Bullying: should your child have to play with mine?

Yesterday I asked for people to define bullying. I had a few people offer definitions in private communication, a few on my facebook wall and one here on my blog. Steve, very poignantly stated,

"The more I think about it, the less sure I become of what my definition is."

Thanks for the honesty Steve. This actually made me stop and wonder if bullying isn't a little bit like theology. I know that probably sounds weird. In theology there are boundaries where you can only say what something is or is not but you can't state both. In other words, is bullying one of those things that has a slippery definition because no matter what definition you use it can be twisted by people who want to manipulate the words? I think it might be.

This is important because it will cause some people to want to minimize bullying. The truth is though that almost all of the time, when we see bullying we know what it is. But that brings me back to our friends who might be claiming to be bullied simply because they are not getting their way.

Steve actually gave a great definition yesterday. He said:

So ultimately I think that they key with bullying is that the motivation is harming or belittling others, or otherwise causing unnecessary pain.

He went to the heart of the action. The government actually does the same thing. The webpage, stopbullying.gov actually gives a threefold definition. It says,

• Imbalance of Power: people who bully use their power to control or harm and the people being bullied may have a hard time defending themselves
• Intent to Cause Harm: actions done by accident are not bullying; the person bullying has a goal to cause harm
• Repetition: incidents of bullying happen to the same the person over and over by the same person or group

Notice the second part, the bully has a goal to cause harm. This is what makes bullying so insidious.Their goal is to actually harm the other person. I agree with both Steve and the government. It is important to teach our children to recognize that the person is intentionally trying to harm them. Intent has to be there for bullying to occur.

This opens up all sorts of questions. Why would someone do that? What makes someone want to hurt someone else? The answers to those questions are obviously deep and beyond the space I have here but over the next few days I want to delve into them a little more.

I googled a few different search terms in preparation for this series. I found some silly sites that simply seemed interesting in harvesting my email address and creating campaigns that would make us feel like we've done something when in reality we probably did not. I found some great sites with really valuable resources and I found a few that were somewhere in between.

One of the consistent themes that I saw was the idea that leaving a child out of a game is bullying. In fact, one webpage said this,

Being left out is a major form of bullying. Exclusion should be clearly against the rules at school. A child can practice persisting in asking to join a game. (emphasis mine) Online source.

What do you think? Is that a form of bullying? If your child doesn't like playing with my child, should your child be forced to play with mine just because they are in the same school?