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Top 5 bullying myths: What you don't know about bullying

We all know that bullying is wrong but you may know even less about bullying than you originally thought. Monitor correspondent Stephanie Hanes debunks 5 popular misconceptions.

4. Everyone is equally at risk of falling victim to bullying.

AP Photo/Steven Senne
Former school bus monitor Karen Klein, of Greece, N.Y., was surrounded by school children while riding a tourist boat in Boston, June 28, 2012. Ms. Klein, who was shown in a viral video being relentlessly bullied by a group of boys, says she’s retiring.

While there is no single profile of a bullying victim, there are characteristics that make a child more likely, on average, to become victimized. Researchers say that socially marginalized children, whether because of sexual orientation or disability, are more likely to be bullied. Bullying also “plays out differently across gender and age, ethnicity and race,” professors Danah Boyd and John Palfrey wrote for “The Kinder & Braver World Project: Research Series,” a 2012 synthesis of research on bullying published by Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society.  

There are also situations that cause a child to become a more likely target for bullies, some researchers say. Children who are new to school or who do not have friends are more likely to be bullied than those with a more secure social network.  

None of this is to say that bullying won’t happen to anyone; many researchers simply urge schools and policy makers to recognize these risk factors. 

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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