SCHOOLYARD TO GRAVEYARD: BARBARA COLOROSO DRAWS CONNECTIONS BETWEEN BULLYING AND GENOCIDE
By Andrew Macleod
Monday Magazine, Canada
May 2 2007
American writer Barbara Coloroso is known as an expert on parenting.
She has written books about preventing bullying, helping kids deal
with grief and learning to resolve conflicts without resorting to
violence. And her talk at Bear Mountain Arena this week, titled
"Raising Strong Resilient Children," will focus on bringing up kids
who are able to think and act ethically. Her most recent book, however,
is about something gloomier: genocide.
A dark little tome with a black cover and a picture of human skulls
on the front, Extraordinary Evil: A Brief History of Genocide looks
at how groups of people have at times killed large numbers of other
people for national, racial, ethnic or religious reasons.
While Extraordinary Evil at first appears to be a dramatic departure
from Coloroso’s previous work, she does a wonderful job illuminating
the connections between how kids treat each other and the extreme
evil adults sometimes do. "It’s not a great leap," she says speaking
from her Colorado home. "It’s actually a short walk."
To make the case she draws on the genocide of the Armenians in Turkey
in the early 20th century, the Jews in Germany during the Second
World War, and the Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994. She’d been a student
of genocide for some time, having discovered through Elie Wiesel’s
book Night on the Jewish holocaust that there were major holes in
her education. But it was while in Rwanda in 2005 that the idea for
the book coalesced. She was supposed to speak to a school about
bullying, but it seemed ridiculous given that, 11 years earlier,
"half the staff had killed the other half of the staff."
Instead, Coloroso writes, "I used the opportunity to demonstrate
that the concept of genocide in general, and the Rwandan genocide
in particular, are macrocosms of the drama known as bullying." In a
chapter on "The Bully Circle" she adds, "They already knew that what
had happened was something very different from a conflict, with only
two characters going at each other. Using the language of bullying,
they quickly identified various players in this tragedy by name
and role."
There were disagreements, even heated debates, over some of the
specifics of who played what role, but the language generally fit
well. In each case there is a bully who is an aggressor. There’s a
bullied, a target of the aggression. And there’s a bystander, who
knows what is happening but does nothing.
To illustrate, she draws on Reena Virk, murdered by schoolmates under
Craigflower Bridge in 1997. "Hers was such a classic case," she says.
A few kids beat and drowned her. Others were active supporters,
cheering on the attackers. Many more were bystanders, kids who knew
what had happened but did nothing to intervene or to tell anyone in
authority about it. These weren’t monsters, she points out. "These
were normal kids."
Genocide requires the same kind of consent from people. While some
do the murdering, others support it, and others quietly accept it.
Both bullying and genocide, says Coloroso, hinge on seeing other
people as something less than human. "The dynamics are rooted in
dehumanization," she says. "It does start with verbal bullying,
the dehumaninzing of another human being." Interestingly, she adds,
every genocide has a youth movement involved.
There are also parallels between how you deal with bullying and how
you stop a genocide. If two kids are fighting about something, you
help them find ways to work it out, she says. If choosing a television
show is an issue, you turn it off until they can find a fair way to
agree. But if one child is hurting the other, she says, when a 10
year old is twisting a five year old’s arm behind his or her back,
the parent or guardian needs to get in and stop what’s happening.
The same goes when one group of people is killing another. "You
don’t ‘resolve’ a genocide, you stop it," she says. "It’s not ‘peace
keepers’, it’s ‘peace makers.’ " While the international community
usually needs the consent of both parties to enter and mediate a
conflict, she says, we need to recognize genocide when we see it and
be ready to step in and stop it.
Genocide can, however, be hard to recognize. Often, as in the cases of
Germany and Rwanda, it happens under the cover of war. She suspects
it’s happening now in Iraq, she says, where scores of Sunnis are
found dead every day.
We have to be vigilant and willing to act internationally, she says,
but we also have to watch for its signs at home. When lawmakers in the
U.S. talk about illegal immigrants as "vermin and bacteria eating at
the fabric of our society", it dehumanizes people in a way reminiscent
of how Germans talked about Jews leading up to the holocaust. There is
a "culture of mean" in North America, she says, where a lot of humour
is based on laughing at other people’s misfortunes. That culture helps
lay the groundwork for violence, she says, whether it’s bullying,
hate crimes or school shootings.
If there’s a ray of hope in Extraordinary Evil, it’s that every
genocide also has a resistance. "There were always groups of people who
defied all that," she says. There were Germans who protected Jewish
neighbours and Hutus who shielded Tutsis, at times becoming targets
themselves. "They were doing a caring thing. I want to find out why."
Looking at that "ordinary goodness" will form the basis of her next
book, already underway, she says. It will hopefully be an antidote of
sorts to a book that she says was emotionally hard to write. It’s hard
to read too, but well worth the effort for the insight it offers.