You’ve got the disease: how disgust in child culture shapes school bullying

ABSTRACT

This paper brings an ethnographic experience to bear on the existing research field of school bullying, rounding out our understanding by focusing on an essential aspect: children’s culture. Based on 14 months of fieldwork and a close analysis of the case of Anat, a 9-year-old victim of bullying, the paper identifies a unique formation of school bullying with no leading bully. Drawing from theoretical approaches which focus on pupils’ everyday life, the paper asserts that bullying without a leading bully is rooted in children’s culture which effectively enforces bullying as a binding norm by constructing its object as disgusting. The paper explores how disgust shapes school bullying into a collective omnipresent rejection. It also discusses intervention programmes and suggests that within such a social position, one practice to consider would be transferring to a new environment where bullied pupils will not be forced to cope with collectively enforced prejudices.

KEYWORDS:

• School bullying
• peer rejection
• disgust
• stigma
• ethnography

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the students of ‘Opportunities’ for generously letting me in to their worlds, and mainly to Anat for confiding in me, I hope I meet her expectations in writing this paper. I thank the editor of Ethnography and Education, the anonymous reviewers, andAliza Segal, Matan Kaminer and Ellie Shannie for their helpful comments on earlier drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 It is important to note that the focus on collective culture does not imply that students do not hold personal responsibility for hurting Anat. Immoral acts are always conducted within social contexts and constraints.

2 Although in his seminal work on stigma, Goffman (1963) does not address this relationship.

3 The data were collected seven years ago. It is quite possible that during this time cultural references have changed, as well as behavioral patterns such as the use of social networks. I believe that the contribution of this paper to the understanding of disgust’s role in school bullying remains significance even if disgust’s production and its work may have been affected by these changes.

4 When Teräsahjo and Salmivalli (2003) asked fourth graders whether students who are left out were ‘told not to join?’ one of the students replied ‘they are just told that there is no room for them’. A second student added, ‘cause there is not the correct number of players, the teams are not even. If they join in the game, you must take more players’. A similar dynamic could be seen at Opportunities. Students did not want Anat to join the game, yet the supervision of teachers did not allow them to express this directly. Therefore they turned to ‘legitimate rules’ to justify exclusion, in an ambiguous structure of meaning entirely transparent to pupils (compare de Certeau 1984, 17–18; Kaminer 2017).

5 Some classrooms exhibit cliques of rejected children (Merten 1996) that may be thought of as a partnership based on a shared stigmatised identity. We need to further explore the kinds of group resistance they enable, and still, it is important to remember that school status hierarchy also produces students who are utterly isolated, like Anat.