A pre-surgery shot of 14-year-old Nadia Iles.
Societal change is always incremental. It never happens that one morning a country wakes up and says, “We were blind, but now we see.”
So it is with bullying. Once upon a time when kids bullied other kids, the most common advice the victims received from adults was to fight, or at least “toughen up,” advice passed down the generations, advice seemingly sanctified by tradition.
But once upon a time we were not very good at confronting our own psychic suffering. Only the mentally ill should seek psychological counseling, we thought. Our quiet childhood traumas were character-building, we told ourselves. If we endured bullying and were no worse for wear (a convenient self-deception), why should our children not simply stop complaining and persevere?
An increasing number of us are coming to know better. We no longer feel that “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” gets it completely right. We are aware that bullying—even just the non-physical sort—can have tragic consequences.
But we should not blame our friends and neighbors who remain skeptical, who feel Long Beach’s recently adopted anti-bullying policy was much ado about nothing, such as commenter “Andre Sanchez” on the Press-Telegram‘s coverage of the new legislation. “What is up with the pussificiation of kids?!?” Sanchez asks. “How about teaching a kid to defend himself….”
Probably the best way to rebut people like Sanchez is to share with him stories that might engender his empathy for the victims, stories that can help him see just how impactful bullying can be. Fourteen-year-old Nadia Iles is an example. As packaged by Good Morning America, this is a feel-good story, a happy ending. But any tale that climaxes with a child having elective surgery leaves me a bit cold.
Nadia became suicidal over teasing she endured related to having ears that stuck out, and so an organization that provides free surgery to children with “facial birth defects”—which in the eyes of some is not limited to the likes of cleft palates and other abnormalities that would guarantee unwanted attention throughout a person’s life—stepped in and performed unnecessary surgery on a healthy teenager.[1]
It’s hard to fault anyone for taking steps to improve the life of a young girl. But when Nadia’s mother likens purely cosmetic improvements to her daughter’s ears and chin to other parents’ giving their kids braces, she somewhat misses the mark. Braces often have at least minor medical need. But even when they don’t, no adult is happy to have teeth noticeably out of alignment, whereas many come to find that their more prominent features help give their faces a unique character and beauty.
A quick mental review of the most beautiful people you know is likely to yield several whose facial features don’t fit the “classic” mold. And any such list is certain to include people who looked downright odd at 14 but had blossomed a mere five years later.
We’ll never know whether Nadia would have grown to feel more comfortable with the features in question, because they were surgically altered in response to bullying. Yes, there’s no doubt her ears stuck out and always would have. And while that doesn’t seem like such a big deal to me, I’m not the one who would have had to live with them. But that her pretty-far-from-deformed chin was also put under the knife can only signal to us how much damage a little girl’s psyche suffered due to the cruel taunts of peers.[2]
Whether surgery should have been performed on Nadia Iles may not be any of our business. But her story’s bottom line is that bullying led a 10-year-old to begin begging her mother to find a doctor to alter her face. Understanding that there are hundreds of thousands of Nadias silently suffering in our country today—not to mention the bullying-related suicides that occur each year—should well instruct us about why the City of Long Beach just did something good.
[1] One of the procedures—namely, correction of a deviated septum—had medical justification. It’s interesting to note, however, that this was not the motivation for seeking out surgery in the first place. It is never so much as mentioned in the Good Morning America piece (though of course that may have been left on the cutting-room floor), and national coverage of this story is unanimous that this was about the ears.