VIEW FROM TASMANIA
No easy answer on bullying
This has not been a good week for Hobart's youth.
The incidents of bullying in the bus mall will have appalled many. With the beating of a teenage boy to the point where he needed hospital treatment to the threat of igniting aerosol spray on victims, there is reason to feel that a minority of Hobart's youth is reflecting not just extreme bullying behaviour but wider social instability. The question many onlookers and those who can remember a kinder, more predictable and respectful Hobart will be asking is: why? There is no easy answer.
Bullying is endemic in schools and not just in Hobart. Moreover, when it is carried into the street and in public, it becomes more obvious. It is a national and international problem that forces schools and communities to spend a lot of time and money in setting up anti-bullying programs and pastoral care support staff for victims.
In her book Bully Busting, Australian bullying expert Evelyn Field makes the following observation: "All types of bullying can injure the child". That is true, but bullying also affects all family members and when witnessed by others, as it was this week in the bus mall, the broader community.
We all need to be concerned about bullying because there is a correlation between the bullying that manifests itself at school and the bullying that manifests itself in adult life. That at least is the opinion of Hobart-based workplace trainer Caroline Dean. "Lots of workplaces and schools have policies in place but they don't take reasonable steps to ensure they're enforced," Ms Dean said this week.
What are reasonable steps? Community advocate Dino Ottavi says, Hobart schools are too soft on bullying. A way to deal with its prevalence, Ottavi suggests, is detention and withdrawal of student privileges. He also believes that teachers feel disempowered. Referring to a 2006 survey from Sacred Heart College, where four boys were expelled for staging a mock holdup, Ottavi said last May that only 14 per cent of teachers believed Sacred Heart had an effective discipline procedure.
The reality is that the bullied child does not simply shrug off persistent assault or teasing. The consequences are clear. In a survey of the attitudes of Australian children aged 10 to 14 undertaken by the Australian Childhood Foundation in June this year, 46 per cent did not feel confident in themselves. Add to that Hobart schoolchildren's increase in self-harm being viewed by participants as an "acceptable way of expressing themselves", as Hobart psychologist Janet Haines said last September, and one could be forgiven for thinking Hobart's youth is in trouble.
If we agree that bullying is unacceptable -- the bus mall incidents seem to show we do -- the community has to own the problem and insist that this is not good enough. It has done so on loutish behaviour in nightclubs, and the 3am ban on rowdy partygoers entering nightclubs has been judged a success.
A coalition of teachers and principals, Education Department representatives, parent organisations, the police and the broader community, including Hobart City Council, should say that bullying has no place in Hobart schools, on the streets or in the bus mall. Such a coalition should institute practical steps to stop bullying occurring.
The incidents in the bus mall were not so much opportunistic as symptomatic of a deeper ill -- the belief that bullying will go unchallenged. There is surely a need for greater surveillance and supervision in the bus mall. It might be achieved by having police or properly trained security staff in the mall at all times that large numbers of students are present. Persistent offenders with a record of bullying may be prevented from being in the mall at peak times and, if not collected by a parent from school, be required to stay at school under supervision until the mall has cleared. Call it a mall offender curfew.
While the Education Department learning services southeast manager Jenny Gale said in May that detentions at school for bullying offenders were not the preferred option -- an approach of "positive behaviour support" is -- it is also clear that some immediate and purposefully deterrent action needs to be taken.
Schoolchildren going feral in the mall, attacking their peers, intimidating and frightening onlookers, is not the gentle Hobart I know. It is something that needs to change and quickly. Otherwise all Hobartians are demeaned and assaulted by the behaviour of a few.
Christopher Bantick
8 November 2007
http://www.news.com.au/mercury/story/0,22884,22722933-5006550,00.html