Via Cath Lugg, a more realistic video about bullying of gay and lesbian youth:
The young woman in the video talks about the reality of bullying and the problems with superficial "it gets better" videos. It gets better when you're an adult and if your choices improve so you're not surrounded by bullies and bystanders. Yes, I'm glad that the "it gets better" videos exist, but they're a shallow response. As my colleague Barbara Shircliffe puts it, you can tell who has power by who has more choices, and many gay and lesbian youth don't have the choices that the "it gets better" personages have. May some day our society be healthy enough, with strongly enforced antidiscrimination laws, that LGBTQ youth don't have to be told "it gets better."
A lot of this is dealt with in Chapter 5, “Bullying, Mugging, and Holdups,” in Randall Collins, Violence: A Micro-Sociological Theory (2008), 156-187.
Total institutions, such as schools and prisons, are conducive to bullying.
In the first pages of this chapter, Collins relies on Montagner’s (1988) detailed study of French daycare centers, where 3-layered social systems emerge for 3 to 36 month old children. Dynamic social stratification ranges from the “popular dominants” with significant social skills at the top of the heap, to the isolates with no network ties at the bottom.
It is in the middle-zone that bullies and their victims are to be found.
Oh, darn. I used up my 3 inches that Sherman gave me. My point is this: we need to better understand the sociology behind this.