995, 444; see also Skeem et al 2011). In this view, without the capacity for reason-i.e. rationality-one is not in good mental health. Moreover, to engage in society, one is assumed to be rational and, moreover, knowledgeable about the expectations and benefits of such participation. For this reason, laws on bullying and harassment qualify prohibited behavior based on what behavior would be taken as disruptive by a reasonable person. This Ciceronian principle of ratio et oratio describes a combination of the mental and linguistic capacities of humans that enable social life. Hobbes’s

admittedly Western view on social order generally describes these fundamental processes of humanity, the understanding of other humans’ ability to speak and rationalize and the filtering of stimuli through the encultured brain require that social interactions occur within a realm of socially constructed reason. One who does not demonstrate reason is by extension both disruptive and in poor mental health. As bullying behavior is increasingly perceived as unreasonable, the labeling of bullies as of poor mental health is normalized.

Uggen and Blackstone too use this notion of “legal consciousness,” noting that both culturally available schemas and individual resources involved in labeling sexual harassment—the question is what a reasonable person would find abusive (2004, 65).

The inverse is that some culturally prescribed or protected aggressive behaviors might not be found abusive by even a reasonable person due to those schemas. Fabrega and

Miller note that social aggression, especially by and to adolescents, “is common cross- culturally, but its content and form depend on cultural context. It may be playful, ritualized, and normative (socially controlled and channeled) or oppositional, antisocial, and subversive (socially destructive and legally incriminating” (1995, 443). It’s worth noting that perception of harassment and bullying undergoes different processes outside the bully-bullied-bystander triad due to different societal-level processes (Uggen and Blackstone 2004); that is, what news media and the general public might label as bullying or sexual harassment might be taken as “part of how things go here” or “just messing around” by the people directly involved.

Morality and Rights

Morality is communicated in legal documents via explicit declarations of rights.

The Anglo-American concept of rights holds that they are derived from the wholeness and inclusion of a person; only for a contribution to the social order does one sacrifice rights, or their rights are removed from them for violations of the social order. As the

“conduct disorder’s” inclusion of bullying suggests, bullying is prohibited based on its disruption of the social order. Asserts the New Jersey law in its definitions of bullying,

“[It] has the effect of insulting or demeaning any student or group of students in such a way as to cause substantial disruption in, or substantial interference with, the orderly operation of the school” (2b).

Thomas Hobbes ties together the notions of social order and moral direction neatly in one paragraph in chapter 14 of Leviathan, arguing that no one should be submitted to “Prey” in preference over peace. The use of the word “prey” brings new meaning to this passage for readers who have internalized the predator-prey model generated in the public discourse surrounding bullying. Those who do as they like without regard for the social expectation to avoid “Warre” are not sacrificing their rights for the common good, and therefore are impinging on others’ rights. The Massachusetts law incorporates this element into its definition of bullying, bullying is a behavior that infringes on rights.

Among Western societies’ salient legal philosophies is Ciceronian “good faith” in the social order, which requires loyal and consistent adherence to the society in which one takes part. This term appears in U.S. anti-bullying law, most notably in that victims must report bullying “in good faith” in order to receive legal protection from bullying and not be marked as “retaliators.” Good faith, then, legitimizes victims’ participation in the

discourse but precludes bullies’ adherence to good faith. If one bullies or retaliates, they have not demonstrated good faith. The Massachusetts law makes explicit the implicit linkage of these two behaviors, A “Perpetrator” is “a student who engages in bullying or retaliation.”

Those who engage in bullying behavior may be criminally charged under laws that don’t specifically refer to bullying. In several high-profile cases of the past few years, the offenders were indicted for illegal stalking, harassment, assault, or conspiracy charges, as described above.

Whose Line Is It Anyway?

Mean Girls (and Boys, and Kids in General): Children’s Social Roles

In the 1980s, Dan Olweus developed the first definition of bullying that imported that notion of power imbalance and applied it to aggression among children; since then,

Olweus, Barbara Coloroso, and other researchers have developed a multifaceted definition that has variably included risk factors based on age, gender, and socioeconomic class; inciting incidents such as perceived social threat or cultural differences; and enactment for one’s own purposes against those of the victim

(Farrington 1993, 384-387). The last characteristic is essential to an examination of power imbalance as a major factor in bullying. Moreover, differential social contexts must be evaluated for their different ideological affects, including power dynamics

(Walton 2011, 132-33).

One such affect is the set of normative positionalities and responses at the multiple levels of the bullying dynamic-most commonly described through Coloroso’s roles of bully, bullied and bystander (based on Riches’ transactional model of the

perpetrator, victim, and observer). These roles are not mutually exclusive, although the health effects of experience in these roles correlate with their respective allocation (Felix et al. 2011, 244). These labels and codes of conduct are packed into media portrayals of bullying, notably in the literature and pop culture that characterizes bullies as social deviants.

The unique social situation of a school creates certain socioecological pressures to which social actors—especially students—must respond. Since social capital regulation is somewhat dependent on network position, we are restricting our network analysis by institutional bounds, here, the school. Schools in the United States are youth-oriented; networking behaviors operate within a child-specific socioecological context with particular incentives to its social actors. Research on the risk factors for bullying has suggested that bullying is a means of adaptive violence that partly relies upon positionality and the perception thereof (Duncan and Owens 2011, 308; Guerra et al. 2011, 305).

The ideological markers of the school institution enforce a relatively strong prohibition of deviance, despite what is in effect a dilution of rights and good faith requirements. Court precedents restrict freedom of speech in educational environments.

The environment is assigned legal protections to ensure that it is “safe” for its students but does not grant students rights in exchange for this protection. In addition, laws provide for the capacity of schools to carry out explicit socialization in lieu of a parental presence. Character education programs and declarations of school environments as civil environments import American personality norms into the functional assimilation of youths, who are, in the Western paradigm, less-than-formed adults, and certain rules of

the school institution, such as division by age and the standardized requirements of satisfactory grades to proceed with one’s education (Rogoff 2003, 155-156). Thus, the school defines its community in its execution of policies and curricula, in a reflexive arrangement that involves its derivation from a governing authority and its self- generating intent to contribute to the public, and by extension society. The ethos of childhood is created by this arrangement and bound by the public interpellated in and by the school. According to media theorist Michael Warner, “A public is a space of discourse organized by nothing other than discourse itself [and] exists by virtue of being addressed” (2002, 50; emphasis his).

As social actors, all engaging in the discursive practices of these overlapping groups constitute the body of social knowledge on youths and their behaviors, through

“dialogue, litigation, and mimesis” (Edelman and Suchman 1997, 502), and this knowledge feeds back to institutional participation as certain phenomena become naturalized (Deleuze 2004, 20; Rogoff 2003, 234). Such phenomena include bullying, which is still considered a “natural” part of the school experience (Frisen et al. 2007,

759).

Men Are From Mars

In a heteronormative and patriarchal society such as the U.S., men are generally expected not only in be in dominant roles, but to perform dominance through their roles.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in their sexual capacity and its sociocultural artifacts. In performing dominance in a non-romantic capacity, many men employ their sexual schema; in performing dominance in an institutional context, many men replicate sexual behavior even without sexual interest (Pina et al 2009, 133). Most alarmingly, in

performing dominance in a situated demanding a higher power dynamic, whether it is war or personal affirmation, many men replicate sexual behavior.

Moreover, resource theory suggests that men might pursue women-or abuse them-as a means of obtaining social capital. In particular, they might enact instrumental violence against partners to ensure continuation of patriarchal dominance (see Gage and Hutchinson 2006).

A common thread through the spectrum of interpersonal social violence is the cultural notion of masculinity. Dovetailing with societal heteronormativity, the assertion of male as dominant as well as of masculinity as assertive, even callous, masculinity guides homophobic teasing, which opens a pathway to sexual harassment and battery.

Heterosexual masculinity is the norm in most middle schools, and youth behave in ways to affirm their heterosexuality publicly, and this can include sexual harassment perpetration. This is what we believe underlies the Bully- Sexual Violence pathway; sexual harassment perpetration is a way to combat against perceptions of gender non-conformity [Espelage et al 2015, 2544]

In a 2012 study, Espelage et al noted that the socioecological demands experienced by adolescents-namely, the puberty-fueled interest in the opposite sex- seemed to encourage their aggressive promotion of heteronormativity, “It stands to reason that the need for control and dominance that underlies bullying is transferred to increasingly escalating forms of aggression and into relationships characteristic of the developing adolescent” (61).

Attitudes and beliefs are further discussed in the next chapter, but for now, it suffices to explicate the gendered dynamic in a socioecological context.

Within an institutional context, contrary to expectations, sexually suggestive power machinations are more common, not less, due to the significant social demands

wrought by the institution. Similar to school bullying—and indeed, perpetuators thereof have been shown to end up as workplace harassers (Farrington 1993)—people employ adaptive, incentive aggression in order to attain and maintain social capital. While sexual harassment is certainly not the only mechanism, it potentially is the most available (see O’Donohue et al 1998). In a public school, multiple markers, including socioeconomic status, race/ethnicity, gender, and age are all at play; in many workplaces, members are among similar socioeconomic status and, depending on geographic factors, race, as well as age, gender remains as the basis of difference and therefore harassment.

“Boys Will Be Boys”: Gender Perspectives on Interpersonal Social Violence

Masculinity also seems to underpin rape myth acceptance and the perpetration of sexual assault and rape (Asencio 1999). Yet Barnett et al found that so-called dysfunctional beliefs predicted rape myth acceptance more than masculinity (2017); however, it is likely that masculinity as a societal construct informs commonly held beliefs about sexual conduct, even if self-reported masculinity has no direct effect on such beliefs. It is also possible that heteronormativity is the primary mediator, Espelage et al 2015, in the first study of homophobic teasing as a link between bullying and sexual harassment, found a clear predictive relationship between the two. Indeed,

Barnett et al (2017) found attitudes toward gender roles to be related to rape myth acceptance.

This is not to say that males are the exclusive perpetrators. Indeed, Sjoberg writes that women often perform pseudo-sexual acts of dominance during wartime

(2016). Ybarra and Thompson found that females perpetrated all forms of sexual

violence; in situational couple violence, females batter with equal coincidence with male perpetrators (2018). (See also Asencio 1999.) Through feminist theory, this phenomenon might be considered a symptom of hegemonic masculine aggression or internalized misogyny. While that’s difficult to measure, it is true that in the U.S., the male sexual positionality is considered the default and more salient or impressive, with many men and women denigrating “passive” sexual behavior performed by a man, using terms such as “ballsy” to approvingly refer to a confident person, or expressing a preference for a “traditional” hunting metaphor in which men pursue women, while it is improper for women to pursue men (Asencio 1999).

Winstok notes that the gender direction of abuse may entail very different sociocultural backdrops, and thus comparisons of male-on-female violence and female- on-male violence (or male-male or female-female violence, for that matter) are arbitrary in a cultural context (2007). Research must examine “the culture and society in which the relationship takes place and which dictates the perceptions of the parties of each other and their behaviors, a patriarchal culture in which men are expected to rule their wives and women to submit to their husbands” (2007, 356). Given this, the cultural expectations and psychological response of male victims to female abusers would be fundamentally different from those of female victims to male abusers, and this difference may explain why males, socialized to perceive themselves as occupying positions of power and control, might underreport abuse by women. Struckman-Johnson and

Struckman-Johnson found that rape myths surrounding male victims of rape were particularly salient in attitudes that male rape victims brought the attack on themselves and could have avoided it (1992, 96-97).

Elsewhere on the spectrum, gender attitudes predicted whether or not people defined behavior that might legally fall under the definition of harassment, battery, or assault as indeed those behaviors. According to Uggen and Blackstone, cultural definitions of deviant behavior occur at both individual and societal level processes of gender socialization and in power dynamics reflecting the domain in which they occur.

Thus, people of different genders literally perceive different expressions and standards differently (2004, 67). Females may overreact, and males may underreact. Those with more egalitarian attitudes were more likely to report harassment, apparently having it within their awareness and vocabulary to do so.

Moreover, race and ethnicity affect individuals’ likelihood to label harassment as such. Write Welsh et al,

the experiences of the white women with full citizenship rights in our study appear to be the most easily encapsulated by both legal and social science definitions of sexual harassment. Although white women’s perceptions of sexual harassment match most closely with legal understandings of sexual harassment, it may be that it is our legal understandings that mirror white women’s understandings of sexual harassment. The law is a powerful structuring mechanism for what is defined as sexual harassment. [2006, 103]

Legal artifacts must be interpreted as that and considered to reflect the demographics hegemonically represented, white, and male. Feminist theory would ask how a male-dominated system would permit penalization of sexual harassment of women, but the answer is simple, while the law provides a standard of measure, mythology is constructed and reconstructed in response to that, sexual harassment is the unwelcome and hostile repetitive perpetration of certain behavior, thus it is easily assigned to something “bad” people do and if an individual does it, it was certainly not

unwelcome or hostile. To achieve this resolution, one must attribute to the victim that she “wanted” or “asked for” it.

With regard to bullying, gender is certainly a mediating factor, but further mediation occurs along mental health parameters. Espelage and De La Rue (2013) found that depression was a significant predictor of bullying among girls. The nurturing stereotype of females aside, prosocial and compassionate behavior seems less likely among girls with depression-influenced aggression. A connection with depression would explain relational aggression’s stability among girls (Crick 1996). Gender schema theory would suggest that pressure to perform under those stereotypes would cause cognitive dissonance in a person afflicted with depression, which causes low social engagement, low self-esteem, and general disaffectedness with one’s environment. In response to the dissonance, the individual would experience a surge in aggression.

The 10 O’Clock News: The Public

The public perception of interpersonal social violence is constructed by and through its news coverage, salient texts from social scientists (often discussed in news articles, especially Dan Olweus and Barbara Coloroso), and legal proceedings, both legislative and judicial. Moreover, the public perception of interpersonal social violence defines the outlets for its expression and response. Indeed, bullying as a cultural phenomenon has been altered through scientific observation (Maguire 2013, 424), penalization (Boccanfuso and Kuhfeld 2011, 2), and sociolegal response (New Jersey

1044).

In Barbara Coloroso’s bullying triad, the bully-the bullied-the bystander, the bystander has the most pivotal role; they are the arbiter of justice, an additional player in

the game if they so choose, and the decider for whether the bullying continues or ceases. In a society permeated by discussions about bullying, the bystander role comprises both the individual in that triad and their position writ large—the overall ethos

(prevailing attitudes), habitus (culturally repetitive behavior), and language through which bullying is enacted, perceived, and addressed. Across behavioral and institutional domains, these constructs all occur within the superdomain of the consuming public, which entails an “embodied creativity and world-making of publicness” (Warner 2002,

54).

Bullying is illustrative of the larger spectrum of interpersonal social violence.

Interestingly, yet understandably, the public is particularly concerned with the spectrum’s behaviors and effects among children. Bullying among adults is called

“harassment” or “abuse”; yet those words carry a legal weight that “bullying” only recently gained. While it seems that bullying might deserve its own special category, it is important to note that the public has defined and continues to mediate each construct of

ISV behaviors. These “differential distributions of forms and practices [are] bases for naturalizing social categories and inequalities” (Briggs 2007, 332), namely the construal of rights for those participating in the institutions and, by virtue of address, the public.

“The focus is on the social categories rather than the unique identity of particular individuals,” says Bugental (2000, 196). What Bugental calls the coalitional group domain has powerful cognitive effects on behaviors and responses thereto, even on an individual scale, for that domain. “One’s own social identity is jointly established by one’s similarly to some and differences from others on socially important dimensions.

The definition of who ‘we’ are is based on differences (2000, 196). As an example, the

#MeToo and subsequent #TimesUp movements triggered a flood of agreement, while both popular discourse and news media generally vilified perpetrators of sexual harassment and abuse. On an individual level, however, the bystander effect is still very strong, and small-level coalitional or attachment domains mediate different responses.

As an example, an individual might be very inclined to agree that a given celebrity has behaved badly but is unwilling to acknowledge bad behavior by a friend. Similarly, on a large scale, people have been shown to adopt generalizations or prominent bias in their opinion, whether positive (e.g. patriotism in time of war) or negative (e.g. xenophobia in time of war), and overall to exhibit what might be called reductive attitudes and behaviors when offered generalizing information in an institutional or societal context.

Notes Slater,

The more closed the communication system within a social identity group, the more likely people will strongly identify with the group and view outgroup members with hostility (and perhaps, even as legitimate targets of violence). The effects of a closed communicative environment are likely to be magnified in the absence of a diverse and open communication environment in the larger society. [2007, 293]

That is, institutional effects constrain the “system,” and thus boost bystander behavior and encourage labeling of interpersonal social violence. Thus, people are more likely to engage in bystander or victim-blaming behavior when situated in a

“closed system.”

The debate over whether and how aggressive behavior may be spurred by exposure to media that depicts that behavior has revolved around children and has focused on depictions of physical aggression, in particular extreme or gory violence.

Although there is ample evidence that exposure to media violence contributes to aggressive behavior, particularly for males, some meta-analyses have pointed out some

epistemological problems, such as that those studies have relied upon observational methods and correlative analysis rather than on experimental or practical methodologies (Glymour et al 2008), or that the studies have accidentally measured a different cognitive-emotional response, such as sympathy rather than empathy (Vossen et al 2017). In addition, media effects vary by the delivery method, Mira Sotirovic (2001) gives an overview of the cognitive effects of “hard news” media versus “infotainment”, noting that the relative complexity of information parallels the viewer’s complexity of thought about policies and current events. Slater (2007, 289) notes that media reinforcement maintains current attitudes. Therefore, “shock theatre” does not motivate intervention. Similarly, aggressive presentation of alternate information encourages cognitive dissonance effect of hunkering down into preconceptions/biases.

In the United States, legal consciousness is comprised of notions of identity and morality, together which generate and reinforce an assumption of rights gained through participation and imagination (Geertz 1985, 175). Some institutions serve as filtering agents between passed (enacted) law and de facto (performed) law; for example, school boards are intermediaries between lawmakers and school administrators, and they, along with other professional groups, such as prosecutors, newswriters, and teachers, construct the salient norms of their respective organizations (Edelman and

Suchman 1997, 498-499).

This sociopsychological need to defend rights permeates the discursive practices of an emergent anti-violence public, people are called out (that is, interpellated) as members of the public, invited to comment on ISV, and become legal actors; they become imbued with legal consciousness,

In this model, legality is conceptualized as interpretive cultural frameworks through which individuals come to understand their lives. Thus, imagined law as culture assumes a less static and homogeneous role than implied by cause-and-effect models. A burgeoning literature on “legal consciousness” exemplifies this approach. [Saguy and Stuart 2008, 158]

CHAPTER 5 RESEARCH QUESTIONS AND METHODS

Interpersonal social violence is known to have serious impacts on the mental, emotional, and physical health of victims. Moreover, it is self-reinforcing, perpetration of bullying has been linked to perpetration of sexual assault and intimate partner violence, as well as workplace harassment. A bullying “culture” or, rather, a set of cultured behaviors has emerged in relation to and through the social negotiations of children; a

“rape culture” has emerged in relation to and through the discourse among bystanders to sexual assault; “a culture of mean” has emerged with regard to a perceived rise in

Cluster B personality demonstration. I ask, How are these behaviors initiated and experienced by its perpetrators and victims? How are these behaviors performed?

This project consists of four stages, each intended to address the interpersonal social violence phenomenon from a different epistemological perspective, in line with the multi-variable socioecological model for adaptive, instrumental aggression, discussed in previous chapters.

Legal and Discourse Artifacts

When addressing the social integrity of a community, a school, or a workplace, lawmakers, newswriters, and the public participate in discourse that constitutes the structural needs of the institution. As the country has become more globalized yet divided by labor, while continuing to host a wide range of nationalities, the questions of rights and belonging have come to the forefront; anti-harassment laws are a major response to this, and the media negotiate these institutional identities. Because such behavior is construed as damaging to rights, it must be defined by its effect.

The present research attempts to examine the variable effects of anti-bullying law, specifically in its real-world enactment through statutory programs and prosecution of bullying cases, and news coverage. Specifically, I seek to address these Research

Questions,

RQ 1. What are the hegemonic and penal effects of these ideological and material artifacts?

(a) How have news media portrayals of bullying affected the social construction of bullying and the expected legal response to it?

(b) How is school bullying defined and prosecuted through laws designed to address bullying and harassment?

Regarding this, I hypothesize,

Hypothesis 1a. News media portrayals of bullying import a sociolegal impetus that encourages the criminalization of bullying.

Hypothesis 1b. Legal address of bullying enforces the structure in which bullying occurs, while marking the behavior as deviant.

Furthermore, I consider the ontological purpose of anti-bullying laws and their required programs and examine the likelihood of either (a) deterrence as provided by the law’s proscription or (b) increased penal response as provided by the law’s prescriptive qualities. Full examination of the effects of anti-bullying programs in and of themselves is not included in this research, due to funding and administrative restrictions on such evaluative data. I do consider that an increased penal response is a negative effect on bullying, and that the norms inversely coded by the legal definition of

bullying as deviance, are furthermore a negative effect on bullying by communicating a new set of behaviors to be conducted in lieu of bullying. Thus, future research may ask,

RQ 2. Do anti-bullying laws and programs have a measurable negative effect on bullying? Regarding this, I hypothesize,

Hypothesis 2a. Without a reflexive connection to the institutional and media aspects of bullying, the effectiveness of these programs is lessened.

Hypothesis 2b. Legal address of bullying has little to no deterrent effect because bullying is not in response to the ideological elements of the law.

Hypothesis 2c. Zero-tolerance programs and workshops work less well than intervention-based approaches.

First Stage

Public’s Perception of Bullying

“The news” has two important communicative powers, that descriptor signifies factual information, and news “consumption” (the term most commonly used to describe cognitive engagement with media) entails the interaction between a news entity and the cultural index as specified in one’s mind. The index refers to a map of the interactional significance, ideological connotations, and lexical rules; these cultural aspects are elucidated by the careful study of the means and rules of news production and distribution, the public consumption of the news, and the text itself.

Methods of Semantic Analysis of News Media

In the first stage of this research, I conducted a content analysis of the news media covering portrayals of and prescriptions for bullying. I searched the Internet,

Google News archive, and the National Newspapers Core database with the search term “bullying,” combined alternately with “adolescent,” “teenager,” “school,” “suicide,” and “violence.” From the search results, I selected 75 news articles, 85.4 percent of which were non-opinion news articles, from nine major newspapers and five major news outlets. I defined a major newspaper as one that is based in a city with a population greater than two million, that has nationwide circulation in print and/or a website readership of over 25 million per month; a major news outlet has over 25 million website visitors per month and/or a network television channel. These parameters ensured that the articles I analyzed had reached an audience large enough that the articles’ ideological content and interactional frame were salient in the majority of U.S. populations.

I then coded each article according to its lexical and semantic content. The lexical content was analyzed with one variable, the number of negative loaded words

(Appendix B). A loaded word is one that carries a strong connotation, evokes an emotional response, describes the context more than the situation, and increases the overall force of the sentence. Examples are the word “pitch-black” instead of “dark,” and

“blinding” instead of “bright.” To assess a word’s strength and polarity of connotation, I organized the total list of loaded words extracted from the article into synonymous or functionally similar groups, and asked colleagues to rank the words from least powerful to most powerful. By examining the loaded words in an article, I was able to assess its relative emotional impact on the reader.

I noted common semantic elements of news articles about bullying cases, bullying-related deaths, lawsuits against school boards, anti-bullying legislation, and

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trials of bullies; I then operationalized them as textual elements that could appear variably in different types of articles and conducted a semantic analysis of the articles in my sample.

Second Stage

The Legal Aspects of Bullying

Since 1999, policymakers have developed an infrastructure of preventative and responsive measures. Generally, these laws define and prohibit bullying and declare that anti-bullying education programs shall be enacted, but less often provide for a penal response to bullying or encourage restorative justice interventions. School boards often are required by these laws to include an anti-bullying resolution in their code of conduct, establish a procedure for reporting and responding to bullying, and prevent bullying, through a number of means. In addition, prosecutors of any bullying cases that come to trial may use these laws to press charges.

As with any law addressing deviant or aggressive behavior, one may examine the text for encoded norms and expectations from the producing society. The law itself has an ideological effect via its proscriptive element and a functional effect through its inculcation of all relevant institutions. Its functional effect is less deterrent and more surveillant, as it contributes to an increasingly panoptic sociolegal examination of the school institution and its increase in regulation. Law also has a material element that demonstrates a flow of wealth as well as ethos-laden artifacts such as its accompanying news media. The privilege of lawmaking belongs to the wealthy; yet the normative or

“good”-that is, not illegal-behavior is enacted and negotiated in public discourse about the law. For “hot button” issues such as bullying and sexual violence, the tangled effects

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of law and media must be carefully separated and examined in their separate socioecological contexts, such as the school, the cyber realm, and family life, to identify the heuristic realms of bullying.

Methods of Semantic Analysis of Legal Artifacts

I analyzed all 47 existing state anti-bullying laws for their lexical and semantic content, with several questions in mind, What bullying behaviors were positively defined? How were social groups defined in relation to the institutions described in the text? How were rights affirmed or granted?

The Western perspective of ratio et oratio should produce in its legal artifacts a semblance of demand for reason and speech, the absence or defiance of which would enable illegal behavior. Thus, I looked for the “reason element” in the law, or the idea that a reasonable person would not engage in destructive behavior, and therefore the illegal behavior would go beyond reason. Moreover, law is expected to be timeless, while our experience is inextricably linked to time; thus, this rather atemporal requirement reflects the illusory timelessness of law, while creating a notion of accountability (Greenhouse 1989, 1632). Thus, I looked for a time element.

Because the law has a corrective element (Edelman and Suchman 1997) and aims to define normal and desirable behavior, and moreover, in the case of bullying law, prescribes actions intended to reduce unwanted or socially deviant behavior and increase “proper” or “good” behavior, I looked for a statement of prescriptive purpose.

Overall, I expected the laws to contain, the reason qualifier, the time element, the inclusion and classification of social groups, the establishment of avenues in conflux with existing institutional structures, and a definition of bullying. Other frequent elements

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might include a cyberbullying definition, a provision for incentive to adhere, an accountability measure, a victim recovery/referral provision, an accomplice clause, a libel/slander clause, and a retaliation clause.

I parsed the full body text of each law, taking it as a legal artifact with a shape and structure to be examined. I tagged the following attributes as I found them, (1) a definition of bullying or harassment, (2) the inclusion of cyberbullying or electronic means of the previous element, (3) any clause including or declaring explicit classes of victims, (4) a prescriptive statement, i.e. the corrective purpose of the law, (5) an explicit reference to desirable good or moral character, (6) a provision for accountability of the law’s executors or agents, (7) a provision explicitly calling for the use of existing avenues for report and redress, (8) any clause prohibiting reprisal, retaliation, or false accusation, (9) any clause providing for immunity, (10) any qualifier related to the principle of good faith, (11) any qualifier related to reasonable thought, (12) any clause requiring a reliable witness, (13) any clause providing for restoration or referral of the victim, (14) the time element, and (15) the scope of the law’s effect.

Third Stage

Social Context and Sociopsychology

In addition, the news and entertainment media have given new emphases to bullying behavior that revolve around current psychological models of the phenomenon.

Moreover, bullying among adults, which similarly entails mocking, teasing, denigration, rudeness, insults, and/or physical harm for the purposes of attaining or maintaining a power imbalance, goes by a different name, “harassment.” Considering the

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demonstrable behavioral effects of internalized archetypes and tropes of visual culture, I ask,

RQ 3. What is the role of the public in defining sociopathy, psychopathy, and/or narcissism as the cause of these behaviors? Specifically, how do educators, activists, and community leaders perceive and conceptualize incidents of interpersonal social violence? Regarding this, I hypothesize,

Hypothesis 3a. Those who perceive the perpetration of interpersonal social violence to be a function of abnormal behavior, e.g. sociopathy, are more likely to engage in victim-blaming than those who understand interpersonal social violence as performative violence.

Hypothesis 3b. Educators, activists, and community leaders draw many of their conceptions and scripts for responding to ISV from the news media.

Hypothesis 3c. Therefore, educators, activists, and community leaders are more likely to perceive bullying as the result of abnormal psychology.

Socioecology

Both visual and discursive culture impart salient models of expected roles, behaviors, and attributes to the public who engages with them, either hypothetically or socially. Thus, the dynamics and roles of violent interactions are heavily schematized and reinterpreted by observers. Thus, I ask,

RQ 4. How are the roles in interpersonal social violence (including abuse, sexual assault, and bullying) conceived and performed? Regarding this, I hypothesize,

Hypothesis 4a. The institutional siting of school bullying enables victim blaming, while media (which tends to be favorable toward the victim) discourages victim-blaming.

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Hypothesis 4b. The de-institutionalized discourse surrounding sexual assault and intimate partner abuse discourages victim-blaming, while small-group dynamics involve cognitive dissonance that encourage victim-blaming.

Hypothesis 4c. The removal of institutional affect toward either bullying or sexual assault/intimate partner abuse encourages a shift toward victim-blaming.

While much research has been done on the psychology of the bullying incident and commonly understood through Barbara Coloroso’s bully-victim-bystander triad, there is a wave of new social network research that considers the ecology of the broader pattern of incidents. From an anthropological point of view, a deeper understanding of the interactions and ideas that shape bullying in a microculture such as a school can only be gained by such a methodology, rather than relying on individual-level examination of the triad. Thus, future research might ask,

RQ 5. How do students’ social networks guide and shape their role in a bullying situation?

Hypothesis 5. Social networks that are smaller, denser, and/or have major external constraints will have more bullying than larger, sparser, or boundary-less networks.

Methods of Ethnographic and Socioecological Study

Considering the ecological aspects of violence, in particular its emergent characterization through multilinear interactions, data on bullying can be most effectively obtained through narrative and visual representations. Indeed, a critical tool of anthropological research is the interview that is grounded in a comprehensive portrait of the institution or community. Bansel et al took a similar approach to their research on

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bullying, engaging teachers in their “everyday talk” and then their own memories in a reflexive method called “collective biography.” They note,

“Largely ignoring the sociological literature on bullying that showed how responses that pathologise wrongdoers may lock them into those pathologised identities, current policies and practices give teachers responsibility for identifying acts of bullying and engaging in some form of remediation—often focused on developing empathy or conscience in the bully who is seen as lacking social skills and/or moral awareness.” 59

Thus, teachers are particularly important to engage in the anthropology of violence.

This stage of the present research entailed surveys and interviews of educators, including teachers, social workers, and advocates, after they viewed a collection of clips depicting bullying and harassing behavior. Participants were recruited through social media groups and listservs targeting those professions, as well as flyers on educational campuses. The interviews followed a loose structure (Appendix C) and ranged from 15 to 30 minutes in length. Some footage of the interviews was compiled into a documentary film on efforts to stop violence, including bullying and sexual assault.

Participants discussed general bullying behavior of students (e.g. “mean girl” cliques, use of slurs), legal aspects of reporting and responding to bullying in schools or incidents of sexual violence, and cultural influences on and portrayals of interpersonal social violence. Because of their professional roles, these people were the most appropriate informants for any project on interpersonal social violence. The anthropological orientation of this project included the participants in discussion of the

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construction, mediation, and symbolic behavior of interpersonal social violence, and provided the documentary with a multi-perspective, ethos-oriented, and politically relevant report on bullying.

Media Effects on Perception of Interpersonal Social Violence

Media and Violence

Media effects of portrayals of physical violence appear to be significant upon young males; however, media effects of portrayals of physical violence often do not measure intent or rely upon physical cues without qualitative followup. Moreover, interpersonal social violence, arguably a more common form of violence than physical violence, is not typically captured in these studies.

RQ6. How does consumption of news and entertainment media that portray interpersonal social violence influence people’s perception of it?

Hypothesis 6a. People who view media portraying interpersonal social violence are more likely to conceptualize what they’re seeing as bullying, harassment, or abuse and to assign pathology to the aggressor.

Hypothesis 6b. People who view media portraying interpersonal social violence are more likely to blame the aggressor and less likely to blame the victim.

Hypothesis 6c. People with Cluster B tendencies are less likely to empathize with the victims in said media, and therefore will not show increased affective empathy toward victims in general or conceptualize what they’re seeing as interpersonal social violence.

Hypothesis 6d. Because their cognitive empathy is not reduced and based upon previous research that people with Cluster B tendencies might be more sensitive to and

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interested in instrumental aggression, they are more likely to perceive and predict a greater negative effect on victims of ISV.

Methods of Media Effects Study

Participants were recruited via online message boards and groups on platforms such as Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook, with a call for “teachers, educators, advocates, and activists” to participate in an online research study having to do with “bullying, narcissism, and harassment.” Similar to Anderson and Shimamura (2005), participants were randomly shown both positive and negatively valenced video to assess its impact on memory vis á vis schema recall. Participants viewed video of different bullying situations and of narcissistic behaviors, then answered questions about ISV behavior and players (Appendix D). A control group viewed DIY or tutorial videos such as those how to perform basic home or car repairs. All test videos were collected from YouTube and are, as best as I can tell, authentic, that is, not staged; all control videos were also collected from YouTube, having been produced for instructional purposes. The video schedule is available in Appendix E.

Participants answered sets of questions measuring their socialized attitudes and cognitive biases both before and after video viewing. The questions included ranking likelihood of others to perpetrate or experience ISV, matching words to their definitions, and matrix plotting of their own experience and perceived others’ experience of ISV. In addition to characterizing their own experience, participants also gave basic demographic, education, and self-health assessments. For a complete survey schedule, see Appendix D.

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The survey questions also included a narcissism inventory measuring attitudes associated with narcissistic characteristics; the inventory is not intended as a diagnostic tool. Although responses were not analyzed on a per-participant basis, the selection of narcissistic attitudes could be entered into analysis with other variables.

I first compared the control group to the test group to test a relationship between viewing the bullying clips and their responses regarding ISV. Specifically, I compared the mean responses of all attitude-related questions (i.e. not personal experience or narcissism inventory) of the test group to the control group. To test Hypothesis 6a, I compared the test group’s responses matching words or characterizing ISV with the control group’s. To test Hypothesis 6b, I compared the test group’s responses characterizing the motivations of the aggressors and the likelihood of someone to experience ISV with those of the control group.

I conducted the Wilcoxon test on paired data produced by similar questions (e.g.

“On a scale of one to five, how would you rank the impact of emotional or psychological distress on the person experiencing it?” measured with sliders after the viewing of one video, and with a matrix after the viewing of all three videos).

I then conducted Chi-square tests on multiple pairs of responses’ mean values, based upon the above hypotheses. Specifically, I measured for relationships between participants’ characterization of ISV and their attitude toward victims. I also entered the mean values of the Likert scales’ responses into a Mann-Whitney U test to assess whether being a member of the test group had a significant (p < .05) effect on responses. Finally, to test Hypotheses 6c and 6d, I assessed whether there was a

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relationship among the variables in the narcissism inventory and the matrix plotting of the effects of ISV on victims.

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CHAPTER 6 FINDINGS

First Stage

News Content Analysis Findings

The findings of my content analysis of 75 news articles dating back to 2005 was presented at the 9th Annual Conference of the International Association for the Study of

Environment, Space and Place at the University of Florida on April 27, 2013 and published in The Journal of Contemporary Anthropology in 2014. The purpose of this project was to understand how our responses to bullying are mediated, and how bullying behavior is defined and reproduced in our society, in order to better respond to and prevent its occurrences.

In my analysis, 42.6 percent of the articles established the frequency of bullying on a national and/or regional basis. Forty percent of all articles included words or phrases that signified a negative characterization of the bully — the villain in the hero- villain framework. Furthermore, proximity of a hailed psychologist, psychiatrist, or other mental health expert coincided with descriptors of bullies as “cruel,” “mean,” violent, or abnormal, in 33 percent of all articles. The rate of coincidence of these two elements establishes bullying as both normative in occurrence but deviant in definition. Thus,

Hypothesis 1a was supported.

Of all articles, 41.3 percent contained a semantic element that attributed blame, ignorance, or disregard to school administrators and teachers. This expectation of educator non-involvement or dismissal is corroborated among children (Frisén et al.

2007, 758-59). The rate of coincidence of the negative view of school faculty and staff and a statement citing frequency of bullying was 4 percent.

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Discussion of First Stage Findings

Through these semantic constructions began the public’s construction of bullying as a treatable social ill as opposed to a normative, functional aspect of school life.

Sixteen percent of the pre-2008 articles included both the vilification element and focus on bullying’s connection to violence. As discussed above, the need to reconcile teen suicides, especially those inspired by bullying, with the expectations of the modern school environment, necessitates that a certain “evaluative function” be built into the stories (see Franzosi 1998). The narratives of violence must be moralized and restructured for public consumption; it is notable that children are separate from this process except as subjects of the discourse. As Robert Franzosi writes, “our ability to go beyond [a narrator’s] microcosm depends upon our knowledge of the social relations of his macrocosm (the interplay between text and context)” (1998, 545).

The characterization of bullying in the media is both reflective and symptomatic of its public discourse. “Through discourse, the very problem is shaped in particular ways, as are the responses to the problem” (Walton 2011, 142). The media’s emotional and psychiatric portrayal of bullying has increased criminalization of the act and defined bullying as a normative trend of deviant behavior. With normatization comes justification among those who perform violence; the news media has reconstructed what was once considered an isolated but treatable act into a pervasive subset of structural violence.

As Walton says, “The dominant discourse on bullying cloaks particular forms of violence related to social difference” (2011, 142). In addition, teachers and administrators are implicated as risk factors in the repeated bullying narrative disseminated by news media, while research on the social factors of bullying is underrepresented.

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Second Stage

Legal Content Analysis Findings

In general, the expected legal elements were found to varying degrees. Almost all of the laws defined bullying and harassment, generally as per the Olweus definition, although some took exception. Most notably, Utah’s law explicitly defines bullying as being of a physical nature, with physical effects. Only 20 of the laws included cyberbullying in the definition.

Although scope (usually, limited to school grounds and school-operated venues) weakly coincided (r=0.2064) with a definition of bullying for ostensible purposes of limiting the law’s application to issues of school safety, this coincidence had the effect of affirming public notions of bullying as inextricably linked to schools.

Unexpectedly, the reason qualifier did not typically accompany the definition of bullying (r=0.1356). However, when it did appear, it usually defined bullying as what a

“reasonable” person would find threatening, thus placing the onus of response and responsibility on the victim.

Similarly, some laws included explicit lists of protected classes as part of the definition of bullying. However, this may have a tacit effect of pinpointing those attributes as the cause of bullying. Some laws more explicitly suggest the linkage, e.g.

New Mexico’s, “Bullying includes, but is not limited to, hazing, harassment, intimidation or menacing acts of a student which may, but need not be based on the student’s race, color, sex, ethnicity, national origin, religion, disability, age or sexual orientation.”

(6.12.7.7) and New Hampshire’s,

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Bullying in schools has historically included actions shown to be motivated by a pupil’s actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, ancestry or ethnicity, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, age, physical, mental, emotional, or learning disability, gender, gender identity and expression, obesity, or other distinguishing personal characteristics, or based on association with any person identified in any of the above categories. [193-F, 2]

Several findings of note include a certain corrective purpose to anti-bullying law.

For example, the Massachusetts law requires that schools develop a plan that provides for “the range of disciplinary actions that may be taken against a perpetrator for bullying or retaliation; provided, however, that the disciplinary actions shall balance the need for accountability with the need to teach appropriate behavior” (I-XII-71-Section 37O-D-v).

Georgia law includes this explicit prescription for civil participation and the prohibition of bullying,

The State Board of Education shall develop by the start of the 1997-1998 school year a comprehensive character education program for levels K- 12. This comprehensive character education program shall be known as the “character curriculum” and shall focus on the students’ development of the following character traits, courage, patriotism, citizenship, honesty, fairness, respect for others, kindness, cooperation, self-respect, self- control, courtesy, compassion, tolerance, diligence, generosity, punctuality, cleanliness, cheerfulness, school pride, respect for the environment, respect for the creator, patience, creativity, sportsmanship, loyalty, perseverance, and virtue. Such program shall also address, by the start of the 1999-2000 school year, methods of discouraging bullying and violent acts against fellow students. [20-2-145]

Georgia’s character curriculum encompassed a number of seminars, educational videos, and motivational posters. As those with the characteristics listed above do not seem to be those who would bully, the corrective purpose of this required curriculum seems to be a positive approach to bullying. However, the effects of the curriculum occur in a different domain of the school institution than that governed by the students.

Moreover, as described in previous chapters, the impetus and choice to bully derives

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from their socioecological needs, not any arbitrary and culturally construed measure of character. The effect of such corrective elements in anti-bullying law and media is to reinforce an ideal constellation of character traits; those whose behavior is then labeled as bullying are then inversely marked as deviant from this ideal. Thus, findings showed weak support for Hypothesis 1b.

However, references to character development, character improvement, or the explicit endorsement of good character occurred in seven laws and weakly correlated with the inclusion of a prescriptive statement (r=.0207). Among the more moralistic was

Kentucky’s,

identify the Golden Rule as the model for improving attitude and the rule for conduct for all public school students; […]amend KRS 158.148 to require school districts to formulate a code of acceptable behavior and discipline that embraces the Golden Rule as the model for improving attitude and the rule for conduct for students; […]; require district to incorporate information regarding the Golden Rule and the code of acceptable behavior in employee training manual; […] amend KRS 158.150 to include the breaking of the Golden Rule through student harassment, intimidation, or bullying as a cause for suspension, expulsion, or other appropriate disciplinary action; […]; identify this Act as The Golden Rule Act.

Many laws include a reporting requirement. Florida law provides that a “process to investigate whether a reported act of bullying or harassment is within the scope of the district school system and, if not, a process for referral of such an act to the appropriate jurisdiction” (1006.147.4.h); Georgia law requires that the parent/guardian and principal be notified (20-2-751.4.b.3; 20-2-751.4.c.2).

Such notification must happen in a timely manner, as should self-reports on bullying, the involvement of law enforcement, and other requirements of many anti- bullying laws. In many laws, qualifiers such as “timely” and “prompt” are not defined or clarified.

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Discussion of Second Stage Findings

Several common elements appear in anti-bullying laws, the reason qualifier, the time element, the inclusion and classification of social groups, the establishment of avenues in conflux with existing institutional structures, and a definition of bullying.

Other frequent elements, some of which are beyond the scope of this paper, include a cyberbullying definition, a provision for incentive to adhere, an accountability measure, a victim recovery/referral provision, an accomplice clause, a libel/slander clause, and a retaliation clause.

The reason qualifier appears in descriptions of bullying behavior, which is prohibited based on its harmful effects upon reasonable persons; thus, it falls upon the prosecution to declare the complaint to be sound, based on the rationality of the victim, as discussed above. If a reasonable person would not be harmed by the activity, it is not bullying, and, if they claimed harm despite having not been harmed, they are not acting in good faith. That is, they are retaliating or slandering; the good faith clause appears exclusively in provisions of anti-bullying law that prohibit these behaviors. Retaliation in this context is any negative action against one who reports bullying or assists in its prosecution, and is, based on this polarity, itself a form of bullying.

If bullying is thus rationally defined to have caused harm to a reasonable person, that person, now categorized as the “victim,” is subject to legal recovery. Recovery, in the anthropology of violence, refers to the appropriate physical, vocal, legal, and emotional response to return the victim to the pre-incident state. Recovery is provided de jure by anti-bullying law, but is rarely achieved through legal means, largely because the laws are usually enacted in response to suicide that was attributed to bullying. The

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original victim who was symbolized in all media through which legal discourse was funneled was unable to receive recovery. Moreover, recovery of bullying victims is not achieved by citing anti-bullying law in criminal proceedings; rather, anti-harassment law is used.

Anti-bullying law addresses as its public a number of social groups, who are divided and classified by their enumeration. The explicit effect is to ensure that all groups, including, generally, parents/guardians, school employees, volunteers, students, administrators, community representatives, and law enforcement, are participating in the enactment of the law; the implicit effect is to include all these groups in the public discourse on bullying. Of these groups, parents/guardians, students, and law enforcement tend to be more represented in news media, according to the first stage of this research. Furthermore, they are highlighted in the provisions of anti- bullying law that delineate the legal routes to address bullying within existing institutional structures.

This textual organization of ideas generates a schema of rationality and morality that is internalized by all those in the public discourse; the framing of news articles communicates the associated legal expectations that variably inform the sociolegal actors in all groups (Saguy and Stuart 2008, 160). These oscillating vibrations fracture the presumptive anti-bullying paradigm along naturalized institutional lines. Using the model developed in Edelman and Suchman’s 1997 review of legal epistemologies, anti- bullying law operates in a regulatory sense, while cases are prosecuted in a facilitative sense, meaning that they serve political and economic needs within a hegemonic framework. Meanwhile, those external to the legal system fulfill a constitutive legal

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function according to their legal consciousness, which entails a criminal-victim framework and conflicting notions of youth personality.

Third Stage

Educator Interviews

For the third stage of this research, I engaged 13 educators through the

University of Florida network and surrounding community and conducted 15- to 30- minute interviews with them. Participants first watched a 2-minute compilation of clips from popular films depicting both physical and relationally aggressive behaviors, as well as name calling and slut-shaming. A brief discussion of these clips was included in the interview schedule (Appendix A). The informal interviews yielded a wealth of data about teachers’ and advocates’ perceptions of bullying and harassing behaviors, the particular aspects of school institutions that contributed to bullying.

Participants attributed ISV to a number of causes but suggested a problematic home life or negligent/inept parents as a likely cause for childhood bullies, and jealousy or attempts at power grabs as causes for adult aggressors. Many mentioned attention- seeking or self-soothing motivations as potential explanations. Given this and that few expressed victim-blaming attitudes, there was some support for Hypothesis 3a.

His older siblings do it, he wants to be just like him or cases where the parent’s not paying attention. So, ‘this is how this is how i get my power and my attention’—I can definitely see it being that case. I don’t want to say there are some kids who just seem plain mean [laughs]. But there are cases where you wonder [Participant 2]

Participant 5, a former victim advocate who now works as a community educator, believes aggressive behavior is modeled from what the aggressor has seen,

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When I first started as a victim advocate, I saw this poster, maybe at a conference, maybe in someone’s office, that said ‘childhood decides.’ And I do think we are creatures who learn from a very early age what behavior we believe we’re supposed to emulate. So if you’re around someone who is kind and nurturing and who picks up litter, you probably from a very early age just don’t even question that. […] I think the other end of the spectrum can also be true that if you have experienced enormous cruelty or subtle cruelty on a consistent basis there may be occasions where you don’t even question it anymore because that’s been normal from the time your earliest memories began.

Participant 3, a teacher, said that the worst cases were due to a sense of entitlement taught by the parents,

It really depends on the parents. If the parents like actually care about what their kids are doing then the kids are going to do it but if their parents just think their kids are God’s green earth and they just do whatever they want and they’re like “oh yeah I’ll talk to them”—they don’t talk to them and then they’re just still bad. SO that’s kind of frustrating. […] for example, I have this fifth grader that I could not stand. And his mom was like really intimidating because she thought he was like the best thing since sliced bread. She just treated all of the teachers horribly, she would call us like racist and like all the other stuff like just because we weren’t being nice to her kid. And I was like, you do realize your kid is like this terrible person. Like he makes fun of all of the older children. He talks back to teachers, he says really cruel things to teachers and the classmates and just like I don’t understand like why. Why do you think your kid is one way when your kid is like this but it’s just I feel like if you’re being brought up to believe or you’re the best thing in the world and that you can just do whatever you want like then you’re just going to do whatever you want you’re going to make fun of kids you’re going to do this you’re going to do that. Like me I would never ever make fun of anybody because my dad would have whuped me to like the end of the age.

Participant 4 agrees, “You get a couple of parents sometimes who refuse to acknowledge that their kid has any problems whatsoever.”

Several participants suggested that bullying behavior is perpetuated at increasingly younger ages, although they noted that it was most common at middle school/pre-teen ages, even calling ISV “middle school behavior” at times. Participant 2, a teacher, mused whether hormones were “kicking in” at a younger age,

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I’ve said now fourth grade is the new middle school you see a lot that, trying to seem more grown up -- what they think is more grown up -- and all the cattiness and in upper elementary school you already see it a lot.

Several participants suggested social media as a contributing factor to relationally aggressive behavior at younger ages. “I think that a lot of kids want to be mature students sooner so they try to act that way, but the social media thing does not seem to be helping,” said Participant 2.

Almost all participants noted that intervention was difficult if not impossible, especially if they had not witnessed the behavior taking place. And when they did witness it and sought disciplinary measures, they were met with either backlash from parents or guardians or apathy from school administrators.

There was one time when I had a student who they were roughhousing, they weren’t as far as I know trying to be mean to each other, but she drew blood from me […] So I had to discipline the child, and the guardian called up freaking about how, you know, I’m a terrible teacher who put a blemish on her child’s spotless record. So yeah if I hadn’t witnessed it, and it’s not just me, but if teachers haven’t witnessed it, it’s a lot harder, I hate to say it, but get away with disciplining a child because there’s so much backlash. It’s hard to do much about it. [Participant 2]

In some cases, the process is so cumbersome that it becomes hard to execute, especially once parents are engaged. The process also favors “classic,” i.e. physical aggression-based, definitions of bullying.

If you wanted to write a referral on a kid, like the kid punched someone in the face, like that would be referral worthy without having it—without having other incidents. But like if someone calls someone a name, like is really mean to them, you can’t just write a referral, it has to happen four times. And like you fill out this blue sheet. Ninety percent of the time, the blue sheet is finished, you can turn it in and it can be a referral. But by the second time that you’re filling out that blue sheet for that kid you have to call parents and make parent contact, let them know that this is a recurring issue as well. If they get a referral and you didn’t talk to the parents… like the parent should not be getting a phone call saying your kid’s getting a referral because he did this four times like that’s not fair to the parent like there’s no chance for them to intervene. […] You need to talk to them

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because they’re not going to know what’s up because kids don’t talk to their parents these days [Participant 3]

Participant 13 is a substitute teacher and thus encountered classrooms on a short-term basis, and therefore wasn’t able to track students’ behavioral trends throughout the year, but she says that she witnessed what appeared to be bullying dynamics and attempted to crack down on the behavior whenever possible. However, students were reluctant to come forward, even though she expressed to the class that they could come to her with issues.

I was surprised a couple times it actually did seem like bullying but they never did come forward. I’m guessing it’s because our county system is not adept at disciplining students that have been accused of bullying. There’s not much you can do. And there’s not much their teachers or the administration are willing to try to knock it down. We’ve had a few students in the past few years commit suicide from cyberbullying, well not completely from cyber bullying. It was part of their issues that they were dealing with. Like not even that has helped much. They’ve put some little programs into place, like there was a campaign to try to stop the use of the word ‘retarded.’ They even passed out certificates at one of the schools to students who promised that they wouldn’t say ‘retarded’ or anything. And even though they got that certificate it seemed like a joke. So like I don’t know they’re trying to in some cases but it’s going to be a slow move for sure.

Many participants expressed that addressing bullying behavior was challenging, especially because bullies typically don’t care about the impact of their action or have any desire to change. In many cases, according to Participant 4, it’s easier to simply move the student rather than engage law enforcement,

I think it was more, we could bring charges, or you could leave away from here. Schools hate paperwork ‘cause they generate a lot of it by default. So as a general rule, any time a school could get away with not doing paperwork on something you know, they do it. So there’s a lot of handshake agreements, ‘Hey, you’re going to transfer to another school next year right? …now, wink wink ... Don’t show up here next year.’ But you know there’s a finite number of schools in the county you know. Yeah we get guys that have cycled through most of the other ones before they get to us.

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Of the films, most participants identified a clip from Mean Girls, in which the titular characters mock several of their fellow classmates in a sort of malicious scrapbook they’ve termed a “burn book,” as the most authentic and relatable scene.

They also named a scene in which Biff bullies Marty McFly in Back to the Future as relatable, although many found it exaggerated. On that note, Participant 4, who teaches at a school specializing in exceptional student education (ESE), for students with disabilities or problem behaviors, notes that the storytelling constraints of a movie belie the reality of dealing with a problem student,

Yeah the bully’s never the protagonist, usually don’t get a whole lot of yeah redemption arcs and the bullying either, you know, and when you actually have to sit down with one, deal with a recurring problem, you know you’re actually trying to get them to stop. Yeah you can’t just arrange for some embarrassing thing to happen to the bully and then how the movie end two hours later. And no matter what you’re probably still stuck with the bully for the rest of the year. You have to figure out some way to get them to tamp it down. Yes. Hold onto them for the rest of the year. Yeah as a general rule you know school doesn’t kick out more than one or two guys a year so odds are whatever problem student you’ve got you’re you’ve got them for the long term you’ve got to find a way to live with them.

Many participants noted a strong relationship between media coverage or portrayals and the attitudes toward interpersonal social violence, although they also said they didn’t see much media coverage themselves. Thus, Hypotheses 3b and 3c were not supported. Several noted the significance of the popular and controversial show 13

Reasons Why, which depicts the aftermath of a bullied girl’s suicide, in the dialogue surrounding interpersonal social violence.

- That 13 Reasons Why TV show that’s out which should not be out that’s like a terrible terrible idea.

- Why do you say that? It seems like such a relevant topic. I’ve not watched it but-

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- OK I have. And I’m watching season two.

- OK. Well, tell me why.

- It is relevant but also like if someone is struggling with that, like they’re trying to, like, you, like, if you are struggling like with this, you should call them and blah blah blah. […] Don’t show them suicide stuff that’s not going to help them. And I just I don’t know, plus that show is like, it shows really scary stuff, like there are times that I’m like oh my gosh I can’t believe I’m watching this, like rape or is this or just that, and I’m just like, while I understand like it’s a relevant thing, like that we shouldn’t be hiding that this happens, I mean enough other stuff is going on to show that that stuff does happen. They don’t need this TV show. This was just- I don’t even know why they needed to make it. But I don’t think it needs to continue. I just think that’s way too much. I have friends that are like yeah I can’t watch that because that’s, that’s too real for me. [Participant 3]

Some participants suggested that media portrayals had a larger effect on administrative action than on public opinion. Several felt that bullying in particular was so much a part of school life that increased news coverage was simply drawing more attention to an extant problem.

- Yeah I remember when 13 Reasons Why came out, the dean sent around an e-mail going, hey, um, tell your kids not to watch this. I’m like, that’s not going to happen. Then every single kid’s going to watch the [sputtering laugh]

- Have you seen it?

- No. But I did get the e-mail about it. Yeah. You know. On our annual list of training things last year, we picked up a school shooter training too. You know. Things happen in the media and then new laws get passed and then they rearrange all of our rules. And then something, something new pops up every year. Media is weird though. You know in general, it’s 2018. As a general rule you get the media that you want to get […] Like his Facebook selects for us you’ve already read. Yes. So like I don’t get many like bullying specific stories in my Facebook feed just cause that’s not the sort of thing I’m clicking on here. But I have to remind myself that you know if you’re going by sheer numbers most people are still watching CNN Fox MSNBC and that’s where most of the bullying stories pop up. Maybe not Fox so much. If it does, it’s, why is everyone triggered by bullying all the time? But now that you mention, it’s a sort of thing where you know there’s been a lot of news stories about it lately I haven’t seen much actual action though. Like I said usually when something big pops up in the news

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they rewrite a couple of our rules. I don’t think we’ve gotten any new bullying directives down from, from the county or the state. I guess you know even though there have been a lot of news stories about lately it’s not like it shouldn’t a new problem like you said we’ve been making movies about this stuff for years. [Participant 4]

Several educators who also encountered workplace or sexual harassment spoke to the challenges of identifying and addressing those behaviors. Participant 13, whose regular job is in a corporate retail chain, relates her frustration in that job,

- one of those girls that I worked with brought up something that had happened at our work a lot with our manager. And it’s like it wasn’t even on my radar as being a sexual harassment type thing. But then I was like oh my gosh yeah that totally counts and it’s not just me being uncomfortable or her being uncomfortable that’s totally like the sexual harassment thing that technically we could report ...not that it would do anything.

- Why do you say that?

- Just the way that [the store] is set up...corporately. They don’t really listen to us much for things that are not important. So ...or things that we think are important that they treat as not important. I would doubt anything would happen with that. And since it’s our general manager that’s doing the thing.

A couple of participants saw a connection between the behavior exhibited by some students and the “office politics” of teachers and administrators.

Some of it may be that they started doing it when they were younger, they just kept it up so that they could certainly be …inferiority complex or things like that. You got the job I wanted so I’m going to pick on you or you got that promotion that I should have gotten. You got principal over me up so I’m going to hold it over you, that kind of thing. I can definitely see that being the case. [Participant 2]

To Participant 4, “school is just a microcosm of the local culture. So whatever is going on in the surrounding culture, it just ends up there.”

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Discussion of Third Stage Findings

Preliminary data suggests that pre-pubescent and pubescent students, or those in the age range of 9-14, demonstrate higher rates of teasing and mocking, as well as the onset of homophobic remarks, while older students engage in more overt bullying, which then tapers off in high school. Studies have indicated similar trends (Frisén et al.

2007, 757; Felix et al. 2011, 241; see also Merten 1994).

More than half of the teacher participants taught special education or a specific activity, such as music or art. A self-selection may be at play, in which teachers engaged with these special classes may be more interested in bullying and therefore more inclined to participate in the present research. As the special education teachers noted, problem behavior tends to be exhibited by kids with special needs. Moreover, small classes may encourage relational aggression; “classing” behaviors seem to be utilized in smaller, closed-circuit groups to maintain status in groups with higher resource intensity (Faris and Felmlee 2011, 57) and older ages (Guerra et al. 2011,

305). Previous research suggests that attempts to regulate and maintain social capital are strongest within groups; there are thus subgroup-particular pressures that inform behavior while restricting resources (Coleman 1988, 105-106).

Name-calling and teasing, especially homophobic variants, were both observed and reported by all participating educators. They provided examples of commonly used negative and positive labels. Typical positive labels included terms such as “best friend” or “homie”; negative labels showed a wider linguistic variety, and included words referring to intelligence (“dumb,” “stupid,” “retarded”) and appearance (“fat,” “ugly,”

“stink”), as well as labels related to sexual orientation (“gay,” “punk ,” “faggot”) or gender and sexuality (“whore,” “skank”). Name-calling is an integral part of bullying behavior,

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self-worth must be targeted because it buffers against the intended effect of instrumental aggression (Guerra et al. 2011, 301; Severance et al. 2013, 839)

Consistent with previous findings, participants reported higher incidences of relational aggression, especially among girls (Crick 1996), and the formation of cliques, and noted that physical aggression seemed to occur outside a bullying context, such as through roughhousing. As noted above, many found that the physical bullying shown in the film clips to be exaggerated.

Moreover, as noted above, several participants identified an intent or purpose to aggressive behavior, suggesting attention or power as a motivation for bad behavior. As

Participant 5 put it, “There’s a saying that needs drive behavior and unmet needs drive conflict.” As discussed in the Literature Review, instrumental aggression may have motivations not consciously expressed by the perpetrator yet operate to relieve cognitive dissonance upon unmet expectation or unexpected conflict (see Tavris and

Aronson, DiMaggio 1997).

The present data do not corroborate the teacher-blaming ideology perpetuated by news media, as found in the first stage. Moreover, educators are not utilizing report strategies to school administration to address bullying incidents, because those strategies often ignore the complex realities of bullying. Participants suggested that educators feel ill-equipped by school administrators or the law to resolve bullying issues.

Fourth Stage

The Mann-Whitney U tests showed a statistically significant relationship between group assignment and mean value of response to all Likert scales assessing ISV

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behavior (U=0.5, Z-Score =2.40227). The test group ranked the impact of ISV behavior on individuals slightly higher. Both test and control groups provided similar definitions for bullying and harassing behavior in the matching and characterization tasks.

Interestingly, “bullying” was most often selected as a description for behavior that fits the scientific and legal definition when a reference to “including others” was in the prompt, and the test group was slightly more likely to identify “a one on one incident in which one person insults another” as bullying (21.74% of the test group, compared to

18.06% of control and 18.44% of all respondents, n=115.) Interestingly, terms such as

“picking on” or “teasing” were less often selected.

Table 6-1. Comparison of test and control groups’ definitions of ISV behaviors

Question: How would you Control group’s top choice Test group’s top choice describe… … a one on one incident in Harassment (19.74%) Harassment (24.24%) which one person causes distress or discomfort to another? … a one on one incident in Bullying (18.06%) Harassment (21.74%) which one person insults another? … a one on one incident in Violence (32.26%) Violence (38.64%) which one person causes physical harm to another? …an incident in which one Bullying (30.88%) Bullying (23.44%) person includes others in insulting another person or asks others to insult another person? …an incident in which one Violence (32.39%) Abuse (26.79%) person includes others in Violence (26.79%) causing physical harm or asks others to cause physical harm to another person?

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Unsurprisingly, any prompt referring to “physical harm” was more likely to be called “violence,” confirming that violence is typically conceptualized as physical acts causing physical harm, while non-physical aggression is thought of as distinct.

Both test and control groups provided similar definitions for bullying and harassing behavior in the matching and characterization tasks. Thus, there was insufficient evidence to support hypothesis 6a. Interestingly, “bullying” was only selected as a description for behavior that fits the scientific and legal definition when a reference to “including others” was in the prompt.

The test group, who watched three videos depicting bullying and narcissism, were more likely to attribute one’s likelihood to experience bullying to introversion (for emotional or non-physical bullying) or weakness (for physical bullying). Given the context of the latter, it’s likely they took “weakness” to mean “physical weakness.” The control group, who watched three videos unrelated to the topic, attributed victims’ experiences to strange behavior. Given that introversion and weakness are not chosen by an individual, while strange behavior arguably is, it appears that the test group was less likely to victim-blame. Thus, Hypothesis 6b was weakly supported.

Table 6-2. Relationship between Viewing Video of ISV and Perceptions of Impact on Victim

Mean likert ranking (q16–19) Mean likert ranking (q61) Question Test group Control group Test group Control group On a scale of one to 3.95 3.26 4.4 4.21 five, how would you rank the impact of emotional or psychological distress on the person experiencing it?

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Table 6-2. Continued.

Mean likert ranking (q16–19) Mean likert ranking (q61) Question Test group Control group Test group Control group On a scale of one to 3.04 3 4.4 4.21 five, how would you rank the impact of physical harm on the person experiencing it? On a scale of one to 4 2.88 3.85 3.52 five, how would you rank the impact of insults or defamation on the person experiencing it? On a scale of one to 3.81 3.12 4.15 3.92 five, how would you rank the impact of social exclusion on the person experiencing it?

The test group also ranked the effects of emotional distress, physical bullying, insults, and social exclusion more highly than the control group, with the matrix’s mean ranking of 3.04 to 4 compared to the control group’s 2.88 to 3.26 (Figure 2).

Interestingly, the similar question that appeared at the end of the survey showed more consistency between the two groups, with a mean ranking of 3.85 to 4.4 for test, and

3.52 to 4.21 for control. Because the Wilcoxon Signed-Rank Test between the repeated measures yielded Z-value of -2.1783 and the distribution was normal, the two questions should show a consistent response. Therefore, it is possible that reading and responding to the questions throughout the survey exerted a priming effect even upon the control group.

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Each variable in the narcissism inventory was tested for a relationship with the likelihood to rank higher in Questions 16 through 19, which measured participants’ perception of the impact on victims. Overall, selecting the narcissistic choice in each variable better predicted participants’ likelihood to rank the impact higher. Thus,

Hypothesis 6d was supported. Interestingly, when compared to the mean ranking, narcissistic choices better predicted higher than mean ranking for the question assessing the impact of emotional distress on victims, while narcissistic choices predicted a lower than mean ranking on the impact of social exclusion. This suggests that, as previous research found, those with narcissistic tendencies do understand and are interested in the emotional impact of bad behavior on others, but hold less of an understanding of social dynamics and nuances.

Fifth Stage

A potential fifth stage of this research would involve its application to one or more applied film and theatre projects, including skit-based mediation techniques and seminars, educational short films, and collaborative playwriting workshops. These projects may be directed towards parents, educators, or children, and will serve several key functions of applied anthropology, they are data-gathering tools, educational outlets with an essential reflexive capacity that increases validity of the research and salience of its application, and socially activist media that incorporates a “thick description” of the culture that contributed to its development and comprises its public.

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CHAPTER 7 CONCLUSION

Findings from previous research highly suggest that perpetrators of bullying and sexual harassment as children and pre-teens are more likely to perpetrate workplace harassment and sexual violence as teens and adults. However, these domains of violence are distinct in both popular and sociolegal culture; people continue to associate bullying with perpetration by children in a school environment, while sexual violence is considered an activity by deviant adults. Expectations and attitudes toward roles and behaviors are highly variable across socioecological contexts, while the aggressor role is variably conceived by consumers of media and those who encounter ISV in an institutional setting.

The first stage of research examined the social construction of bullying through the news media. The third stage of research gathered educators’ and advocates’ voices to examine the social construction of bullying and interpersonal social violence through discourse, including discussion of news, as well as entertainment, media. The first stage revealed that the news media perpetrates an idea of teachers as culpable for school bullying, while characterizing bullying as a social ill. Meanwhile, the literature does not support a conceptualization of bullying as either an epidemic or the exclusive function of

“deviant” or “attention-seeking” children. However, while educators agree that bullying is not an epidemic and instead consider it part of school culture, they also tend to attribute bullying behavior to attention-seeking.

Future research should expand the semantic analysis of news articles to a larger sample, and a semantic analysis of social media posts would be useful as well, as most online discourse arguably takes place in user-generated content on social media

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platforms. Moreover, interviews would ideally occur within a one’s workplace setting, while administrative constraints prevented that in the present study.

The second stage of the research traced the legal outlines of anti-bullying law.

Although these laws affect local-level programs and policies, by decree in some cases and also according to educators, they do not seem to have a direct mediating relationship to people’s attitudes on the topic, but rather reflect hegemonic ideals for moral behavior. However, the present research forms a foundation for further study of any relationship between anti-bullying law and the effectiveness of related anti-bullying programs.

Finally, the fourth stage approached traditional media effects research from a different perspective, using media depictions of relational aggression in addition to physical aggression as a trigger, while measuring people’s attitudes toward interpersonal social violence, rather than empathy or sympathy. Results confirmed previous work that relational aggression viewing, whether in media or in the real world, encourages both relational and physical aggression; moreover, people’s expectations for roles and contexts in their schemas for gender, school, violence, and other factors contribute to victim-blaming behavior when those expectations are not fulfilled. The survey would benefit from a larger sample and should be considered a pilot study.

Overall, this research finds that interpersonal social violence is a highly subjective, interconnected, and contextual experience for all roles in the aggressor- victim-bystander triad. Moreover, through media and law, the bystander role is expanded to include a dually consuming and producing public. Although the solutions to this violence are beyond the scope of any one study, the highly variable perception and

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subsequent conception of interpersonal social violence within a salient socioecological context speaks to the importance of culturally competent, discourse-oriented research and intervention to quell bad behaviors on the spectrum of interpersonal social violence.

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APPENDIX A GOOGLE SEARCH RESULTS

Figure A-1. Google search results for search term: bullying

Figure A-2. Google search results for search term: teen bullying

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Figure A-3. Google search results for search term: teen suicide

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APPENDIX B SEMANTIC ANALYSIS CUE WORDS abuse tragic atrocities traumatic/traumatized attack utter bombard vicious brutal vile cruel viper deadly vulgar despair desparate destructive devastating distraught distress hazardous heartrending helpless horrendous horror hound insidious intolerable lethal malicious merciless miserable/misery nightmare overwhelming poison predatory prey punish relentless ruthless savage savagely scared suffer terrible terrifying terror threaten torment torture

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APPENDIX C DIGITAL INTERVIEW SCHEDULE

What are some experiences you’ve had with bullying, harassment, and other aggressive behavior, whether among your students/clients/patients, colleagues, or happening to yourself, and did you find that anti-violence laws, policies, or programs had an impact?

Some research finds that aggressive people have low self-esteem; some finds that they have high self-esteem. To what do you attribute bullying or harassing behavior? Is it different between children and adults?

Research suggests that bullying is a unique set of behaviors tied to an institution, whether a school or a workplace. Do you find this accurate? Why or why not?

Do you find the portrayals of bullying, harassment, slander, slut-shaming and so on in the video compilation to be true to life? Why or why not? Have you experienced similar situations to those portrayed in these clips?

Have you seen similar situations happen to others?

Why do you think people like those behaving badly in these clips behave the way they do?

Do you think the people who were hurt by the behavior in the clips responded appropriately?

How could they have avoided or better responded to the hurtful behavior?

How can we avoid or best respond to these situations in real life?

How much do you hear in the media about bullying, harassment, sexual violence, and other problem behavior? Do you find these portrayals accurate? Why or why not?

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APPENDIX D SURVEY SCHEDULE

NB, Numbers may not be in order due to how Qualtrics assigns numbers to survey components. All numbers here match their labelling in the dataset.

[Pre-survey] Q1. Age Q4. Gender Q5. Ethnicity Q6. Sexual orientation Q7. Religion/faith

Q8. Do you have any of the following, (select all that apply) ⃞ physical disability ⃞ intellectual disability ⃞ mental health condition

Q9. Characterize your experience of the following by placing each on the below graph. (Less severe and less frequent is quadrant 1, more severe but less frequent is quadrant 2, more frequent but less severe is quadrant 3, and more severe and frequent is quadrant 4. You may also place items at the centerpoint.)

Less Severe More Severe Less Frequent

More Frequent

Q10. What type of schools did you attend and for how many years? ⃞ Montessori ⃞ pre-school ⃞ early learning academy ⃞ public school ⃞ private school ⃞ boarding school ⃞ middle school/junior high school ⃞ post-secondary high school ⃞ charter school ⃞ community college ⃞ 4-year college/university ⃞ graduate school ⃞ trade school ⃞ military academy

Q11. Please choose the option that best describes you.

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o I have a natural talent for influencing people. o I am not good at influencing people. o I will be a success. o I am not too concerned about success. o I am no better or worse than most people. o I think I am a special person. o I am not sure if I would make a good leader. o I see myself as a good leader. o I am assertive. o I wish I were more assertive. o I like to have authority over other people. o I don’t mind following orders. o I find it easy to manipulate people. o I don’t like it when I find myself manipulating people. o I can read people like a book. o People are sometimes hard to understand. o I just want to be reasonably happy. o I want to amount to something in the eyes of the world. o I always know what I am doing. o Sometimes I am not sure of what I am doing. o I sometimes depend on people to get things done. o I rarely depend on anyone else to get things done. o Sometimes I tell good stories. o Everybody likes to hear my stories. o I expect a great deal from other people. o I like to do things for other people. o I can live my life in any way I want to. o People can’t always live their lives in terms of what they want. o Being an authority doesn’t mean that much to me. o People always seem to recognize my authority. o I would prefer to be a leader.

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o It makes little difference to me whether I am a leader or not.

[Respondents watch one of three video clips]

[Survey]

[Matrices] Q16. On a scale of one to five, how would you rank the impact of emotional or psychological distress on the person experiencing it? Q17. On a scale of one to five, how would you rank the impact of physical harm on the person experiencing it? Q18. On a scale of one to five, how would you rank the impact of insults or defamation on the person experiencing it? Q19. On a scale of one to five, how would you rank the impact of social exclusion on the person experiencing it?

[Characterization] Select all that apply. Q20. What increases the likelihood for someone to experience emotional distress? weakness strength small stature large stature being younger being older submissiveness aggressiveness introversion extroversion attractiveness unattractiveness alternativeness strange or unusual behavior Q21. What increases the likelihood for someone to experience physical violence? weakness strength small stature large stature being younger being older submissiveness aggressiveness introversion extroversion attractiveness unattractiveness alternativeness

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strange or unusual behavior Q22. What increases the likelihood for someone to have someone insult them? weakness strength small stature large stature being younger being older submissiveness aggressiveness introversion extroversion attractiveness unattractiveness alternativeness strange or unusual behavior

[Participants watch one of three video clips.]

Q23. What motivates someone to cause distress to others? weakness strength small stature large stature being younger being older submissiveness aggressiveness introversion extroversion attractiveness unattractiveness alternativeness strange or unusual behavior Q24. What motivates someone to insult others? weakness strength small stature large stature being younger being older submissiveness aggressiveness introversion extroversion attractiveness

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unattractiveness alternativeness strange or unusual behavior

[Characterization, cont’d] Select all that apply. Q25. What motivates someone to cause physical harm to others? weakness strength small stature large stature being younger being older submissiveness aggressiveness introversion extroversion attractiveness unattractiveness alternativeness strange or unusual behavior

[Matching] Q27. Place each of the following words in the row in column B that matches its definition in Column A, Nouns, abuser, bully, psychopath, sociopath Verbs, abuse, bully, harass Column B, Nouns an unstable and aggressive person a person with extreme antisocial attitudes and behavior and a lack of conscience. a person who uses strength or power to harm or intimidate those who are weaker a person who uses something to bad effect or for a bad purpose Verbs use superior strength or influence to intimidate (someone), typically to force him or her to do what one wants treat (a person or an animal) with cruelty or violence, especially regularly or repeatedly subject to aggressive pressure or intimidation

[Columning] Q27. What word(s) does the following define? a person who uses strength or power to harm or intimidate those who are weaker

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‣ abuser ‣ bully ‣ psychopath ‣ sociopath ‣ thug ‣ tyrant a person who uses something to bad effect or for a bad purpose ‣ abuser ‣ bully ‣ psychopath ‣ sociopath ‣ thug ‣ tyrant use superior strength or influence to intimidate a person, typically to force them to do what one wants ‣ browbeat ‣ bully ‣ coerce ‣ exploit ‣ harass ‣ manipulate treat a person with cruelty or violence, especially regularly or repeatedly ‣ browbeat ‣ bully ‣ coerce ‣ exploit ‣ harass subject a person to aggressive pressure or intimidation ‣ browbeat ‣ bully ‣ coerce ‣ exploit ‣ harass

[Respondents watch one of four clips]

[Post-Survey]

[Cumulative] The same answer set is offered for each with the instruction to “Select all that apply.”

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Q55. How would you describe a one on one incident in which one person causes distress or discomfort to another? slander teasing picking on annoying/irritating messing with abuse bullying harassment violence Q56. How would you describe a one on one incident in which one person insults another? slander teasing picking on messing with abuse bullying harassment violence Q57. How would you describe a one on one incident in which one person causes physical harm to another? slander teasing picking on messing with abuse bullying harassment violence Q58. How would you describe an incident in which one person includes others in insulting another person or asks others to insult another person? slander teasing picking on messing with abuse bullying harassment violence Q59. How would you describe an incident in which one person includes others in causing distress to or asks others to cause distress to another person? slander teasing picking on

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messing with abuse bullying harassment violence Q60. How would you describe an incident in which one person includes others in causing physical harm or asks others to cause physical harm to another person? slander teasing picking on messing with abuse bullying harassment violence

[Matrices] Q61, On a scale of one to five, how would you rank the impact of emotional or psychological distress on the person experiencing it? On a scale of one to five, how would you rank the impact of physical harm on the person experiencing it? On a scale of one to five, how would you rank the impact of insults or defamation on the person experiencing it? On a scale of one to five, how would you rank the impact of social exclusion on the person experiencing it?

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APPENDIX E VIDEO SCHEDULE

Research Survey

Control Group If participants are assigned “control,” they will see only control clips for both sets. Control Videos (2) in random order, https, //vimeo.com/244549231 https, //vimeo.com/244546170

Experimental Group All other participants will always see at least two ISV clips and one narcissism clip. No participants will see two of any type of clip. No participants will see an ISV clip in both adjacent slots.

TYPE OF SLOT 1 (randomly SLOT 2 (randomly chosen SLOT 3 (randomly chosen from CLIP chosen from options from options listed below) options listed below) listed below) narcissism (not available in this slot) hair & makeup clip, (if not shown in Slot 2) https, hair & makeup clip, //vimeo.com/244546160 https, //vimeo.com/244546160 diary clip, diary clip, https, https, //vimeo.com/244553840 //vimeo.com/244553840

non- gossip/slander, https, (if not shown in Slot 1) (if not shown in Slots 1 or 2) physical //vimeo.com/244553818 gossip/slander, https, gossip/slander, https, ISV humiliation/smear, https, //vimeo.com/244553818 //vimeo.com/244553818 //vimeo.com/244551188 humiliation/smear, https, humiliation/smear, https, cyberbullying clip, https, //vimeo.com/244551188 //vimeo.com/244551188 //vimeo.com/244546146 cyberbullying clip, cyberbullying clip, https, https, //vimeo.com/244546146 //vimeo.com/244546146 physical physical bullying clip, (if not shown in Slot 1) (if not shown in Slots 1 or 2) ISV https, physical bullying clip, physical bullying clip, //vimeo.com/244546129 https, https, //vimeo.com/244546129 https, //vimeo.com/244546129 https, //vimeo.com/244554691 //vimeo.com/244554691 https, https, //vimeo.com/244554695 https, //vimeo.com/244554691 //vimeo.com/244554695 https, //vimeo.com/244554695

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Qualitative Interview

The clip available at https, //www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMjNPbgQ_VA will be shown before the interview begins.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

V. Rachel Wayne studied anthropology at Valdosta State University in Valdosta,

Georgia, where she focused on North and Central American media, rituals, and institutions. She graduated with honors in 2010, then moved to Gainesville, Florida, where she began applying her studies through community activism and art. She enrolled in the UF Department of Anthropology in 2012 and began studying the media factors in bullying, sexual assault, and intimate partner abuse. She continues to use the tools of anthropology to work with survivors of these forms of violence.

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