New Study on Teen Bullying

The LA Times is reporting on a study published in the most recent edition of the American Sociological Review that finds a direct link between the social status of teenagers and their propensity to bully their peers.

This is hardly groundbreaking. I don’t think I’m alone in recalling that the most menacing kids in school were the ones who were most concerned with their position in the social pecking order. My own worst behavior coincided with high sensitivity to my low popularity stock and desperate attempts to improve it. Everybody who has endured even a day of American middle or high school knows that aggression is the emission of the teenage social machine.

But here’s something interesting from the study:

However, those who were in the top 2% of a school’s social hierarchy generally didn’t harass their fellow students. At that point, they may have had little left to gain by being mean, and picking on others only made them seem insecure . . .

I remember this too. There were certain cool kids who were . . . cool–to everyone. They seemed possessed of a self assurance the rest of us lacked. Perhaps their popularity afforded that luxury, or perhaps their popularity was a product of it. In any event, they were above the usual social feeding frenzy.

When I tried to talk to my high school students earlier this year about bullying and the social pecking order, I was surprised to hear a rather rosy description of affairs. “People can hang out with whoever they want,” some of the told me. “Nobody bothers you.” All the while, a silent minority traded knowing looks with one another. A big part of the story wasn’t being told.

My rosy-eyed students weren’t lying. And they’re not naive. They are part of that top 2% of their peers. I’m sure of it. For them, life at school really is a cake walk. Nobody bothers them. They’re never the targets of aspiring socialites’ arrows of verbal and physical injury. But they’re not inflicting it either.

The challenge with these students, it seems to me, is to cultivate some empathy for their peers who are suffering the slings and arrows that they, the popular elite, never see, so that 1) they share in the experience of the bullied and maligned ,and 2) they advocate on the beat-ups’ behalves among their popular peers, upon whom these elite kids exercise real influence.

How to do this? There’s a treasure trove of narrative resources in scripture, from Jesus’ advocacy for the least of these to the prophets to the giving of the Law. There’s lots of doctrinal reflection that can be done here too, from the community of the Trinity as a non-hierarchical community of self-giving love to the mission of God’s people in sum.

What are some of the best ways to do this, to equip the cool kids to stand up for their uncool peers?

Trienniumedia

I spent the last week at my denomination’s marquee youth event, the Presbyterian Youth Triennium. This worship/study/play/rock fest gets staged every three years on the ginormous campus of Purdue University. It gathers over 5,000 youth from Presbyterian churches all over the country while also pulling in youth from global partner churches. This was my first experience of Triennium. In fact, it was my first experience of a church youth gathering of more than, say, 200 kids. I did that once.

John Vest has done some really thoughtful digesting of the event in recent days. This and this post and accompanying comments are really good. Since Yorocko is mostly interested in the “ministry in the media matrix,” I paid close attention to the various expressions of media brought to the event and how they affected what was going on. Here’s a simple review:

Video: in the opening worship service, there was a killer short film produced to introduce the “time” theme of the event. Clips from movies like “Back to The Future” and “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” were spliced into a soundtrack of pumping electronic music. It was invigorating, and the intensity of it built so that worshipers started cheering for movie clips they recognized and related. When the clip of Landon Donovan’s World Cup goal against Algeria popped up, I nearly left my seat. Later, a brief documentary film was shown to introduce Bill Nathan, who runs a home for street kids in Port Au Prince and who survived the January earthquake there. On two nights, animated movies were offered as recreation options.
Speech: each worship service featured a sermon. Two of these were roam-around-the-stage sermons with lots of personal anecdotes and accompanying images, and two of the preachers were nailed to the glass pulpit. Participants didn’t seem to me to be overly swayed by the former. They did seem surprisingly engaged by the latter.
Music: the worship band was a floppy-haired jean-clad outfit called The Great Romance. That is what it is. To their credit, they played through similar sets in each service, so that participants got to know them well enough to scream for their favorite lines. Like this one: “We were made for such a time as this/ to make a difference in the world we live.” Further, small group leaders were encouraged to play music before and during sessions, particularly U2’s “Pride (In The Name of Love). Preacher Graham Baird treated worshipers to an acapella rendition of that one. Ahem. Also, there was a choir assembled of the participants. Their introduction was one of the more powerful moments of the week. (A final music note: organizers played a pop music soundtrack in the auditorium as youth gathered for worship, and if you’ve never been part of a thousand teens hijacking the Glee Cast’s “Don’t Stop Believin‘” for their own celebratory purposes, I can assure you it is positively doxological)

Drama: elaborate and finely performed dramas were produced at each worship service. These brought together the story of Esther and Jesus in illuminating ways. In the small groups, participants enacted scenes from the gospels in both comic and serious ways.
Visual Arts: the small group manual was built around paintings. Seriously. Small groups were asked to bring an Esther or gospel text into conversation with a painting like this and this.
Photography: pictures (and live videos) of the participants scrolled across the screens prior to worship. As expected, youth screamed and waved in delight when they saw themselves make the Big Time. Participants likely shot millions of photographs: of one another, of worship, of the rain–they shot it all. I found myself wondering about the nature of the worship experience at one point, when the powerful introduction of Bill Nathan set off a blizzard of flashbulbs throughout the auditorium. I found myself wondering, “Are we really experiencing this or merely documenting it? Are we documenting it to preserve it for ourselves or to share it with others? For adolescents, is documenting something now an essential part of experiencing it?”
Text: participants engaged the Biblical text in small groups, reading aloud lengthy excerpts from Esther and the gospels. Calls to Worship and Prayers of Confession were projected and read responsively and in unison during worship.
Social Media: there was a vibrant conversation happening on Twitter all week under the hashtag #pyt2010. Preacher Bruce Reyes-Chow even showed Triennium-related tweets to worshipers on-screen during worship. That was about the extent to which social media was taken up by the organizers of the event and incorporated into the content of the event. Of course, participants were texting and sharing pictures and videos with each other all week.

Triennium is a smorgasbord of media. Sorting out the good and bad of it might be an impossible task, but I think it’s worth holding up the best uses, since it’s obviously here to stay.

Avoiding the Lousy

RETHINKING YOUTH MINISTRY put together this slide show, “6 ways to guarantee a lousy fall.” I find most of what RTYM very useful, and this is no exception.

I particularly like the last slide about starting the year with a big kickoff event. I’m waffling a bit on our group’s fall kickoff party tradition anyway. Do you all have big kickoff events in the fall? Why or why not?

6 ways to guarantee a lousy fall

View more presentations from Brian Kirk.

Youth Group: Huh! What Is It Good For?

Youth ministries are made up of lots of activities. Sunday school, small groups, mission trips, the weekly youth group, youth choir: these are but a few of the church activities that fall under the “youth ministry” category. Some of them fall under other categories, too.

They involve different students. A very small percentage of youth participate in two or more of them; most participants probably stick to one.

They do different things. Sunday school teaches. The mission trip serves. Yet they all do more than one thing. They all teach. They can all serve.

What about the weekly youth group? What does it do? What is it’s main aim? How does it complement the small group or the service project? How is it different from the multitude of “groups” that seek to enhance our students’ development, from student government to soccer?

What is the weekly youth group’s primary job?

Facebook and The Privacy of The Least of These

A timely text from a friend yesterday asked if I had read danah boyd’s anti-Facebook rant. I hadn’t. Well, I’d skimmed it. So I went and read it. Thanks, friend.

The privacy conversation has never really interested me. I have no illusions about the possibilities when I share something online. I’m making an informed choice to share something about myself and calculating that the potential negative consequence is worth what I gain from sharing it. I do this with strict personal rules: I don’t share things about other people without their consent. I don’t post pictures of other peoples’ kids.

I’ve always assumed that everyone else does this too.

But Boyd has carefully stated what’s at stake with Facebook’s activity. It’s not really privacy, but informed consent. Facebook has made it confusing and difficult for its users to control the people (and–more to the point–advertisers) who see what they share. The privacy settings are confusing, and for that reason, users are being coerced into sharing personal data with audiences they never intended.

When it comes to my stuff, I can handle this. But churchy social media types ought to be more concerned with other peoples’ privacy than their own. How concerned are we that scores of teenagers, for example, are having their personal data mined without their consent? Facebook is providing a platform for ill-intentioned audiences to harvest personal information shared by users who, developmentally speaking, are still learning how to navigate complicated privacy legalese. It’s opportunistic, and it presents real problems for people (like myself) who are otherwise rosy about young people’s social media activity.

The Facebeook defense has been, essentially, that people choose to participate in Facebook, and so they should be willing to accept the consequences. But when that choice is made by people who are developmentally or socially vulnerable to complex and even misleading privacy settings, the integrity of their “choice” has to be questioned.

A teen may accept an invitation to a party as an opportunity to mix with their friends. But if the host of that party invites lots of people the teen doesn’t know, people who are after the teen’s personal information for economic gain; if the host establishes a default “public” setting to the interaction–that just by being there the teen is consenting to sharing everything they do there with with everyone else–and everyone who everyone else chooses to share it with; if the teen can opt-out of that arrangement only by leaving their friends behind at the party or taking valuable party time to fill out forms specifying who’s allowed to see what they’re doing: who would say that the teen had a fair shot at protecting their privacy?

Needing Some Confirmation

I’ve wrestled with confirmation for two years now as an Associate Pastor. I never did it as a youth, and I’ve never spent any length of time in a church that did. So I’ve read and re-read, thought and re-thought the process we put 9th graders through more times than I’ll recount.

One thing I’ve changed this year is the statement of faith that confirmands are routinely asked to produce. Heavily influenced by this Martin Copenhaver essay in The Christian Century, I’m instead asking youth to compose a narrative instead of a statement. Copenhaver writes

Over the years I have come to realize that I am just not that interested in a 15-year-old’s reflection on eternal matters. In fact, I think we do youths a disservice by implying that they have anything important to say on such things at that point in their lives. Doing so may only create more adults who are overly infatuated with their own opinions.

I’ve asked our church’s 15 year-olds to write something that answers three questions:

How has God been involved in your past?
How is God involved in your present?
How do you hope God will be involved in your future?

I’ve given them lots of fodder questions for addressing each of those three. They have “about a page” to work with, and they know it will be shared with their fellow confirmands, with me, and with the church session (governing board).

Is this a better way?

Youth Ministry, Media, and Go Karts

Here’s a sample, representative event that your standard issue Associate Pastor for Youth needs to plan and promote: Youth Night at Boomers. It’s a fundraiser, held at a local mini-golf/go Kart/ arcade joint, to benefit a local nonprofit.

Our AP begins, about six weeks out from the event date, to publicize and recruit.

She writes about it in the monthly church newsletter for two consecutive months
She sends a postcard in the mail to every middle and high school student on the church’s rolls (about 30)
She sends an email to all of those students, as well as to their parents, about it
She puts it on the monthly calendar that gets mailed to every student, as well as emailed and posted on the church’s website
She talks about it at youth group gatherings for two weeks before the event date, asking for a show of hands: who’s coming?
The week of the event, she posts the event on Facebook and sends it to the youth group’s facebook group
The day of the event she sends text messages to students reminding them of the time, location, and cost of the event.

Five students come.

Five.

This is not a lament about a lack of student commitment. Maybe the event was garbage. I mean, you can publicize the death out of a belly-button-lint-collecting party, and nobody’s going to come. No, this is an open inquiry about the sheer number of media our Associate Pastor is employing to promote the youth ministry to her students.

New communication technologies don’t replace old ones. Our AP is not texting students instead of sending a monthly calendar in the mail. The Facebook group has not supplanted the weekly email. Instead, basic competence now requires that our AP employ the newest media to connect with teens on top of the face-to-face, telephone, and mail media she’s been using for years.

And with no apparent change in participation.

What to do?