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Ten years ago schools struggled to mention bullying in case
acknowledgement of it was perceived as admission of a serious problem and
affected a school’s reputation. We would ask the staff if there was a
problem with bullying. Invariably we were told ‘No!’ As the day progressed,
staff would come to us privately and say ‘You know, this work is really
going to help us with the bullying that goes on here’. Now bullying is
openly discussed and every school is required to produce an anti-bullying
policy
However, like all other organizations that have an equal opportunities
policy many are struggling to translate their paper policy into a
whole-school community practice. Often there is a description of what
constitutes bullying, a checklist of what behaviour is or is not allowed,
and penalties for bullies. Policies adorn walls and they may or may not be
read, but they invariably depend on adult intervention.
The core problem is that young people are undervalued because of adultism,
the mistreatment of young people by adults. Within adultism there is an
assumption that only adults will be able to take charge, make change, have
the power to act, and so on. Actually it is a false premise.
Most bullying happens in the playground, toilets and on the school journey —
all scenarios where school staff are not usually present. We need the very
people who are present, young people, to be able to take action to
intervene, to nip it in the bud.
NCBI’s experience is that it’s often the young people that have the ability
to come up with the sharpest and most creative one-liners that stop the
mistreatment in its tracks; responses that most of us only dream of in the
bath or in the middle of the night three weeks after the event! Rukshana, a
13-year-old young woman, wears glasses and gets called ‘four eyes’. After
giving vent to her hostilities she turned to the person role-playing the
perpetrator and with a sweetness and gentleness that absolutely floored the
adults in the room, responded with: ‘But if I didn’t wear my glasses I
wouldn’t be able to see how beautiful you are!’
Three principles underlie NCBI skill training programmes. The first
principle is dismantling the strangely consoling myth that bigots and people
responsible for perpetuating various forms of discrimination are an
unreachable, distinctive and fundamentally different group. The unsettling
broader picture, that all of us harbour prejudices, is rarely considered. A
measure of the self-righteous condemnation in reaction to another’s bigoted
comment may be traced to one’s own insecurity. It is often easier to condemn
another person than it is to face one’s own prejudicial attitudes.
Approaches which stress a focus on the bully, as if ‘the bully’ is somehow
different from the rest of us, set up a mythology of bullies. The bully
becomes the other, an ogre who is unlike the rest of us. There is something
wrong or lacking in this ‘other’ person. Painful as it may be, an effective
strategy for intervention is built on reaching for a common humanity with
those who express bigotry.
The second principle is adopting the attitude that prejudicial remarks are a
call for help. When we bully others it is often an attempt to feel powerful
ourselves, not to notice how frightened we feel, or a way to be popular and
gain admiration from our peers. However, peer leadership programmes can
change the culture so that it becomes cool to be a proactive champion of
others. |
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