We are hurting children with our fearful obsession to keep them safe

WERE you bullied at school? I don’t think I was nor do I remember being much of a bully. But it really depends what you mean, doesn’t it?

Once upon a time, the reasonable definition of bullying meant big, strong kids physically picking on the weaker ones. But, these days, there has been a certain amount of mission creep, encouraged — it has to be said — by campaigners disguised as charity workers. Bullies, we are encouraged to believe, are everywhere.

So when the increasingly commonly accepted definition of bullying has been widened from violence to include being teased, called names, having your stuff messed with, or even just being ignored by other kids, who could look back on their childhood and say that they weren’t bullied, or that they never bullied somebody else?

That’s why I question whether anti-bullying campaigns such as those launched by the Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty (ISPCC) this week do more good than harm. It diminishes the importance of real problems if they are lumped together with petty complaints. In typical ISPCC fashion, it’s certainly a hard-hitting series of ads. Pop stars Jedward and X-Factor judge Louis Walsh pose as bruised and battered assault victims. MTV presenter Laura Whitmore and actor Saoirse Ronan look thoroughly fed-up.

The other person to feature is Westlife singer Mark Feehily, who came up with the idea which apes campaigns by the ISPCC’s sister organisation in Britain. He says he was inspired by his own personal experiences of bullying when he was younger: “I know at first-hand how the impact of being bullied as a teenager can quite literally last a lifetime.” Given that Feehily has just reached the grand old age of 31 — scarcely a lifetime for most people — one hopes he will get over the effects of his childhood traumas soon.

Ah, but now you’re trivialising a serious issue, you might say. Not so. For a small minority of children, bullying is undoubtedly a profound problem. Every year, we read tragic news stories about children taking their lives after years of incessant bullying. Such stories are heartbreaking — and they are precisely why we need to put the debate about bullying in some proper perspective. But there is a difference between the few serious and damaging cases of bullying, which nobody could ignore, and the wide range of happenings that constitute bullying according to government-funded campaigners like the ISPCC.

But surely it is a worthy aim to try to decrease bullying and ensure a safer environment for children? To a point, yes, but the more you talk about bullying, the more it sensitises people to each and every social slight, and the more it becomes problematic.

The fault lies not with children but with adults. Although bullying itself might not have got any worse over the years, what has changed is the way in which adult society views playground goings-on. For an adult world that has a keen sense of individual vulnerability, the skirmishes and name-calling of the schoolyard have come to seem very disturbing. Teachers and children’s rights activists warn that there is a slippery slope from teasing and suicide, and that the emotional scars of childhood bullying could scar young people permanently.

For some children — a minority, one presumes — bullying is indeed a profound problem. Some children are indeed isolated and lonely, spurned by their peers, and regularly scorned, humiliated or even beaten by other children. Adults do need to work out how they can assist in such situations.

By prevailing in a decisive but subtle manner, it’s possible adults can help a child who is being bullied. But equally they may make things worse, creating a more profound wedge between the victim and the bullies. Also, by intervening an adult may weaken the child’s capacity to deal with the situation for himself or herself, making life more difficult for the child in the long term.

Also, much that is defined as bullying today is not bullying. It’s rowdy banter or everyday playground quarrels that could — and should — be resolved without adult mediation. Treating all playground disagreements as serious acts of abuse does not help victims of terrible bullying. Indeed, it discourages a proper sense of vigilance about real brutality. In the same way that every adult who wants to work with kids is all too often seen as a potential paedophile, children are presented as nasty little monsters who can destroy lives through bullying.

We need instead to appreciate that children are children, rather than brutes or helpless victims. It is true that children argue. They trade insults. They fight. Children are certainly ingenious when it comes to thinking up ways of tormenting each other. They know the insults that will wound. And for the child on the receiving end, the result can be unhappiness, but usually only of a very temporary nature. More often than not, the different parties make up again and, in the process, learn how to become adults.

In this ever-changing drama of friends and enemies, children are learning how to manage relationships and to stand up for themselves. This is far healthier than encouraging children to believe salvation is to be found at the end of a confidential telephone line.

Anti-bullying campaigns — including those initiated by the ISPCC — lead to a situation where children become unwilling to, and incapable of, resolving their own problems with their peers. This could damage children’s development, and their relationships with each other, far more than the odd stone thrown or insult shouted.

All too often, the negative messages that the ISPCC and others communicate depict adults and the other children in young people’s lives as predatory, nasty and harmful. We need to ask what the consequences will be for society — and for children themselves — if the trust that children have traditionally placed in the various people in their lives is continually undermined.

Kids always used to be reluctant to snitch on their peers, however nasty their behaviour. Today this silence is seen as unhealthy, and children are urged to come forward. In the good (bad?) old days there was an understanding that the separate worlds of adults and children have different rules; different standards of judgment, reward and punishment. You didn’t tell tales.

Equally, to children, who called who names and who wrote on whose pencil case might have felt like matters of life and death but adults used to know they were not. How did we lose our sense of perspective? We should stop projecting our fears and uncertainties on to children and let kids learn about life through experience – even if it includes some bad experiences.

Our fearful obsession with keeping children safe from risks and threats, real and imagined, is creating the danger of screwing them up and damaging society’s future by preventing them from growing up.

In Louis Pasteur’s words, while childhood is a wonderful thing, “childhood prolonged cannot remain a fairyland. It becomes a hell”.

Bullying, in the forms in which normal people understand it, is revolting. But the industries which spring up to counter the tendency seem always to end up feeding off it. And as a result they overstate the case. They end up bullying all of us.