“Fight Back” or “Just be Nice”: How Parents Perceive and Respond to Gendered Bullying with Children

Background and Purpose:

This study seeks to contribute to previous literature by integrating an intersectional feminist approach to examining how parents perceive and respond to gendered harassment with children. Previous research has examined bullying from a feminist perspective (Meyer, 2008; Pascoe, 2011), explored parent perspectives on bullying (Mishna, 2004), and assessed how parents address bullying with their children (Sawyer, Mishna, Pepler, & Wiener, 2011). This study moves beyond previous research integrating these sites of inquiry and asking: a) How do parents recognize bullying as gendered harassment? b) How do parents address addressing gendered harassment with their children? c) To what extent do the intersecting identities of these parents shape how they perceive and address gendered harassment with their children?

Methods:

This study used both radical feminism (Dominelli, 2002) and intersectionality theories (Crenshaw, 1989, 1991) in the design of this study. We engaged five fathers and eight mothers to participate in this study (n = 13). The majority of parents identified as White, had some college, earned a middle-class household income, and identified as Christian. We conducted semi-structured individual interviews and integrated the modified Van Kaam method of analysis phenomenological data (Moustakas, 1994) with a feminist approach to phenomenological inquiry (Sprague, & Kobrynowicz, 2006). We infused a feminist perspective into the data analysis by examining the intersecting identities our participants embodied and how intersecting identities illuminated the phenomenon differentially (Cho et al., 2013).

Results:

We reduced the themes to two broad categories: How parents perceive gendered harassment; How parents address gendered harassment. An intersectional feminist analysis rendered clear gender differences in how mothers and fathers perceived and advised their children to handle the bullying. The fathers mentioned advocating for their sons to use non-violence, but stressed the pragmatism of using physical fighting to counter boy-on-boy bullying. One mother mentioned telling her daughter to avoid or show empathy to bullies, which is oriented with both the radical feminist notion of sharing power (Dominelli, 2002) and hegemonic norms for White women to avoid conflict (Lorde, 1984). Race played an important role in how these parents coached their children to address the bullying. The mothers encouraged their children to address the bullying in ways that White women have been socialized to address conflict, by “being nice.” Two of the fathers were not concerned about how their sons might be perceived if their sons engaged in physical fights, which could be very different from how a Black, Latino, or Middle-Eastern male child might be perceived engaging in physical fights (Collins, 2009; Lorde, 1984). Thus, it seems as if gendered racism permeated parent efforts to confront the bullying.

Conclusions and Implications:

Future research based on this present study could move in two directions. First, developing and evaluating programming related to educating parents and children on gendered harassment would provide useful information about best practices for preventive education on this topic. Second, examining the efficacy of policy aimed at preventing and responding to gendered harassment would illustrate the impact such policies have on ameliorating this issue.