Boycotts, Bullying, and the Bystander
Recognizing & Addressing the Role of Othering in Our Society
The storm of speculation around Sushant Singh Rajput’s death brings up terribly difficult questions about social exclusion and isolation tactics across a range of settings: including workplace bullying, school bullying, and college ragging. It is unlikely that bullying, or any single factor, is the cause of suicide either in Sushant Singh Rajput’s case or in any other case. But studies do confirm some correlation between bullying and raised risk of suicide, and this makes it essential that we break the silence around it. India has the dubious distinction of being the country with the highest rate of suicide in South East Asia (WHO 2016), and experts all over the world fear that workplace bullying is as serious an epidemic as sexual harassment in workplaces, but has yet to explode the way the #MeToo movement did in 2018.
Othering as a Social Tool
India’s active caste-based practice ensures that the use of social exclusion and isolation is already embedded into our social processes. In 2017, Maharashtra’s landmark law banned social boycotting commonly used by leaders of jaat panchayats to bully, harass, and exclude people from participating in all sorts of social functions as well as blocking access to institutions like schools or community halls of hospitals.
While the implementation of such a law is still a challenge, it acknowledges that the impact of social boycotts can be devastating. Panchayats might mete out “consequences” to those who break rules or challenge hierarchies. The law also establishes two key players: community leaders who make decisions, as well as those who support decisions made by leaders, acknowledging the role of an in-group or social network, that passively but effectively helps preserve hierarchy. Out of the traditional caste and Maharashtra context, social boycotting is a well-established tool used by powerful people to preserve a particular hierarchy. Anyone can see that this “format” of bullying is also used widely in schools, colleges, and work environments.
The use of social exclusion and isolation is already embedded into our social processes.
When we concentrate primarily on solutions that address the victim’s mental health, we are signaling that victims should find ways to cope with reality — not that the bullying or harassment will stop. What we learn from reading the suicide note left by PHD student Rohith Vemula in 2016 is that he needed support from mental health experts and a suicide prevention helpline, no doubt, but clearly he also needed the harassment he refers to in his letter to stop. He needed his delayed fellowship stipend to be paid, he needed allies to make sure he was allowed back into his hostel, he needed sustained support to discredit the rumor that he was an anti-national. Similarly, victims of sexual abuse might need support to seek out legal, psychological, or other support — but they also need allies to help ensure the abuse or harassment stops. What this means is that along with empowering victims, we need to intervene in order to stop bullying and harassment. Why don’t we? What stops us?
Recognizing Bullying & Its Impact
Recognizing and thus addressing bullying, and social bullying (also called relational aggression) and things like boycotting could be tricky. Let’s not confuse bullying with professional competition, which is bound to exist across all sorts of workplaces and businesses — including Bollywood. Bullying, as described by psychologists, is “a type of aggressive behavior that relies on an imbalance of power, when more powerful people/groups target those less powerful repeatedly to cause harm.” Bullying is often and inaccurately viewed as a school or parenting problem, while WHO defines it as a broader public health issue, a multifaceted form of mistreatment, that occurs across ages — in schools, colleges, business or work settings. Bullying and boycotting are particularly hard to spot early or address easily, because they are often located in the grey area between business and personal lives, informal and formal systems, or between academic and home life for students.
Physical and verbal bullying are slightly easier to identify and address (96 percent of adults are able to spot it and this might make it easier to act on it). But social bullying or relational aggression is rarely recognized or acknowledged. Used by adults, youth and adolescents — it is more subtle and covert, targeting a victim’s social status or relationships, it often plays out in the context of groups. This kind of bullying might not involve direct threats or interaction with the target, but could instead play out on television, social media, or with the target’s peers and social networks. Social bullying ensures that the target is gradually and systematically distanced, ignored and isolated through rumors, gossip, “humorous” teasing, mimicking, exclusion from social gathering, or boycotting.
Needless to say, social exclusion and boycotts can have a devastating impact on adolescents. Take fifteen-year-old Samir, twelve-year-old Parijat and eleven-year-old Ankit (names changed): each of these students felt bullied and excluded in their schools. They experienced sleeplessness, physical illness, and depression, and were unable to attend school until two of them finally switched schools. While their parents did ensure that each accessed a psychologist, the sustained social isolation did not stop. In the case of adults too, social boycotting and exclusion can have a serious psychological impact, even when individual actions seem mild and innocuous.
Social boycotting and exclusion can have a serious psychological impact, even when individual actions seem mild and innocuous.
Why do “low-intensity” actions like ignoring an individual over months or excluding them for weeks even warrant an intervention that is supportive of the target? Borrowing from the approach to sexual harassment and India’s POSH (Prevention of Sexual Harassment) law, it might be important to think about the act of bullying based on impact it has on the victim, rather than the intent of those who bully. Seemingly “harmless” actions with no intention to harm can leave a victim feeling frightened and intimidated. Boycotts and isolation by a group can damage reputations, destroy social networks that are linked to earning, delay or defer projects and payments, affect financial security, even destroy future plans — so that victims are left to feel lonely and threatened. Another conflict between intent and impact might be when bullies engage in what they believe is light humor, but which might affect victims differently if they find it aggressive or humiliating.
We are often hardest on boys and young men, who are meant to be tough enough to take all sorts of “fun” on the chin. In 2008 when Aman Kachroo, a new medical college student, left a college ragging session because he did not want to participate in the “fun,” he paid with his life. There are generations of boys from India’s elite boarding schools who are expected to take bullying and sexually abusive practices all in good humor — a well-guarded bullying tradition silently passed on (and thus preserved) by illustrious alumni from these schools.
How We Can Change
There is good news, however. If we are serious about disrupting bullying, social boycotts or social isolation patterns, then bystanders have been found to have a significant positive impact. Research finds that 81 percent of bullying take part in the presence of or with the participation of observers or peers present. Although those around intervened only 19 percent of the time — when they acted, bullying and harassment stopped 57 percent of the time.
Bystanders can use peer group status or observer and audience power to stop and disrupt bullying even while it is ongoing and help the bullied person recover. Bystanders can leverage their positions of power in various ways to intervene. Influencing friends and social networks actively to reject bullying behavior or reaching out and supporting victims who are being boycotted (but publicly so as to influence others) — could be ways of leading the charge against this problem.
Research shows that when bystanders intervene, bullying and harassment stop almost 60 percent of the time.
While we are silent and inactive as bystanders, we do need to wonder whether our social media messaging, social networks, entertainment choices, friend groups, or peer groups are in fact making us into bullies even when we might not think of ourselves as such, keeping us silent under the guise of neutrality or objectivity. Perhaps on this one, we take a leap and go old school: nothing fancy nor technical. As bystanders, let us simply introspect and show compassion to all sorts of people, especially those who are wonderfully different from us.
Suparna Gupta is a Mason Fellow from Harvard Kennedy School, an Ashoka Fellow, and the founder of Aangan Trust.
