Lori Falce: Bullying is a team sport

Bullying is one of those things that is easily defined but hard to identify. It is generally seen as cruel, aggressive, intimidating abuse. And yes, that seems accurate. But there is a nuance to bullying that just seems hard to grasp with words.

There are any number of situations that you could probably describe on a playground or in a classroom or even at work that might fit that description and yet still not quite fit what we think of as bullying because the definition misses or ignores an important aspect.

Bullying demands an imbalance of power. Maybe the victim is vulnerable. Maybe the bully seems almost inviolable. Whatever it is, there is a discrepancy that makes it easy for the bully to feel like there is no downside to punching down at the nerd or the poor kid or the fat kid or the kid with a stutter or whatever it is that has singled out someone from the pack.

Part of that imbalance is always numbers. A bully may act alone but always with the tacit approval of the group — even if that approval is just an embarrassed silence that allows the abuse to continue. But sometimes bullying is a team sport.

That is what happened when Armstrong High School students — up to 60 of them, according to Principal Mike Cominos — engaged in a kind of mass-bullying incident at a hockey game with Mars Area.

Sports events can be passionate, and hockey is particularly known for being not for the faint of heart, but what happened went beyond that. Students directed a graphic, vulgar chant at the Mars team’s female goalie that if said in person in a hallway at school could easily have gotten any one of them detention, if not suspension.

Instead, it prompted all Armstrong students to be banned from the next game and from being permitted at the Belmont Complex near Kittanning where the incident occurred. The Pennsylvania Interscholastic Hockey League issued additional discipline.

Armstrong isn’t alone. Bullying just isn’t usually so blatantly displayed, which is what makes it shocking. Bullying is subversive. It happens when teachers are out of the room so that even if they suspect, they may not know about it. It happens when the other witnesses are just as complicit as the bully or just as cowed as the victim.

Which is why the incidents that don’t happen at a well-lit ice rink have to be addressed just as seriously.

New Kensington police are investigating an incident in which garbage was dropped on at least one student in a bathroom at Valley High School in the New Kensington-Arnold School District.

A life skills teacher at the school says she knows of at least two instances of the behavior, one of which involved 10th grade student Isaiah Parks, 16, who died Oct. 26 after a long battle with DiGeorge syndrome, a rare birth defect. A second incident involved a seventh grader.

The teacher spoke to Parks about the incident and said he was upset about it, but Parks’ mother said she didn’t know about it until after her son’s death. This is the kind of silence that allows bullying to go on with the same kind of secret, fungus-like growth that happens with other dark crimes that abuse power: hazing, child abuse, sexual violence.

Every school says they take bullying seriously. Armstrong and New Kensington-Arnold have made statements to that effect. The Pennsylvania Office of the Attorney General includes bullying as a behavior to be reported via its Safe2Say Something anonymous reporting system.

However, too often bullying response is passive, waiting for victims to save themselves. Instead, it should be addressed like it happened on center ice with everyone watching.