The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by annalee flower horne:

John Stanning @10; 20: See, I was the target of severe bullying, from grades six through grade 11, when I dropped out of school to make it stop.

So I hope you will understand what I mean when I say that I would not trust a school administrator to have my best interests at heart with regards to bullying if my very life depended on it. And there were times when it did, and I didn't.

Bullying doesn't happen because well-meaning teachers and administrators are trying their best and failing to foster a safe, supportive, and civil learning environment. Bullying happens because schools send a very loud and clear message that they care more about defending bullies than protecting their victims.

It doesn't take a password to make bullying unacceptable in your school. It's quite simple, really:

1. Make sure the staff and students have a working definition of bullying that's broader than stuffing someone into a locker. It should include harassment, both online and in person, stalking, physical and verbal abuse, and intentional humiliation.
2. Train staff and students to take bullying they witness seriously, and react immediately.
3. Punish bullies, not their victims.
3a. Do not let bullies represent your school in any capacity, be it on a sports team, in student government, or other extra-curriculars.
3b. Do not put the burden of prevention on victims by telling them to change their behavior, dress, religious convictions, or access to school resources to prevent bullying.
4. If you have staff that think it's appropriate to join in, condone, or flat-out commit bullying (and you probably do), fire them immediately. For cause, and without a reference.

We have developed a belief that kids are just naturally cruel, and that bullying is inevitable. Bull. There are many rather famous psych experiments that illustrate that even the most conscientious person will do inhuman things when subjected to systems that encourage it. How many more of those do we need before schools figure out that it's the system and not the students that are the problem?

There's also the matter of the TOS violations, both on the part of the students handing over passwords and the school for using them. Most TOSes say something about not giving out your password, allowing others to use your account, or using the accounts of others. Wasn't the myspace murderer successfully sued for a TOS violation?

For me, what it would really come down to is violating the trust placed in me by those who'd friended me. You tell me/show me something in confidence (or under a friends-lock), I'm going to do everything I can to keep it in confidence. And that's called "good moral character," which I believe is what most Christian (and "Christian") schools purport to encourage.

I've already instituted a "no voicemail" policy. I started it back in college. The college phone policy involved mandating the use of the most obnoxious voicemail program you can imagine, tied to a phone so loud that when it rang, starlings outside my closed window would spook and fly away. I set the message to say I didn't check messages there, then disconnected the phone from the wall.

These days, if I miss a call from someone I want to talk to, I call them back first and clear out the message second. No point to a "missed calls" list if I'm not going to use it.

w00t w00t w0000t!

That is delightful news!

I generally have a 'don't feed the ugly, ugly trolls' policy when it comes to Coulter myself, because paying attention to her doesn't do anything but raise the blood pressure (and perhaps make people dumber-- clinical test results on that point are inconclusive).

But when this story started appearing on my friends' list, my first reaction was 'she ought to check the statistics on that, because I don't think there's any evidence suggesting women are more liberal than men.' It didn't occur to me until a few seconds later that the possible factual inaccuracy wasn't what made this a story... I think I'm just too used to Ann Coulter saying ridiculous things.

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