Bullying

Bullying not only causes misery but ruins lives. Pupils cannot thrive if others are attacking them, whether verbally or physically. Bullying focuses on difference, maybe racial, maybe religious, maybe physical (for having red hair, or wearing glasses, or being epileptic). It may pick on the victim, a soft target, someone without power who does not defend himself or herself.

In the 1980s, the Commission for Racial Equality wrote a report called Learning in Terror, describing how ethnic minority children had to suffer both name-calling and even physical violence in the playground and in the streets. Times have changed since then, but racist bullying is still around, more subtle. It is easy on the sportsfield to make that over-hard tackle when the referee is not looking. Sport can be a site of intolerance and tribalism, causing fear to its victims.

The mobile phone, texting, and emails have caused other opportunities for bullying, messages of hatred and exclusion, threats, and persistent abusive messages.

Bullying is wasting potential. Victims do less well, and do not achieve their potential. We may never know what that potential is, what benefits to the world might have resulted. It has gone, lost through depression, perhaps suicide. The victims may end up doing jobs beneath their potential.

Victims need supporting. Some of this is shelter, some building up their resilience. Aggressive bullying should not be tolerated in a humane educational establishment. Every effort should be made to ensure that victims are not disadvantaged.

Of course perpetrators should not benefit from their bullying: the reality is that they usually do. Managers and executives might be appointed exactly because they are "strong minded" (often a euphomism for workplace bullying). The bully also needs to engage with personal and social learning. In particular, they need to understand the consequences of their actions, the plight and feelings of victims. They need then to apologise and put things right. This prionciple is used in the justice system - restorative justice, restoring what has been violently taken. In schools colleges and universities, restorative practice allows no ducking of guilt, not being soft, requiring full recognition of pain given, and consideration of how to put right the wrong. The spirit of this is needed in education to ensure that no pupil bullies with impunity, and no victim is allowed to suffer in silence.

©Stephen Bigger 2008