17/11/2005
Consensus politics in action
entry posted by Inquisitor at 2:39
(permalink).
edited on: 17/11/2005 2:50.
categories: Idiots
, Misc
, Personal
, Politics
The new, more open, "Have Your Say" format on the BBC News website has turned into a cesspool of idiots spouting received opinions, despite most discussions supposedly being fully moderated. It's not quite unreadably crazy yet, but it's getting there.
What's depressing is the kind of comments people are voting for - the format provides a comments rating system that appears to be used by people to bolster each other's stupid bollocks. The first sensible comment out of all the highest ranked on this bullying discussion is on page 3 - Mark Fairman pointing out that bullying was in fact an accepted part of school life in the 1960s and 70s, from teacher down (see: Kes, Scum, Richard Branson's and John Peel's autobiographies, your parent's recollections, much of this b3ta discussion etc) and things are in fact getting better in that bullying is now recognised as a problem. Of course, the kids are still screwed anyway. Most of the rest of it is "bring back corporal punishment! bring back borstal! bring back h...old fashioned punishment! political correctness gone mad! revoke the Human Rights Act!" - all absolute crap, but sadly believed by many.
It is this kind of consensus-jumping which caused the "TRAITORS!" front page on the Sun, and it has absolutely nothing to do with the truth. I know full well how little schools actually care about bullying; one of my brothers recently had to spend a long period out of school after being near strangled by someone that "no-one saw" (in a crowded corridor, uh-huh), and I had a truly horrendous time at that very same high school. I was attacked in a corridor in between the two papers of my Higher English examination; I'm still amazed that I managed to keep enough control in order to pass the thing. I've always suspected that some of the stuff done to my brothers, who are all very different individuals to me, was entirely because I was related to them; shit filters down. Can't prove it, but I know.
The fact remains, though, that quite a lot of it is a "Code of the Schoolyard" situation; the kind of thing that the Simpsons skewered so well back in 1990, and not anything to do with the school's (lack of an) anti-bullying policy. If no-one will talk, like in the case of that assault on my brother (and other such assaults on both me and my other brothers), then no-one can be punished - even in the best case scenario, it's he said he said, and in the worst case scenario, it's he's had to go to hospital for two days and stay out of school for a fortnight but he doesn't know who his attacker is and no-one else will even dare say anything happened, and it's this more than anything else that stops people from going to teachers in the first place. Crappy enforcement of existing rules, and wholesale ignoring of anti-bullying policies, is definitely a problem, but bullying is an odd issue; this almost omertà-like enforced silence is a symptom of the fear that bullies cause and administer, and of entrenched societal attitudes that are not being confronted often enough.
And as for societal attitude, look no further than this Guardian Weekend article on homophobic bullying - the type of bullying that earns you a "Get Out Of Trouble Free" card. As the guy from Stonewall points out in the article, you don't even have to be gay to suffer from homophobic bullying; you just have to not be within someone's Straight Stereotype. And since schools still think they're working on a Section 28 agenda, if you get bullied that way you're probably doomed.
I wrote a TV script some years ago, in a bout of depression related to rememberances of my high school years, called School's Out; conceived as a series of satirical sketches about the education system, it instead evolved during writing into an interlinked venomous rant, occasionally taking setting ideas from things like the deep-fat-fryer torture scene from Spooks, aimed at no-one and everyone in particular (and, cheerfully, bookended with a teenager committing suicide to a Mogwai song; I was listening to "Happy Songs For Happy People" a lot at the time). It's way too raw to even consider sending it anywhere, but possibly with some toning down and serious restructuring/rewriting it might at least become readable. So that's my new writing project - making a School's Out serious revision that I feel secure enough, at least, to post on here.
Probably won't happen, but I can always hope...