The Tolerance Generation: Growing Up Online in an Anti-Bullying Era
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American high schools can’t stop talking about bullying. As educators nationwide invest in the anti-bullying movement, youth are saturated with initiatives promoting tolerance and kindness, from school assemblies to their social media feeds. These well-meaning agendas have the potential to prevent harm on multiple levels. Research shows that while one fifth of students are bullied at school annually, the threat of bullying is patterned by gender and sexual hierarchies. Girls are bullied more often than boys, LGBTQ and gender non-conforming youth are bullied at twice the rates of their peers, and bullying content routinely involves the policing of sexuality and the regulation of the gender order. Despite the recent surge of bullying prevention programming in schools, bullying rates have not decreased. Why don’t these efforts work better? Moreover, how do teens engage their lessons as they navigate coming of age online?
The Tolerance Generation is about how youth grapple with gender, sexuality, race, and conflict in the digital age. Following a community of teens over two school years, the book draws from 127 interviews, digital ethnography of 75 teens’ Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Tumblr accounts, analysis of bullying reports and policies, and fieldwork at “Township,” a rural Northeastern high school, to explore how young people both aggress and learn to get along in an increasingly virtual society. With intimate detail, the chapters illustrate how bullying prevention approaches do little to address the larger cultural and structural forces that shape the hostilities youth experience. Charting teens’ lives as they are impacted not only by bullying, but by sexting exposures, cancel culture, gendered threats of school shootings, and viral contests over LGBTQ rights and racial justice, the book chronicles how youth navigate complex conflicts at the intersection of their virtual and corporeal worlds.
At Township High School, youth use digital culture to negotiate norms, status, and identity. Teen social life operates on a razors’ edge of youth-driven expectations of virtual disclosure and ever-evolving cultural expectations for “normative” gender and sexual expression. These dynamics are shaped by intersectional inequalities and generate new opportunities for conflict, readily documented in cyberbullying reports and virtual threats against school communities. Yet, they also create new responsibilities. As active bystanders against bullying, youth are instructed to engage in peer-based surveillance while collectively making sense of who they are online. Through innovative methods, the book documents how teens handle the tensions networked publics bring to schooling in an “anti-bullying era.”
Centering the experiences of youth, The Tolerance Generation illustrates how and why bullying prevention fails them. Their stories expose how the anti-bullying industry’s narrow definition, characterizing bullying as a defined incident with clear bullies and victims, misinterprets how youth experience conflict in the digital age. This approach also evades addressing the persistent, yet diffuse, hostilities directed towards non-dominant youth that are reinforced by educational practices and the affordances of social media. Anti-bullying initiatives encourage teens to treat each other as equals without addressing the structural factors that routinely position youth unequally. As students are taught to “be kind” and practice tolerance, these well-meaning directives are not accompanied by inclusive curricular shifts or sustained efforts to mitigate the pervasive impacts of inequality in their lives. Indeed, despite the proliferation of bullying prevention agendas, nothing fundamental has changed about the status hierarchies and structural constraints that characterize schooling and inform youth conflict. What has changed is the need for teens to become savvy about the rules, and how to work around them.
In the face of a bullying prevention regime that leaves them shortchanged, youth develop their own strategies for handling conflict. As Township teens’ stories illustrate, while the digital age has created new avenues for bullying, it has also radically expanded young people’s capacities for social change. The book captures the many ways young people harness digital culture to go “beyond tolerance,” using social media as a site for diversity education, conflict resolution, and collective resistance. The anti-bullying movement is a training ground for teens to learn how to deal with American inequalities. However, the youth of The Tolerance Generation know they are being underserved, and together they are creating a more effective curriculum.
This study was funded by the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the American Sociological Association Section on Sexualities, the Center for Research on Families, and the University of Massachusetts Graduate School. The manuscript is currently under advance contract with the University of Chicago Press.