No more hiding behind the word "Drama" anymore... It's time to come clean.

Bullying becomes such a common occurrence all throughout high school that students learn how to cover up their tracks through denial of accusations, knowing who you can and can't say things to, and covering up the severity of situations using well-worded vocabulary. Girls, especially, attempt to shade over the severity of most bullying situations with the word "drama", implying that its not bullying, but simply that girls are going into their "natural" dramatic state that they all go through during their adolescent years. To many unaware of this scheme, they feel as if they may have over reacted to a situation when accusations of bullying arise, only to find out that its "stupid drama", often times those blind to this scheme being teachers, parents, guardians, or many of the other adult figures in a teenager's life. All teenagers, however, learn the coded-language of bullying, and know the true meaning of "drama": a cover-up to hide the true severity in a bullying situation.

While the majority of bullying programs attempt to stop bullying before it happens, very few attempt to provide resolutions in the case of current bullying situations. No teenager is ever unaware of the bullying being put upon them, however they were never given the tools to resolve said situation. Intervening at the point of victimization is crucial in diluting the situation at hand, since the bullying won't simply seize due to one small comment. Adults fail to use "drama" as a synonym to "bullying" due to the previous context of the words being far more distant than they are at this current moment. Students trying to cover up bullying situations use the word to hide their illegality. Whatever the word used, drama or bullying, both qualify under Massachusetts state law as forms of harassment. And yet whether its drama or bullying, we'd rather to tools to diffuse any current bullying situation, rather than trying to prevent something that is simply impossible to halt.

Danah Boyd brings many interesting, often times untouched, ideas to the table towards the increasing bullying situation. Boyd tries to convey how important it is to look deeper than the typical meaning of seemingly harmless words, drama being the most overlooked of them all. Boyd tries to show parents, educators, and the general population as a whole the disturbing level the children of this age have brought bullying to. Where its used to be black and white now involves not only the gray area, but virtually all the colors of the rainbow with so many people hiding the cold hard facts of bullying yet no one giving or receiving help towards diffusing a bullying situation in progress rather than attempting to prevent one. Where are all the programs, she asks? Surely educators should have been on top of this already with the extensive amounts of results pouring in from student surveys pertaining to their bullying in their lives. No better time than the present.


Why Cyberbullying Rhetoric Misses the Mark by Danah Boyd
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/23/opinion/why-cyberbullying-rhetoric-misses-the-mark.html