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Now, in time for National Bullying Prevention Month 2017, students have solid, research-based guidance for countering online hate, harassment and bullying – in the form of a cartoon!

“Counterspeech DOs & DON’Ts” is the result of a months-long collaboration of iCanHelpline.org, iHeartMob.org, #ICANHELP, Project HEAR, The Dangerous Speech Proejct and some outstanding student advisers in California and Connecticut (it was adviser and award-winning essay writer Chet Ellis who advised that a cartoon would be much more accessible to his high school peers).

The resource is based on “Considerations for Successful Counterspeech,” by Susan Benesch, Derek Ruths, Kelly P Dillon, Haji Mohammad Saleem and Lucas Wright – cutting edge research in an emerging field. Included are some points from Megan Phelps-Roper’s TED Talk, which tells the story of how counterspeech can change people and lives and, as of this writing, has been viewed more than 4.5 million times.

I first blogged about Dr. Benesch’s work here after hearing her speak at at both Facebook’s 2015 Compassion Research Day and in a smaller multi-cultural meeting at Twitter. Two things compelled me to ask her about collaborating on (then) a counterspeech curriculum for students: 1) seeing research out of the University of New Hampshire showing that most bystanders try to help peers who are being targeted but hearing from educators that they generally don’t know how and 2) knowing that the bullying prevention field had been focusing more and more on turning bystanders into upstanders (some examples in this Google search). I wanted students to have a really accessible “tool” they could use to be the change-makers they want to be. My partners at #ICANHELP had seen and demonstrated over and over again that students are part of the solution to more than the problem of social cruelty online. So I reached out to our collaborators –HeartMob and their very talented designer Kendall Simpson kindly donated their time for breathing life and color into bullet points – as well as friends at the Born This Way Foundation and Teaching Tolerance to get this tool into the hands of as many students as possible. Please click to the tool for more reference links.

We hope you’ll join us in using and sharing this tool widely. Happy Bullying Prevention Month! Let’s make it real – empower the counterspeakers and changemakers!

If we want schools to be safe for all kids, we cannot ignore the direct connections between bullying, sexual harassment and homophobic name-calling in middle school. That’s according to groundbreaking research presented by University of Florida psychology professor Dorothy Espelage in her latest talk. One of the U.S.’s leading bullying researchers, she was speaking in Washington at the American Psychological Association, which just honored her with a lifetime achievement award.

“Bullying leads to homophobic name-calling,” which is prevalent in middle school, Dr. Espelage said, “and it also predicts sexual harassment perpetration in middle school” and high school, as well as dating violence in high school and then colleges and universities.

A major new study by Harris Poll for GLSEN found that 55% of students aged 13-18 hear peers saying “that’s so gay” often or very often, 43% other homophobic terms often or very often, and a quarter (25.5%) hear school staff “make negative remarks related to students’ gender expression.”

Factor gender into bullying prevention

Espelage and her colleagues have found that students as young as 5th and 6th graders commonly use that terminology, as many parents know – “especially when boys do not act masculine and girls do not act feminine,” as kids collectively define those terms in their own peer groups and schools. “We found that such homophobic language is used to assert power over other students…. [They] start to sexually harass members of the opposite sex to demonstrate that they are not gay,” she wrote.

For that reason, even though most bullying prevention programs don’t factor in gender, they need to, she said in her talk. “We have to recognize that this socialization process, this homophobia and sexual harassment that happens to both boys and girls happens way before we send them to college.

“If we continue to do this [bullying prevention] work in schools with no gender lens, we’re going to continue to fall short,” she said. On the other hand, “if we address homophobic name-calling … we’ll have much improved lives for middle school students, and [this prevention work] will be relevant to them [emphasis mine].” She mentioned one brave 7th grader who told her that he was just so done with the name-calling and didn’t understand why the questions the researchers were asking them didn’t look at the kind of aggressive behavior that irritated and disturbed students like him the most.

Other key highlights from a very comprehensive talk:

• Social emotional learning is powerful: “Out of the gate, after just 15 lessons” (out of 41 SEL lessons that 3,600 6th-8th-graders received over a three-year study), her research turned up a “major reduction in physical fighting”: 42%, “where most programs predict a 3% reduction,” she said. “By Year 3, Second Step [the SEL program they used in the study] had reduced all forms of victimization – including for kids with a disability.” The findings reinforced what many of us have come to see, including me: that SEL instruction would benefit every student and every school, especially now that social media is part of the school climate mix. Social literacy training for social media (and life!). In her talk, Espelage also pointed to studies showing SEL’s positive impact on students’ academic performance as well as school climate, “and it works at multiple levels of society.” [Here‘s what SEL teaches.]

• Positive school climates, safe students: SEL, bullying prevention, mindfulness, etc. “We can have all these programs, but we have to understand the larger school climate…. We’ve ignored the adult component – teachers, administrators, superintendents. “You really can’t have the social-emotional competencies in kids if you don’t have them in teachers,” she said, pointing to the need for teachers’ professional development in SEL too. “I [as a student] can have a predisposition to be aggressive, but if I’m in a classroom where the norm is to be pro-social, [that predisposition] will not be turned on,” she said, saying the reverse can be true too, of course. “My individual propensity interacts with classroom norms and ultimately school climate.”

• If we want students to be “upstanders”: In visits to schools all over the country, Espelage found that, when teachers said they had a social aggression problem in their schools, the students said they didn’t intervene. “We can’t tell kids to intervene if it’s not a safe space,” she said, referring to classrooms as well as school in general. And it has to be a safe space for teachers as well, in this sense: “If teachers feel supported by their school’s administration to do this work in the classroom, the kids are saying aggression is happening less.” They’re bullied less, victimized less, and they fight less. “That’s powerful,” Espelage said, while acknowledging that it’s not easy to make this happen because it’s a multi-level process, but it’s worth it – rewarding for everybody. “You’re not going to be perfect, nothing’s perfect. But go after this – so the kids can perceive you’re doing something, and then they’ll be more caring toward one another.”

• Taking “the punishment route” doesn’t work. “Principals are very challenged,” Espelage said, because they’re often pressured to use the punitive approach by parents or victims. But progress comes from adults’ supportive responses and modeling of respectful behavior – a huge part of improving school climate. This will have a positive impact on cyberbullying too, she said. “My hope is that, as we create more positive school climates, where kids are bullying and engaging in other forms of aggression less, then when they go into that other [digital] space, that prosocial behavior will be reflected,” she said.

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  A healthy school looks like a healthy family and vice versa (see Espelage’s slide to the right for the characteristics of “healthy” in both cases).

• Cyberbullying’s context isn’t social media. Seriously. “What I hear all the time from schools is that ‘social media is wreaking havoc’,” Espelage said. But addressing content or behavior in social media doesn’t reduce cyberbullying nearly as much as addressing bullying, homophobic name-calling and gender-based harassment, she said. “Having the attorney general come to school to talk to students” about social media doesn’t really help reduce cyberbullying, she said. That’s because the context of cyberbullying is really young users’ school climate, what’s happening in their peer groups, not media. Bullying predicts cyberbullying more than social media use does. This was a key finding from a lit review produced by a national task force I served on: that a child’s psychosocial makeup and home and school environments are better predictors of online risk than any technology the child uses.

• If a student comes to you: “Just assume when a kid comes to you and says ‘I’m being bullied, I’m being victimized’ – and of course you’re going to ask them what’s happening, because ‘bullying’ doesn’t really mean much…from Student A to Student B – assume it’s been happening for a while…ask them if they feel they can defend themselves. If they say no, then ask, ‘Who can you turn to, do you feel helpless?’ In some cases, especially LGBT youth, we’re starting to chase after this notion of feeling like a burden to their family. So understanding that some kids feel so depressed and withdrawn when they’re victimized because they don’t want to tell their parents again; their parents thought it stopped…and their mom’s having to take off of work and come down to school…. So the burden piece is showing up to be quite relevant as well…. So we have these components: If it’s been happening for awhile, they feel defenseless, they have no one to turn to, be concerned and do a referral.”

So 1) bullying prevention work needs to reach young people when or before they’re doing their developmental identity formation, which includes gender identity and 2) everybody in the school community has a role in creating a climate of dignity and respect. And 3) when schools decide not to tolerate sexual harassment of any student, they’ll see less homophobic name-calling, more gender equity and less sexual harassment. 4) They’ll also see less cyberbullying, which is bullying happening in what has become just another space where students’ interaction plays out. 5) Punitive doesn’t work: Not only is it clearer than ever that pressure on administrators to suspend and expel not only does nothing to make schools safer, it sends the message that power – which is a component of both punitive responses and bullying – is what solves social problems. It doesn’t. And 6) we now have solid, multi-year research showing that social emotional learning is powerful prevention. It reduces “all forms of victimization,” even for the most vulnerable students, and improves school climate.

Just from watching Engadget’s 6 min. video report about it one can tell “The Last Goodbye” – a 16 min. virtual reality experience that debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival that just wrapped in New York – will have a profound impact on anyone who experiences it. The reporter called it “emotionally harrowing.”

So there are really two central roles in this VR experience: that of Holocaust survivor Pinchas Gutter, who was 11 years old when he was literally shipped to Majdanek, then an extermination camp in Germany-occupied Poland, and that of empathy. Because clearly – based on the thoughtful video report by Engadget reporter Devindra Hardawar – the project is truly all about both. The participant is walking into Gutter’s horrific experience as a child and spending that time with him now, which is beyond extraordinary. Part of it is virtually, immersively, being in – walking around in – the camp with Gutter as he points out what happened in specific locations. “We wanted to ease people into the walk-around,” one of the producers told Hardawar. You can tell that’s needed.

The experience itself is the first part of experiential learning. The other essential part is the reflecting, the thinking out loud, that the participant does about their experience of it. So there’s a third crucial role (if a production is to become a teaching tool) – that of the facilitator or teacher and others external to the experience who are bringing empathy to the overall experience (in and after the virtual part).

Empathy around the VR experience too

So further thought needs to go into empathy’s role. Clearly, based on Engadget’s report, it was central to the project and the producers’ intent. They wanted to be sure the production, the art and the technology, was faithful to the story and the space, they said. In teaching with a tool like this, we’d want nothing less than the level of integrity they’re asserting, right? That’s baseline.

Then there’s the empathy around a teaching tool like this – the kind that supports the participant, especially a child. The producers said they’re not sure what’s next – museums, classrooms, etc. They “want to be able to release it to everyone who has VR headsets.” But maybe it’s not ideally a solitary experience for a child, right? What if it gets into the hands of a child who’s not ready for this “emotionally harrowing” experience? It could be that VR like this needs to be in classrooms and other communities of guided practice, where there are caring adults who know what the children in their care can handle – and who can hold discussions afterwards that give participants context and even emotional support where the experience triggers strong negative emotions.

Related links

• An award-winning empathy teaching tool available to parents and educators right now is Gifts from the Enemy, the true story of Alter Wiener, a teen survivor of five Nazi concentration camps. Writing for children 8-12, award-winning author Trudy Ludwig tells of how “an unexpected person demonstrated moral courage in repeated acts of kindness” toward Alter. As described in Ludwig’s site, the book aims to show “how acts of social justice and kindness can change lives.”
• “Four big trends in virtual reality on display at the Tribeca Film Festival” at Forbes.com
• “How virtual reality can be used to fight prejudice and racism in society” at UploadVR.com