Book of the week: Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy by Emily Bazelon

(Random House, $27)

Numerically, at least, we’re not experiencing a bullying epidemic, said Meghan Cox Gurdon in The Wall Street Journal. One surprising finding of Emily Bazelon’s “humane and closely reported exploration” of the phenomenon is that the percentage of children and teenagers who claim to have been bullied has remained steady for decades. What’s changed, of course, is that social media has allowed such harassment to follow youngsters home and be witnessed by countless onlookers. Evidence has also been mounting that bullying takes a lifelong psychological toll, perhaps even equivalent to the effects of child abuse. Using ground-level reporting plus a wealth of academic studies, Slate.com’s Bazelon “brings clear, kind analysis to complex and upsetting circumstances.”

The media often oversimplifies the problem, said E.J. Graff in The American Prospect. Bazelon discovered this while reporting on the 2010 death of 15-year-old Phoebe Prince, which was dubbed a “bullycide” and led to the indictment of six Massachusetts high schoolers. Following her interviews with Prince’s tormentors, Bazelon wrote, “I’d gone looking for black-hearted monsters, but only found shades of gray.” She discovered, in fact, that Prince had engaged in self-destructive behavior that invited peers’ anger. Though consistently sympathetic to victims, Bazelon also criticizes schools’ zero-tolerance policies, which fail to recognize that many conflicts between teens are two-sided events rather than aggressive one-sided campaigns. On the other hand, differentiating bullying from simple social drama can be fiendishly hard to do.

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As a parent, “I came away from this book far better informed,” but with little sense of a solution, said Andrew Solomon in The New York Times. Bazelon offers various recommendations, including encouraging bystanders to intervene in bullying incidents by sending empathetic messages to the victim. But no solution jumps out as a panacea. Still, Bazelon makes up for that shortcoming by extending empathy to both the bullied and the bullies—who often come from abusive backgrounds themselves. At one point, Bazelon is so moved by the relentless harassment of a middle school girl that she uses personal connections to get the girl transferred to another school. It’s a “retreat from journalistic neutrality,” no doubt, but one that “reflects an essential humanity that is more important in this book than pure objectivity would be.”