To Bully Without Bullying: Subtle Hostilities and the Reproduction of Inequality

• In Event: 4240 - Power and Inequality in the Lives of Children and Youth

Abstract

This article explores what bullying is and what bullying is about. Drawing on two years of fieldwork at a rural high school in the Northeast, social media observations, and 127 interviews, I explore the disparate conceptualizations that adults and teens have about bullying, and how this mismatch in interpretation reinforces the marginalization of certain youth and identities. While adults focus on addressing individualistic, direct, targeted aggressions, teens experience bullying as subtle, diffuse, and fundamentally related to the reinforcement of larger social norms. Bullying is about inequality, enacts inequalities, and is experienced in inequitable ways. Yet because bullying prevention is increasingly policed in an institutional context that continues to make bullying’s role in the reproduction of inequality useful to teens, bullying practices have become more creative and covert.

Author

• Sarah A. Miller, Boston University