Bullies and the Bullied: Bullying, what it is, why it’s important and how to stop it.
Most likely, you have been part of or witnessed incidents of bullying in your own lifetime. Bullying isn’t just limited to the playgrounds, but can occur at the workplace, in the neighbourhood or within a family. As adults we have more life-experience to counter bullying behaviour. Children do not. For this reason it is very important that we teach children how to build appropriate relationships and deal with bullying on the playgrounds before they become adults who bully or are victims.
What is bullying?
Bullying isn’t just teasing on the playground. Forms of bullying can include:
- Physical abuse: punching, pinching, constant physical harassment, etc…
- Threats: of physical abuse, of ‘telling on someone’ or spreading false ‘rumours’, showing weapons
- Verbal abuse: Name calling, teasing, gossiping
- Social abuse: exclusion, scapegoating
Bullying is “a conscious, willful and deliberate hostile activity, intended to harm.” (1) Bullying is NOT a right of passage or a ‘normal’ part of childhood. It is a serious concern that can have lasting effects in children’s lives.
Consequences of bullying:
If we allow our children to be bullied, what are we telling them about the world they inhabit? About self-worth, order, fairness? If we allow a bully to get away with bullying, what are we teaching them? The consequences of not dealing with bullying can reach far into the lives of all involved.
- Low self esteem: Bullying works primarily through humiliation, by lowering the esteem of another for the benefit of the bully. Bullying can have a lasting effect on a child’s feeling of self-worth, hampering their social skills and happiness into adult life.
- Guilt: Bullies may later feel guilty for their acts. Bystanders may feel guilty that they encouraged the bully, or did nothing to intervene. These feelings can linger into adult life.<
- Inability to deal with problems: The bully uses his/her aggression as a crutch to solve other problems including low self-esteem. Allowing bullying to continue won’t teach the child how to properly deal with his/her problems or interact with others.
- Depression and an exclusion from opportunities to grow: School is a time for children to learn, grow and discover activities that will aid them in adult life. Bullying can seriously impair a child’s ability to participate, to learn, or to enjoy school or other people.
- Suicide: In extreme cases, when bullying goes on long enough, a child may decide that death is preferable to continued bullying.
Who is involved in Bullying?
Surveys show that up to 30% of children in school have been bullied and 10% bullied relentlessly (2). Bullying peaks at the 11-12 age group, although the severity of the incidents tend to increase as ages increase. Bullying usually starts off small and escalates.
There are three types of people involved in most bullying incidents:
- The bully
- The bullied
- The bystanders
Bystanders aid bullies by encouraging or rewarding the bully for his behaviour (laughing, participating) or by failing to intervene. The bully gets away with bullying because bystanders turn their heads or act an audience.
What can I do about bullying?
As an adult it is important to take a pro-active stance against bullying. Bullying often happens away from the eyes of adults. Here are some general examples of what you can do to help prevent bullying:
- Realize that victims often don’t want to tell adults because they are ashamed of themselves and what’s happening and out of fear of retaliation from bullies.
- Open good communication. Talk about bullying and what to do if it happens. Give direction to your child and get them to role-play: How does it feel to be bullied? How does it feel when others watch and do nothing? Why would someone bully? Who can you talk to about it?
- Teach the difference between ratting and reporting. A failure to intervene in bullying behaviour is the prime factor in bullying continuing.
- Provide effective, learning consequences for bullies. Singling out or ‘protecting’ the bullied child does little to solve the problem. Bullies and what drives them to bully need to be addressed.
- Address bullying as a problem that extends well beyond just the bully and the bullied. Parents, teachers, friends, strangers and even television and popular culture play a part in encouraging or discouraging bullying. Talk to teachers, staff and other parents about what they are doing about bullying. Set up anti-bullying programs to discuss bullying and ways to stop it.
- Repair damage to self-esteem. Inform bullied children that it is not a problem with them. Engage them in social activities that will repair damage to their self esteem and give them skills to cope with bullies.
Cyberbullying
Cyberbullying is a relatively new development in our culture where bullies use modern communications technology (cell-phones, the internet, web pages, etc…) as a means to harass others. This is particularly troublesome because it takes bullying outside of the school and into the private life of the bullied. Examples of this can be creating ‘hate’ web pages about a certain student, online harassment, or even catching compromising photos of individuals and mass distributing them. Cyberbullying doesn’t have to occur from someone you know, the bullying could be someone the bullied has never met before.
The ways outlined above can help to deal with Cyberbullying as well as these additional steps:
- keep computers in accessible, commonly used spaces and keep tabs on your child’s internet activity.
- Tell your child not to reply to bullies online.
- Encourage your child to not keep bullying to themselves.
- Talk to your cell phone/internet provider about incidents.
- Don’t delete messages from bullies. They are necessary for proving your case to the proper authorities.
- Inform the proper authorities – principals, teachers, police.
For more information on cyberbullying and how to prevent it visit www.cyberbullying.ca.
Related resources:
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Kids Help Phone 1-800-668-6868 |
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Canada Safety Council |
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Canadian Safe Schools Network |
Reference:
- Barbara Coloroso, author of The Bully, the Bullied, and the Bystander:
From
Pre-School to High School -- How Parents and Teachers Can Help Break the Cycle of Violence. - Tough talk on bullying: Best-selling author helps parents halt cycle of violence, The StarPhoenix (Saskatoon), Sep 26 2002
