To be pissed off after neighbour's son called DD "a dirty bitch mongrel?"

[user1482840083]

My late father was Afro-Caribbean and my mother is a Latina originally from the Dominican Republic. DH is also mixed (half black/half Chinese), so my two children (DS is 24 – DD is 14) are made up of a diverse background. My daughter is good friends with the girl next door – she’s also 14. DD’s friend has as a 16 yr old brother. Yesterday she went over to the neighbour’s house. Like her older brother who is now works as a videogame programmer, DD loves videogames. She played her friend’s brother on “FIFA” and beat him. He called her a “dirty bitch mongrel” in response to the loss.

To DD’s credit, she told me she just laughed at the boy’s frustration (she’s that kind of girl – finds humour in the face of adversity). Fortunately, DD’s friend’s mother was within earshot and reprimanded the boy. And she forced him to come to our house and apologise. I and DH accepted the apology as we know children do silly and sometimes unthoughtful things. But when I woke up this morning I was absolutely seething – angrier than I first was when I heard what happened.

That's not only appalling, I'd be wondering where he got that sort of language from

As other people have said, if the boy plays games online (particularly shooters), then that sort of stuff can be pretty common, sadly. However, normally it's as horrific as it is because of the veil of anonymity - they'd never dream of saying the foul stuff they do online if they were face to face.

I think there's also a bit of a lad culture where boys/men will abuse their friends in a jokey way, using the most outrageous language possible - it gets almost competitive to be as offensive as possible. Being generous, it may be that the boy has overdone it in a fairly major way, but fortunately his mom was there to correct him.

Being less generous, he might just be a racist little shit.

Wow this thread is depressing! There seems to be such an acceptance of the inevitability of misogynistic insults in online gaming culture.

Arguing that it's not necessarily racist towards the DD herself because such insults are commonplace.
That it's probably just good old fashioned sexist annoyance at being beaten by a girl.
That the word bitch is meaningless!
That sexist insults are just the way it is so DD doesn't get to play online.

How depressing!

I had no idea mongrel was a racial insult, in fact I thought it was a disability one.

Unfortunately I hear 'mong' often, someone said it on the tv the other day.

I've worked in schools and the one I was at certainly didn't take homophobic or racist insults very seriously and I heard that kind of language all the time. (I never experienced anyone actually making a complaint about it but people were called homophobic and racist terms all the time and it was shrugged off. In their defence the kids wouldn't have considered themselves to be racist or homophobic, they were just used to throwing around those kind of terms).

16 year olds generally know it's wrong as well - but as mentioned upthread they're fitting in with their mates in a way 6 year olds aren't. Actually that's one reason I'm pleased ds3 hasn't gone to the boys grammar - he's far less switched on than ds2 & would be less able to separate out the misogyny.

Accepting it happens and dealing with it when it does doesn't mean you accept it. For most 16 year olds fitting In with their mates is more important than I (as an adult) would like it to be. Hence the awful language etc.

I think the mum is dealing with it very well.

I also think teens throw out the popular insult of the week without a thought as to what it really means & just how insulting it could be. It doesn't make it right, however.

As I said. Depressingly low expectations.

Namechangeforsex....Read my post again please...I didn't say what you have quoted.....I said they don't do extensive work with this type of language.....I really have no idea if they exclude for this....I doubt ours does, because a teacher recently told her class that legally they cannot exclude, they can only ask you to leave. And our school takes in troubled children from rough areas, so I very much doubt they would exclude for that....

newdaynewname - you're thinking of "mongol" - an old-fashioned & now offensive term for Down's syndrome.

"mongrel" means a mixture of races, usually applied to dogs.

It sounds like from last update his mum wants to discuss further - which is a good sign, I think. Hope it goes well OP.

So what would you do Bertrand?

You can't police children every minute of the day.

Mine swears but never uses spaz, spastic, retard, mong or anything g like that. If I overhear his friends saying it (on Skype) he tells them I don't like it.

I've never heard him use a racist term - if he did I hope after our discussion he'd never use it again.

He doesn't use homophobic terms as he has plenty of those levelled against him & he has a lot of gay friends & gay adults he looks up to.

I'm not sure that being realistic about the way teens (esp boys, esp while gaming) talk to each other is having low expectations.

newday - It's a racial insult. The word "mongrel" was used to describe dogs that are of a mixed-breed. By applying it to a person, you're not only belittling their racial background, but reducing them to something less than human. It was used commonly to describe mixed race children who were born as a result of their mothers being raped during the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.

Finola - DD is good friends with the boy's sister (the friend was distraught over the whole affair). She doesn't interact with the boy all that much. But yes, for the time being, the boy's sister will be coming to our place to be with DD.

Lessthanballpark - Believe me, I hate this "lad culture" in videogames. Especially online games. But after I and DH heard some of the stuff that was being said when DS played online (he never engaged in the "banter," but you could hear what other gamers said through the audio) we thought it's not good to have DD exposed to that. And like another poster said, when these gamers find out an opponent is a female, all hell breaks loose. It's beyond repulsive and I wish it wasn't that way. But there are so many things in society that are the way they are, and it sucks.

Metal Midget - I only believe he's a nasty person. Perhaps the emotion is making be biased and yeah, we all make mistakes, but I don't know - sometimes the real us comes out when we're angry. He may have just revealed his colours.

Metal Midget - I meant that I really believe he is a nasty person, not "only believe."

I think if she wants to talk to you later, then it is a certainty that she has discussed it with her son to ram home how inappropriate he was. She obviously didn't just make him apologise and leave it at that.

I have heard my 14 year old ds use the term retard occasionally whilst gaming and the word gay as an insult. I immediately picked him up on it and he knows it's wrong but I've heard him do it again. Now I know that he really has no problems with people being gay and is sympathetic to those with learning disabilities. I am 100% sure there is no intent behind his words at all. He knows that doesn't make it ok though and i hope it won't happen again. Difficult when the culture is so insult orientated though.

"I'm not sure that being realistic about the way teens (esp boys, esp while gaming) talk to each other is having low expectations."

Being realistic isn't. Saying that he probably didn't understand how vile it is.

Perhaps the emotion is making be biased and yeah, we all make mistakes, but I don't know - sometimes the real us comes out when we're angry. He may have just revealed his colours.

What he said was awful and if he said it in an other context I may very well agree with you. But there are certain activities (like gaming!) where the most awful trash talk is common. This doesn't make his comments ok. But I do think that context matters.

And you did accept his apology.

Mongrel is a mixture of dig breeds, not race, which is why it didn't automatically come across as racist to me either....certainly not a nice term to use, but I can see 16 yr olds also using it to non mixed race friends too. Thinking it through you can have different coloured dogs of the same breed, labs for instance, but yes, I can see that it come across as racist. I've heard worse from 16 yr olds standing outside our local supermarket to their mates. 16 yr olds are very silly, (not all granted), but the majority are just horrid....

"Mongrel is a mixture of dig breeds, not race, which is why it didn't automatically come across as racist to me either..."

Seriously???????? Or are you just being disingenuous because "you can't say anything these days"?

Thanks- I had no idea! I grew up in an area lacking racial diversity so I will blame that !!

I think any reasonably bright 16-year-old could parse the usual applications of 'mongrel' about dogs and realise that it was racially derogatory, as well as plain insulting, to use it to a mixed race person who'd beat you in a game.

However, there are also lots of people, including 16-year-olds and people far older, who seem incapable of the level of abstract thought needed for basic linguistic analysis. You'll see them on MN, and other forums, arguing that recognising very straight-forward implications is just "over-thinking". This boy might be one of them.

I will say that it sounds like his mother certainly doesn't fall into the second group, so even if he is one of those poor lambs who doesn't recognise racist language when he says it, she will have explained it to him.

You cannot go round and complain now that you have accepted the apology. You can't accept an apology and then reopen the wound, it is a contradiction in terms. All you can do is refuse any contact between your family and this other family, this includes your daughter and their daughter. This may seem like it is punishing your daughter, but this is your strongest weapon: if their daughter is upset she can't see her friend any more, she will take it out on her brother!

To be honest I think you are overreacting through. All that happened is the boy chose some inappropriate words to attack your daughter with. Teenagers do this. It just happened that your daughter was mixed race, so he picked up on that and used it as a weapon against her. It's not nice, but teenagers use whatever language they think will upset their victim - fat, slag, ugly, whore, their parents, in this case race. Be reasonable. He was angry and said some bad things. She had beaten him at FIFA, after all...

That sexist insults are just the way it is so DD doesn't get to play online.

How depressing!

It is depressing, and unacceptable, but it still keeps on happening. I used to run a World of Warcraft guild with a zero sexism/homophombia/racism/ableism policy. I used to get called a 'humorless Nazi' because of it - some people genuinely didn't think that using gay or faggot as an insult was homophobic, because 'language changes', or saying that they were 'raped' in a PvP battle was offensive, because it was just 'gaming slang'.

You do what you can against it, but some people are just clueless. They don't see using that kind of terminology as being discriminatory because they 'don't mean it in that way' - probably because they've never been discriminated against. Which really doesn't make them hugely different from 'actual' racists - they're still normalising the behaviour, to the point where the people on the receiving end get worried that they're being 'over sensitive'.

BertrandRussell....Yes, seriously, I really didn't spot it was racist initially. Does that make me a bad person? I think not. I can see 16 year olds saying it to white friends too. They probably think it means something like an ugly runt or something.

If were are being literal-minded, mongrel dogs are usually cleverer and healthier than purebred ones, because mixing the gene pool up is generally a good idea.

So it's not only an insult, it's a crap insult, based on obsolete 18th-century notions of what genetics is like. Which can also describe the entire mindset of white supremacists (or any "racial" supremacist).

Soupdragon Well I would have asked you if I'd realised that you definitely knew.

Of course you wouldn't be guessing and making a sarcastic comment just for the sake of slapping someone else down, would you?