Back to school... and here’s the best system to beat the bully
Their children may have some other worries that they have not yet divulged to their stressed parents, namely they are being bullied by others in school, on the bus, on the streets - or now even in their own homes via texts, emails, or other electronic messages.
Ask most school personnel if the problem exists in a serious way in their own school, and the answer will probably be ‘no.’ Yet the statistics are frightening, varying between 10% and over 30% in national and secondary schools.
Bullying can be physical, verbal or psychological.
All three types are extremely difficult to uncover.
The easy way out for the Department of Education is to point to its own excellent Guidelines for the Prevention of Bullying in Schools published 12 years ago; for school management it may be to write a policy stating that ‘this is a non-bullying school or ‘bullying will not be tolerated in this school,’ or ‘this is a tell-all school.’ Without having an almost fail-safe method of putting these excellent statements and theories into practice, all the work, the good intentions and too few actions may exacerbate the problem rather than solve it.
Imagine that you were a student in such a school entering, let us say, your fourth year of suffering daily abuse from some fellow students about which you are afraid to speak.
Of course you have heard the mantras over and over, you have listened carefully to concerned staff give talks on bullying, you have been told there is a strict system in place to stop the abominable practice - but all the while your tormentor is able to lick the system. You can even see him or her looking particularly earnest listening to the talks or viewing the videos while you know there is no system that works, that it is all talk, and your tormentor knows it.
There are two major steps that must be taken by the authorities if school bullying is to be prevented: one is that they must become aware of what up to now they were unaware of; the other is that they must take constant and relentless action to make it stop.
The problem should be tackled head on, thoroughly, effectively and on a constant basis. The Department of Education guidelines should have become compulsory rules over the 12 years since they were issued, but this has not happened, and the Government has grown lax in the interim.
What is needed is a fail-safe method of finding out the truth and then effectively stopping the rot.
The ‘box and interview method,’ devised 12 years ago, is one attempt at such a fail-safe procedure.
Each student is required weekly to drop a signed form in a letter box answering three questions:
1. During the past week, have you been bullied.
2. Do you know of anyone in your class who has been bullied.
3. Do you know of anyone in the school who has been bullied?
So, the telling can be done without the victim having to do it. Volunteer teachers filter the information and, based on this, a number of anti-bullying co-ordinators hold selective intervention interviews with various people, including victims, alleged bullies, other students and parents. The anti-bullying code spells out clearly what the method is, and this code is published with the school rules which must be accepted by parents and students who apply for entry. The box and interview method, as might be expected, is much more complex than this brief summary indicates. It also needs to be updated in line with changing legislation. It focuses on immediate and ongoing prevention rather than long-time psychological action to help bullies and victims. This should be left to other agencies within and outside of the school.
It can be accessed at the Peace People website www.peacepeople.com under ‘Links,’ at the CaB website: indigo.ie/~odonnllb/cabullying/ under ‘Box and Interview’ or directly at homepage.tinet.ie /~justinmorahan/bullying/
While it was designed for secondary schools it could be fairly easily adapted for use in primary schools, universities, the workplace, prisons, armies, hospitals and other institutions. Though copyrighted, it may, of course, be used freely by all those who passionately want to end the culture of bullying in Ireland
Justin Morahan
Scholarstown Road
Dublin 16.
