Foreign Perspectives

Bullying policies are at the sharp end of schooling in that they are there to deal with situations that essentially schools and parents would rather not think about. After all, who wouldn’t like to think of children as being essentially good but maybe needing a little guidance now and again?

With that in mind many of the solutions proposed are based around showing the bully that they’re wrong and talking them back onto the right path. These involve everything from the simple talking to the child through to revealing to them the effect on the feelings of their victim in various ways. Whilst talking does seem the best platform to start with, moving to having the victim reveal their feelings can give a committed bully more ammunition to use against their victim which obviously is less than ideal in the enclosed environment that is a school.

In fact the most effective method of dealing with them appears to be simply telling on the bullies. Thanks to the intimidation that bullies create this needs to go so far as to create a “telling school” whereby everyone feels empowered to tell the teachers about bullying activities. Thus, the victim can rely on someone other than themselves to tell about the bullying they’re subjected to. Downsides are that it could lead to a tell-tale culture if taken to extremes and takes some getting used to.

The other problem that bullying policies can run contrary to some other policies in the school. For instance, what would you do if you saw a child being pounded by another one (ie not a fight)? Most of us would attempt to stop it verbally but that doesn’t always work with a bully so might find themselves needing to pull a bully off a victim but child protection policies often have a “no touching of a child by an adult” clause, so what do you do? That “no touching” clause can sometimes be so strong that if one were to apply it to the letter one would have to allow the bullying to continue until the bully decided to stop. That might sound crazy but is exactly how it’s applied in the school our little guys go to.

You might think that sense would prevail but that “sense” should really be built-in to the policies. After all, if a child were to pull out a knife and start stabbing other kids it seems obvious that you’d intervene to stop them. Doing so is directly contrary to the school policy on child protection though so strictly speaking you’d be required to let the child carry on until they decided to stop. Isn’t that crazy?

The basic problem is that many of these policies are single level with no escalation mechanism built-in. That seems to be largely down to the feeling that policies need to be easy to understand plus parents simply don’t even want to think about the potential of what are essentially junior thugs and how they might need to be dealt with though some process of escalation. In effect, they create policies to deal with their own nice children and don’t allow for those that might not be quite so nice.

What’s really required is an integrated policy with escalation processes built-in that protects victims and potential victims.

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