I thought this was a harmless adolescent eccentricity until I discovered that lunch boxes are out because they probably contain — wait for it — home-made sandwiches. Brown bags are in vogue because they suggest you have left the school grounds to buy yourself a toasted ciabatta with salsa chicken and Caesar salad from one of the expensive cafes nearby.
Continuing my education, it was explained that hot drinks are only acceptable when sipped from paper cups stamped with chic coffee brand logos. I wasn’t even to think about digging out the old tartan thermos and sending her to school with tea brewed in our kitchen.
When something as simple as packaging for a lunchtime snack is turned into a tell-tale sign that identifies and singles out the poorer, weaker and less clued-in, then we have reached a sorry state — particularly if it makes these children targets for bullying.
The need to assert themselves by picking on those they believe to be inadequate seems to be a pressing imperative for pampered youngsters these days. Like competitive adults in an increasingly affluent and consumerist society, children in well-heeled schools are finding it is not so easy to distinguish the socially inferior any more. This means they must devise ever more precise and insidious methods of fine-tuning the values and fads of their set to make sure that there are always some unfortunates left outside the loop. So paper bags are in, lunch boxes are out.
Once isolated by sophisticated devices, the bullies’ victims can then be persecuted by equally advanced means. No less than 34 second-year girls in Alexandra College in Dublin have had to be disciplined over the past few weeks for tormenting named classmates on a website. They used the internet to mock their appearances, their mannerisms and their sexual naivety. Hateboard.com is an international website, but teenagers from the college had seized upon it as a medium to vent their spite towards unpopular peers and the pupils of less glamorous educational establishments.
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As one entry on the site put it: “U prob go 2 sum gay northside skul so f*** off — jus cause we can afford tings.”
The essence of the taunts posted on the site seemed to boil down to two specific areas: the flaunting of wealth and sexual nous. In fee-paying schools, in particular, the need to weed the arriviste or, heaven forbid, scholarship chaff from your circle seems to be a relentless business.
I am familiar with one posh school where the 13-year-old “in-crowd” have a custom of meeting for early dinner in an expensive Italian restaurant every Friday night. Some of the kids live in dread of being excluded from the weekly gathering on a ring-leader’s whim.
The way children dream up ever more elaborate ways to torture and isolate those deemed unworthy is reminiscent of Lord of the Flies. But could somebody explain where these kids got the idea that it is acceptable to judge or dismiss somebody solely on the basis of a cheap jacket or an unfashionable address?
Other events of the past week suggest there is an increasing prevalence of childish misbehaviour based on sexual knowledge, which is arguably more alarming than old-fashioned snobbery. It emerged on Thursday, for example, that a group of girls as young as 10 were suspended from a Dublin primary school for sending sexually suggestive text messages to a male teacher. These students first blocked their own phone numbers, then bombarded their target with raunchy texts. They were rumbled when one kid panicked and feared her number had been discovered.
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The response from teachers and parents to these incidents has been to point the finger at technology. Text bullying is particularly popular with young girls, apparently, because it offers precision as well as deniability. Some schools have responded by banning mobile phones. Similarly, the Alexandra College incident has been attributed to a lack of responsible monitoring of the children’s internet access, which has now been addressed by blocking offending sites.
There is, of course, nothing to stop these children catching up on their texting when they get back from school, nor from accessing any website they fancy on the home computers they have in their bedrooms.
It seems foolish of the parents and teachers charged with providing moral guidance to these youngsters to believe the argument that mobiles and PCs are to blame for this outbreak of nastiness. Children don’t need technology to bully and isolate their peers when something as simple as carrying the wrong lunch bag can mark a kid out as prey. Children don’t persecute others simply because it’s a way to pass the time. They do it to deflect attention from insecurities in their own lives. They particularly target those failings they fear in themselves. So the fact that sexual ignorance has been identified as especially contemptible among such a young age group signals some cause for concern about the environment in which these children are growing up.
Most adults have become inured to the sexual innuendo and imagery all around us — in advertising, in the words of popular songs, in all forms of the media, even on kids’ clothes. Despite promising it would abandon the juvenile FCUK logo, French Connection continue to flaunt it on sweatshirts designed for teenagers, to the point where it barely registers any more. We’re desensitised to the fact that the vernacular of pornography has become acceptable advertising lingo. Isn’t it time there was a statutory limit on the number of dull-witted ad agencies that can use the phrase “size matters” at any one time?
We have given up the struggle against the coarsening of our cities. When the Ann Summers sex shop opened on O’Connell Street in 1999 it almost caused a riot. Now Peter Stringfellow has been told he can open a full-on strip club on Parnell Street and the only thing that seems to bother local residents is the effect on property values. The only objection on social and moral grounds came from the Ruhama Project, which works with prostitutes.
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If sex shops and strip clubs represent progress, then efforts to block them are probably doomed, but that doesn’t mean voicing your reservations isn’t worthwhile. These are sleazy, seedy developments and it’s craven to say nothing for fear of seeming oppressed and ignorant.
If the grown-ups can’t take a moral stand with any conviction, it’s pointless to expect children to find their way through a maze of licentious influences and expectations. Instead, they’re more likely to be troubled by a sense that everybody else is clued-in on sexual matters, which, in turn, leads to taunting, bullying and promiscuity.
Computers and mobile phones don’t turn decent, secure youngsters into cruel cyber-bullies. The consumerist vacuity and sheer moral cowardice of society is to blame for that.