The Bully Button: New Tool Is Either World's Greatest Anti-Bully Weapon or Terrifying Fascist Plot

After school

Photo Credit: Image by Leonid Mamchenkov via Flickr

If you and I were together on the middle-school playground and you could poke me in the gut while calling me a stupid cripple and nobody would see us except seven passive cowards and three of your suck-up toadies, would you? Sure you would.

But what if I could film you on my iPhone? Better yet, what if with one click I could send this footage instantly to school administrators, your parents and mine and the police?

A new app can do that. Last week, OptimizeApps.com launched its Bully Button, which allows users to document and report bullying incidents with a single touch. An upgrade, to be launched in two months, adds GPS and other features ascertaining the bullying incident's exact time, place and even barometric pressure.

This is either the world's greatest anti-bully weapon or a terrifying fascist plot.

"My theory is one of complete transparency," says OptimizeApps CEO Thomas Murphy. "Everything's on camera now. That's just how it is. If you're doing something that's good to be doing, it doesn't matter whether or not we see you doing it. If you're doing something bad that you're ashamed of doing, then you shouldn't be doing it."

Gotcha.

Bullying is bad, mmkay? No, seriously: so bad that it sometimes ends in suicide. The martyrs' roll call is a harsh reality: Jamey Rodemeyer. Jamie Hubley. Jared High. Tyler Clementi. Haylee Fentress. Paige Moravetz. Phoebe Prince. I was bullied and perhaps so were you, and it was horrible. But should victims fight back? Some have, and were arrested for assault. Last year, Australian teen Casey Heynes body-slammed his longtime tormentor. The video went viral. Casey, hailed as a hero by thousands worldwide, was suspended. Witnesses and victims are advised to report bullies to authorities. This helps victims feel less alone. But does it also teach passivity?

Launching StopBullying.gov and convening the first-ever National Bullying Summit in March, Barack Obama announced that bullying is "not something we have to accept." True. But are anti-bullying campaigns sending the wrong message? And how might instant-documentation technology change that?

No child should hurt. But, urged to report incidents and people to authorities, we enter a moral morass. Where do we draw lines between tattling and telling, big brother and Big Brother, safety and Stasi, self-defense and free speech? We are beset these days by mixed signals, which sometimes stem from the same source: Passive resistance or stand up, fight back?

Bullies use mainly words, whose damage can't be measured, noun by devastating noun, as can the work of sticks and stones. Words are subjective. Words are protected by law, which also cannot control for the wildly variable points on each of our personal gauges at which teasing becomes torture and comments are crimes.

So: What to tell and how to tell it and to whom and when?

Barbara Coloroso, author of The Bully, the Bullied and the Bystander (Morrow, 2009), says while that anti-bullying campaigns raise long-overdue awareness, they're largely counterproductive because they're inconsistent, spottily enforced and tend not to empower victims, whom she prefers to call "targets." Coloroso says few anti-bullying programs teach targets to stand firm.

"These programs advise kids to tell bullies, 'Please stop. That hurts.' Don't say that to a bully! They'll love it! Instead, we should teach targets to be aggressive. Assertion dissipates bullying. Passivity invites it."

But how assertive? That's another line we hesitate to draw. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold "were covered on a regular basis with ketchup and mustard by athletes at Columbine High. Nothing justifies what Eric and Dylan did, but we've got to look at the climate in which these things occur."