The Nerd And The Bully

The Nerd and the Bully

Bullies and Mean Girls in Popular Culture

The numerous anti-bullying programs in schools across the United States have done little to reduce the number of reported bullying instances. One reason for this is that little attention has been paid to the role of the media and popular culture in adolescents' bullying and mean-girl behavior. This book addresses media role models in television, film, picture books, and the Internet in the realm of bullying and relational aggression. It highlights portrayals with unproductive strategies that lead to poor resolutions or no resolution at all. Young viewers may learn ineffective, even dangerous, ways of handling aggressive situations. Victims may feel discouraged when they are unable to handle the situation as easily as in media portrayals. They may also feel their experiences are trivialized by comic portrayals. Entertainment programming, aimed particularly at adolescents, often portray adults as incompetent or uncaring and include mean-spirited teasing. In addition, overuse of the term "bully" and defining all bad behavior as "bullying" may dilute the term and trivialize the problem.

Bullyocracy

Bestselling author Donald Jeffries turns his critical eye onto the topic of bullying to show how teachers, principals, and other school officials invariably side with the bullies in the most egregious cases, instead of protecting the victims. He also shows how many so-called anti-bullying activists and nearly all the professional "experts" excuse bullying and in fact laud sociopathic behavior in general. As Jeffries demonstrates, this curious phenomenon is due to the power and influence of the social hierarchy, and it revolves to a great extent around the enduring popularity of sports. Jeffries talked to parents who'd battled a system that logically should have been working for them, some of whom lost a child to bullycide, the term for children who kill themselves over bullying. His investigation into what has become one of the most talked about issues in America is as explosive and controversial as anything he has written.