The recent bullying cases involving lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered victims has sparked talks on UNC’s campus about the subject.
Criminal law professor Joe Kennedy and philosophy professor Marilyn Adams spent an hour Wednesday discussing bullying as part of the Lunch and Learn series hosted by the Parr Center for Ethics in light of the recent attention being drawn to the issue.
The two professors approached the issue from different mindsets. Adams approached the issue from a moral perspective and Kennedy offered a legal point of view.
“My interest was spurred by the recent rash of teen suicides,” Adams said.
She said she defines bullying as a type of torture that has the goal of wrecking an individual’s personality. She said it is a pattern of behavior that either consciously or instinctively preys on the victim’s insecurities and self-hatred.
“Self-hatred is a relentless tormentor,” she said, connecting bullying to suicides. She added that bullying preys on a victim’s self-hatred until they feel they have no right to exist anymore.
“I think that there’s a social dimension to bullying as well,” she said.To Adams, society sends a signal that it is safe to abuse certain people because they will not receive the same protection, citing legislation surrounding same-sex marriage rights and the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.
Other laws do offer protection from bullying, Kennedy said. A professor in the law department, he spoke more on the law’s place in bullying, asking the question “What can or should the law do about it?”
Kennedy said certain acts of bullying, such as battery, destruction of property, harassment and communicative threats. He said that other acts, such as public disclosures of private facts, are considered violations of tort laws. This leaves a lot of room for bullying that is not included in the law, he added.
“The law has really struggled to get their arms around this,” he said.
Kennedy added that it’s hard not to overlook nonviolent bullying in context with all of the violent crimes committed in youth today.
“This is an enormously difficult time to be a child,” he said, adding that many people are being affected by bullying.
Adams said bullying’s commonplace nature doesn’t excuse its perpetuators.
“Everyone does it, but that doesn’t make it okay,” she said.
Adams likened the tendency to overlook psychological harm from bullying to when soldiers come home with post-traumatic stress disorder because she said their pain’s invisibility makes it easy to neglect.
“We will tolerate it when it doesn’t result in physical, bodily harm,” she said. “That’s not good enough.”
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