Cath Lugg's continuing discussion of LGBT students' suicides reminds us that civilization is a thin veneer. It may be ideal from one standpoint to socialize children so that they're shocked to realize there is inequality in the world, but that's a luxury that's equivalent to "discovery" preferences of some educators. When she was five years old, my daughter learned that the first generation of astronauts were all men, and that despite superior results on a number of physiological and psychological tests, women were coldly excluded from the early astronaut corps. She was outraged at the time on behalf of the women who could have become the earliest astronauts. I don't think I'm an especially brilliant parent, but my children grow up in an environment that's safer than what the vast majority of children historically have. They have the luxury to grow up with the assumption that discrimination is wrong. Millions of youth today have grown up with and developing a similar sense that discrimination based on sexual orientation is wrong. In the long term, that's healthy for society, and if we could just rely on today's children and young adults having discovered that discrimination is wrong, all would be well with the world.
But LGBT youth who are teenagers today have to survive to that long term, and while they live in a world that is much better than 40 years ago, there are substantial pockets of hostility, bullying, and silence by adults in the face of bullying. Human Rights Watch's Hatred in the Hallways (2001) described schools no one should be proud of. We're nine years past that report, and there are plenty of schools that still fit that description, a demonstration that we can't just rely on students' "discovering" that bullying is wrong. That would be as much educational malpractice as assuming that young children will inevitably discover the alphabetic principle in the irregular English language or that children will discover for themselves the same scientific knowledge that required a wholesale break from Aristotle's "common sense" reasoning.
We're generally not taught explicitly how to stand up effectively for others, and we're not born with the knowledge. One of the things no teacher ed program effectively covers (and certainly no six-week instant-prep program or induction workshop does) is what to do when a small group of students gangs up on others. I'm not going to pretend to know exactly what the best anti-bullying program might be, and I'm well aware that school systems tend to engage in a great deal of ineffective anti-drug and pro-safety programs. But I think we have to stop assuming that inaction is best when people keep dying.
Randall Collins, Violence (2008), has an entire chapter devoted to bullying as an outcome of social stratification dynamics. His anti-bullying program targets total institutions, where bullying is more prevalent because victims simply cannot get away from their abusers. Closed networks made up of limited numbers of social ties, can sustain abusive relationships over years. (This is central to Collins’ definition of bullying: recurring, extending over years. This is a far cry from passing status displays of humiliating the competition and impressing your friends.)
On this basis, the answer is multiple associations outside schools, which are the breeding ground for this kind of ongoing abusive relationships. These alter relations allow for the social construction of other, less victimized, selves; on whose basis (I speculate), egress from abusive relations may be possible. The point here, for Collins, is the maintenance of give-and-take fights between equals, not the stronger battening on the weakest. Historically, this is the background of duelling. Would that we could escape our “greedy institutions” (Lewis Coser’s term) the same way — on an equal footing.