Time to play our part

Students, teachers, parents, communities, and school management must support the anti-bullying plan with actions not just words, writes Mark Caffrey

BULLYING in schools is a topic that has dominated headlines in recent times, particularly in the last year, following the tragic deaths of Erin Gallagher and Ciara Pugsley, and the Department of Education yesterday launched its action plan to tackle bullying in schools.

Bullying in schools is not a problem which will be solved quickly. Nor is it something which one action or person can fix. It is something which will take a long time to fix, and will require the involvement and support of all sections in society.

I was given the opportunity to be on the working group which wrote this action plan, and I am grateful that student involvement in the decision-making process has been supported.

When I made my contribution to the anti-bullying forum last May, I didn’t know much more about the topic than the ordinary teenager. But as I looked more and more into the topic, it has become clear to me that there isn’t a silver bullet that is going to solve our problems.

Those in the education and youth work sectors will have to make it their responsibility to know how to detect and prevent bullying. The entire community, both inside and outside the school building, is going to have to accept a role in developing and implementing national, regional and local policy.

I believe that we need to have a real change in our approach to how we tackle bullying among our young people.

The outdated guidelines on bullying were in need of significant reform; the dawn of a strong social media culture among young people has changed entirely how people communicate, and this brings with it new problems and challenges.

If a young person is experiencing bullying, social media such as Facebook and Twitter sadly make it possible for bullying to occur 24/7, and dealing with cyber-bullying is probably one of the key things we need to do to stop bullying.

Parents, much as it may frustrate their children, need to monitor, to a certain extent, what their children are doing on social media outlets so they know when there’s a problem and can act accordingly. I believe that students themselves also need to become more responsible for their actions, and also for their lack of actions.

It is up to students, as well as schools and parents, to decide that bullying isn’t acceptable, and to work together to ensure that the message that it is unacceptable is communicated loud and clear in our communities and schools.

Differences, and even perceived differences, are often used by bullies to make people feel isolated — and this is by no means limited to young people.

There are many ways in which people can be discriminated against because they are different, and also if they are identified as being different, even if it’s not actually the case. I believe that if we encourage society to embrace difference and diversity, then it will be harder to bully people and to create that sense of isolation.

For example, one of the key focuses of the action plan launched yesterday is homophobic bullying. Someone who springs to mind, for me, is Johnny Galecki who plays Leonard on TV comedy The Big Bang Theory. When asked why he didn’t respond to rumours that he was gay, he said: “I’ve never really addressed those rumours because I always figured, why defend yourself against something that’s not offensive?”

If we encourage our young people to embrace difference, it will become a lot more difficult for someone to use difference as a tool to bully people.

It’s time that we began to look on this topic and its many facets as our role to contribute positively in and not to leave it to others. The consequences of us forgetting about our role any longer are terrible.

Supporting the action plan with words is great, but students, teachers, parents, communities, and school management all need to support the plan with actions too — it’s not going to work unless everyone steps up to the plate to take action.

I believe that this one action plan is not going to be enough in finding the solutions that we need, ultimately only grass roots action starting on a school and class level is going to do it.

Hopefully it will provide us with the start that we need but, ultimately, it’s going to come down to each one of us playing our part to finish it and end the scourge of bullying in our schools and society.

Mark Caffrey is equality officer of the Irish Second-Level Students’ Union and a member of the Anti-Bullying Working Group