Sarah Miller

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. Despite the surge of bullying prevention programming in schools, bullying rates have not decreased. Over the past two decades, one-fifth of youth consistently report experiencing bullying annually, and these rates are higher for girls, LGBTQ teens, and those who are class disadvantaged. Why don’t these efforts work better? Moreover, how do teens engage their lessons as they navigate coming of age online?

The Tolerance Generation: Growing Up Online in an Anti-Bullying Era (under advance contract, University of Chicago Press) is about how youth grapple with bullying in the digital age and the industry designed to prevent it. 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. Charting teens’ lives as they are impacted not only by bullying, but by sexting exposures, school shooting threats, and viral contests over LGBTQ rights and racial justice, the book chronicles how youth navigate complex conflicts and new responsibilities at the intersection of their digital and corporeal worlds.

Centering the experiences of youth, the book illustrates how and why bullying prevention fails them, encouraging teens to treat each other as equals without addressing the structural factors that position youth unequally. 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 online and evades addressing the slow violence directed towards non-dominant youth that is routinely reinforced by educational practices. Yet, 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.