Bullies
Apparently, New Zealand has the second highest rate of bullying in the world. This comes as no surprise to me. I have two daughters who can only be described as “petite”. The eldest, age 22, is only 4’6″. When she first started at high school, she was bullied unmercifully. We took the matter to the principal of the school only to be told there was no bullying going on at the school. This may explain why that particular school had one of the highest rates of teenage suicide in the country.
We took our children out of school immediately and home-schooled them for five years.
This blindness towards bullying does not appear to have changed, as the article goes on to demonstrate:
“Educational Institute president Frances Nelson said New Zealand had a high-profile focus on bullying, meaning Kiwi children were more likely to disclose incidents.”
Apparently, Ms Nelson had not noticed that the report was based on direct surveys and not on reported bullying. The likeliness of children reporting bullying was irrelevant.
Children tend not to report bullying anyway, for much the same reasons as women do not report domestic violence. Fear of the violence becoming worse and fear of the stigma of being an informer/sneak/tell-tale. No matter how easy it becomes to report bullying, these things will always hold children back.
The only way to effectively combat bullying in school, is to patrol the corridors and playgrounds with teachers, and come down heavily on the culprits. Inevitably, some form of parent counseling will be needed as this behaviour is commonly handed down. If the problem is not addressed directly then the situation develops into that described by CS Lewis in his Narnia books:
These people had the idea that boys and girls should be allowed to do what they like. And unfortunately, what ten or fifteen of the biggest boys and girls liked best was bullying the others.
CS Lewis: The Silver Chair ”
This is as true now as it was in the 1950s, when Lewis penned these words. If you leave children to their own devices, in class or at play, the strong ones will pick on the weaker, sometimes to the point of criminal behavior. Adults, of course, behave in exactly the same way, but children have far fewer coping mechanisms and are much more dependant peer approval. Adults are also better protected by the law, when bullying involves violence, theft and slander. These are usually dismissed as “fighting”, “teasing” and “name-calling”, where children are involved.
Until adults, and educationalists in particular, take bullying seriously enough to become interventionalists, this plague upon our smaller, weaker children will continue.
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- Bullying « Something should go here, maybe later. — [...] Mac Doctor has a good post (actually, he has no other kinds of posts other than ...
Dec 15 08 7:22 pm
I remember at schooled being bullied. I finally went to the headmaster (you can see I come from the UK), he said he would deal with it carefully. Next day I took such a beating, as it seems the head used my name when he talked to the bully.
I did not make the same mistake twice of going to see the head.
Dec 16 08 3:24 am
The trouble is it is so dam hard to stop
Constant monitoring helps but then there is texting and other subtle ways they (the bullies) make the bullied kids lives a misery
Simple ways of dobbing in the bullies and fostering a culture that bullying is not ok helps, it is really important to give the victims ways of dealing with it but still it will happen
It is awful when it happens to your kids and I have to say when it did I just told them to toughen up and/or use humour to deflect it
Because the thing is it is just as bad in adult life and it easest to deal with it yourself
Dec 16 08 10:49 am
I was tiny so I learnt how to fight back. I hated it but at least they left me alone. Girls can be so vicious!
Dec 16 08 10:45 pm
Picture this: I am working away at my work, and the supervisor walks out for his lunch break. I get up, walk over to the lady sitting beside me, grab her handbag, and proceed to tip the contents out all over the floor, and then pass it round to my fellow workmates, as they all giggle. I then go and punch her several times in the head, and smear chewing gum in her hair for good measure.
Within minutes, I would be asked to pack my stuff and leave my workplace and never come back (90-trial or none). I would also expect to hear from the police in due course.
If I did this to a class mate at high school, I would probably get a couple of days in detention, a telling off by the headmaster, and probably a letter sent to my parents.
The only way to stop bullying is to respond to it like it is responded to in the ‘real world’.