Empathy and a rubber band. For one student, these are the things that made a difference.
One Friday afternoon, Rachel, a high school junior, was walking down the hallway on her way out of school. Among the hundreds of students who were talking, laughing, and gesturing as they exited the building, Rachel spotted one girl, a younger student whose name she did not know, sitting in front of a locker staring miserably across the hall as students walked by her, stepped over her, and ignored her in their rush to leave school. Rachel stopped and sat down next to the girl and asked her whether everything was OK. The girl immediately began talking, amid tears, about how every day students ridiculed her about her race and her size and spread rumors about her sexual activity.
As the girl gestured emphatically, the sleeves of her shirt rode up her arm revealing three 5-inch-long, raw cut marks. Rachel asked the girl why she was cutting herself, and she said, "the only time in my life when I don't think about how awful school is for me is when I can concentrate solely on the physical pain of cutting myself." In the past, she had put rubber bands around her wrist to remind her not to cut herself. But she was so anxious that she picked at the rubber bands until they broke.
Rachel was wearing a wide, thick rubber band around her wrist that day. She gave it to the younger girl, saying, "I'm giving this to you because I want you to remember that I care about you and because this band will not break. You won't have to cut yourself." Rachel added that she hoped the girl would talk to a counselor.
Seven months later, Rachel ran into the younger girl again. She was still wearing the broad rubber band and told Rachel that she had not cut herself since they talked.
The Power of Words
Words are the central tool of education. Whether written or spoken, words can elucidate, inform, and inspire. But they can also scare, humiliate, and disempower. Degrading slurs, jokes, and epithets are pervasive in the hallways, cafeterias, buses, locker rooms, and even classrooms of middle and high schools everywhere.
A school where degrading language, slurs, and jokes are widely used and rarely challenged is a place where violence is far more likely to occur. Some students will take the silence of bystanders as license to escalate their behavior from words to harsher words, threats, and finally violence. In every instance of violence that I have investigated in schools, first as a hate crime prosecutor and more recently when administrators asked me to help them respond to serious misconduct, I have seen this same process of escalation.
Of course, physical violence is not the only potential problem arising from hateful speech. Students who are targets of bullying and harassment may lose their health—becoming anxious or depressed, turning to alcohol and drugs, or engaging in self-harm such as cutting. Others lose their education because they are unable to put aside their feelings of humiliation, fear, or anger and concentrate on academics. Some find that their grades fall, some start skipping school, and some drop out entirely. Tragically, a few lose it all and take their own lives because of the desperation and hopelessness that a school life dominated by exclusion, intimidation, and degradation brings.
The Center for the Prevention of Hate Violence helps students find new words—words of civility and respect that can heal the wounds caused by bias and harassment. We have worked with students in the United States, the Middle East, Canada, and Northern Ireland to empower students and teachers to speak up when they hear degrading speech. Teachers can use the principles we espouse to transform the classrooms and hallways of their schools.
Empowering Students
Administrators and teachers alone cannot change school climate. A school may have the best possible written harassment policies, and administrators may consistently and fairly apply those policies. Teachers and other staff may interrupt degrading language whenever they hear it. But most incidents of bias, harassment, and disrespect occur outside the hearing and eyesight of any adult. Until we empower students to stand up and speak up, we will not change school climate.
The Center for the Prevention of Hate Violence empowers students through the Unity Project, an intensive multiyear relationship in which our staff collaborates with administrators and school faculty and staff on a variety of different interventions. Strategies include full-day workshops with student leaders, assemblies in which students work in small groups to devise strategies for reducing harassment, and intensive dialogue programs. Students learn about harassment in school, talk about bias and stereotypes, and, most important, develop strategies and skills for leadership.
Learning About Harassment
Focus groups with students help school leaders learn what degrading language and other harassment students are using and observing in school. Whenever we start working in a new school, we begin with focus groups. To encourage greater candor, we group students with similar peers: girls, boys, students of color, gaystraight alliance members, and so on. Girls, for example, will talk more openly about sexual harassment in an all-girls group than in a mixed-gender group.
One high school student wrote the following during a focus group:Freshman year I got a reputation for being a "slut." Everyone always asked me about it or commented about it when I was around, and it hurt really badly. It was so unfair because I am not sexually promiscuous. It got to the point where I never went out. I just went home and cried. I started cutting myself. After a while, the rumors dissipated, but I have never recovered the friends I lost during that time, and I still won't go to school parties because I'm afraid of what they say to me.
Another student wrote about a classmate who had recently immigrated to the United States:I have a friend who was harassed in school every day because of the color of her skin and her accent. She became depressed, wishing she could return to her home country, but that could not happen. So she started to skip school. All her grades went down from As to Fs. She felt there was no need to go to a school where she was not accepted for who she was.
After the focus groups, we draft a report and present our findings to faculty members by having them read aloud 25–35 of the student descriptions. Reading these comments together helps teachers develop a shared understanding of the level of harassment and bias. The effects of bullying become very immediate, very real, and very painful.
Information from focus groups is also crucial when working with students. Too often, we talk abstractly about bias, harassment, and bullying. By giving students concrete examples of the words that classmates use in school, we replace the abstract with the harsh reality of what goes on in hallways, cafeterias, and classrooms.
Challenging Stereotypes
Two weeks after a bloody racial fight witnessed by hundreds of students, our center gathered 25 students from the high school in question to discuss racial tension in their school. One-third of the participants were white students who had expressed high levels of hostility to students of color. Another third were students of color who were upset about the racial bias in the school. The final third were students from all races who wanted the school to be safe and respectful.
Students broke into small groups to discuss the use of "the n word." White students asked questions, and students of color provided both history and personal and family experience. Mark, a white student who was angry about the demographic changes in his school, had freely used racial slurs, and was regarded as a leader by many white students, asked to speak. He pointed to Sara, a student of color, and said that her explanation of the history of violence and humiliation surrounding the n word had helped him understood for the first time "how awful that word is." Turning to his white classmates, he said, "We need to change; we need to come together." He looked at Sara, said, "Thank you," and sat down. At that moment, this group of 25 students changed.
The degrading language, slurs, and jokes that students so frequently hear are built on a foundation of stereotypes about gender, race, sexual orientation, body size, religion, disability, and other characteristics. Such stereotyping makes it far too easy for students to depersonalize others who are different and to treat them in degrading and hurtful ways.
Our Controversial Dialogue programs, like the one described above, are intensive facilitated discussions about stereotypes and bias, often including students who have been in conflict. Such dialogues typically include between 18 and 25 students who meet weekly for 90–120 minutes over four to six weeks. These dialogues have been remarkably successful both in reducing conflict and in uniting students from different groups in a joint belief in the importance of preventing bias, harassment, and violence.
Although the dialogue sessions at Mark and Sara's school remained intense even after Mark's comments, the students began listening to one another and talking with their friends who didn't attend the session about the need to end racial animosity. After that first dialogue session, there were no more racial fights for the remainder of the year!
Developing Leadership Strategies and Skills
Recently, racist flyers were distributed to homes in a neighborhood surrounding a high school participating in the Unity Project. People of color living in the neighborhood and students of color attending the school were fearful. The community was shocked. The local press and community members began to suggest, without any basis, that white high school students were responsible for the flyers.
The morning after the flyers were distributed, I was scheduled to meet with 25 students in an ongoing dialogue on race. I asked the students to decide on a response to the incident. Within minutes, the students had decided on two projects. The first was to write a letter to the editor of the local newspaper condemning the flyers and making it clear that this ugly incident did not reflect the values of the school or the community. The letter was typed, signed by all 25 students, and sent to the paper. It was published the next morning.
The second project was to have the school host a community meeting. The students made a large poster sending the message that the high school stood firmly against hate. They sat at a table outside the cafeteria and asked their classmates to consider signing the poster. Eight hundred students signed. At the community meeting, attended by community and elected leaders and by the press, students shared feelings about the flyers, read the letter to the editor, and displayed the poster prominently at the front of the room.
For some people, leadership appears to be innate. Most of us, however, must learn to be leaders. Educators can help students develop leadership skills by talking with them about leadership and by role-playing how they might intervene when they encounter degrading language. But students also need opportunities to actually act as leaders by, for example, speaking at assemblies, presenting to faculty or parents, working on projects in school and in the community to reduce bias and tension, and facilitating discussions with other students. These experiences prepare them to respond effectively when their school experiences a crisis involving bias-motivated violence or threats. The 25 students who responded to the racist flyers turned a hateful incident into one that confirmed school and community values of respect, civility, and diversity.
The Role of Teachers
Although these stories show that students can and do effectively combat harassment and bias, teachers have a critical role to play as well.
Interrupting the Language of Hate
Whether in the hallway or the classroom, teachers must speak up when students use degrading language or stereotypes. In a busy hallway, these interventions can be short. Making eye contact with a student and saying, "I heard that," "We don't talk like that here," or "That word is hurtful" sends the message that bias-motivated slurs and jokes are not acceptable. These low-key interventions break the pattern of escalation and stop some students from continuing to use degrading words. They also model for students what they can do to interrupt hurtful language themselves. And finally, when teachers speak up, they send a message of hope to those students who constantly hear slurs but feel that no one cares.
Responding in the Classroom
Incidents occurring in the classroom present a far better opportunity for learning than the incidents that take place in a crowded hallway. Every incident needs a response from the teacher and, when feasible, a classwide discussion.
When a student uses harsh language or hurtful stereotypes in class, the teacher might demonstrate the need for unity by asking a student for a pencil. The teacher then holds up the pencil and with two hands breaks it in two. Then, the teacher asks five or six students for their pencils. Holding the pencils together, the teacher tries unsuccessfully to break them—there simply are too many to break. The teacher can conclude by saying,There is no one student in this class who can't be singled out for mistreatment and bias. And that student can be deeply hurt or, like the pencil, broken. But all it takes is a small group of you to stick together and you become too strong to be broken.
This can be the extent of the exercise, or the teacher might follow up with a longer discussion about the importance of standing up against bias. In faculty workshops, our center provides teachers with a number of similar activities that can serve as prompts to discuss bias, stereotypes, and harassment.
Talking Openly
One Monday morning when I arrived for a session at a school, I learned that a former student had been shot to death by police in the street in front of the school on Saturday night.
That afternoon, I was scheduled to meet with a group of 25–30 students to continue a discussion about racial tensions in the school. At the meeting, I asked them if they would rather talk about the shooting, and every one of them said yes. I then asked what discussions they had had about the shooting that morning in school. They stared at me blankly until one student said, "No one has mentioned it. Not once!" The students, however, did notice a significant police presence in and around the school. Rumors were flying, and students were anxious. I shared what I knew about the incident.
Students then talked about how they felt. Some were scared, some were angry at the police, and a couple were deeply saddened because they knew the young man who had been shot. The discussion went on for about 20 minutes, and the students then said that they were ready to continue the planned dialogue about racial issues. At the end of the session, the students described how healing it had been to talk about what had happened and learn that they were not alone in their feelings.
Teachers need to talk with students about the major events that affect their lives. These conversations do not need to take an entire class period. Often students want only a few minutes in which an adult validates their experiences. Students cannot focus on academics when they are thinking about traumatic events outside the classroom. Teachers who acknowledge their students' emotional experiences send the message that they understand and respect their students.
"That Assembly"
The Center for the Prevention of Hate Violence has developed an interactive assembly program that combines a candid speech given by someone from our staff followed by small-group discussions facilitated by students. We close the program by asking students to walk from their seats to an open microphone and talk about a time in which they or someone else had done something to create positive change in school climate. Slowly, one by one, and then in twos and threes, students come up to speak about a time when someone broke up a fight, interrupted the use of hurtful language, talked with a teacher about a classmate involved in self-destructive behavior, or reached out to someone who was lonely and sad. Often the line of students waiting to speak seems never to end.
One middle school student wrote this response to the assembly at her school:"That Assembly"At the assembly I saw thousands of tears, on the inside and a few on the outside. I heard people tell stories of harassment, stories of sorrow and also apologies. A girl who had made fun of me a year ago had her eyes welled in tears. She turned around and said through a gasp, "I'm sorry." It must have hurt her to keep that incident in her mind for a long year and a half. But it still made some of my pain go away.Even though some people laughed at first they must know now that it can hurt. And as I left the assembly, I saw the people who had shed tears, surrounded by friends, by strangers, and by teachers. And it made me want to cry. The most beautiful sight in the world is to see someone in sorrow surrounded by reassurance.As I walked through the halls, I heard something so miraculous. A young girl was telling her friends that she had two fathers, explaining why she had not told her friends. "I love them, but I was so afraid if I told they would get hurt." It makes you want to go up and hug her yourself, not even knowing her name. That one assembly helped her feel safe enough to tell the truth. And when I left that hallway, I realized that assembly changed me, that girl, and so many others.
When we give students the opportunity to tap into their large reservoir of empathy, when we model for students the courage to speak up for someone else, we will often be surprised at their capacity for leadership and their ability to make change.
