Sticks and Stones - Defeating the culture of bullying and rediscovering the power of character and empathy
by Emily Bazelon
This book was set in the USA about a decade ago. Shortly after some well mediacised suicides in which bullying was a factor. There was a lot of controversy surrounding these cases and obviously feelings were high. Similar case had different outcomes. One case Bazelon dives into deeply is about Phoebe Prince.
Bazelon states that children have always 'bullied' in the past it was considered a part of childhood that you had to cope with. Nowadays things are different. However, some conflict in childhood is normal and helps children to gain the skills they need to survive as adults. Adults should not be supervising every incident of name calling etc as the children need to sort out strategies for themselves.
When bullying becomes a problem is when it involves unequal power, is repetitive, is deliberate and harms (even mentally or physically) - This is also how BullyFreeNZ define bullying on their site:
Schools were teachers and administration staff turned a blind eye to bullying had become cesspools. After several headline worthy incidences schools needed to start to take notice and many different plans were instigated. Some involved small targeted programmes, many schools started up support groups but possibly the most effective was a school wide system PBIS . Which I can quite confidently say is the forerunner to our PB4L system where the emphasis is on teaching behaviours and acknowledging those who perform those behaviours.
Social media can play a huge part in bullying and many children discussed in the book had had a difficult time due to social media. Schools are needing to spend a lot of time and resourcing following up on social media incidences which happen outside of school hours. Bazelon went to Facebook headquarters to discuss what they were doing to crack down on online bullying. She goes in to some detail in the book but basically they are not doing enough. They have improved their system but seem to take little responsibility for 'policing' their site. They did say, and rightly so, that the best thing is for the children to take responsibility themselves and do have a script of how to help yourself boxes when people report things on facebook. However they are very slow to work though complaints of bullying etc and do not always end up removing things that should be removed. There are millions of users so they feel the task is to big to deal with reports in a timely manner.
Bazelon concludes that whilst it is partly the schools responsibility that parents have a very importance role to play and as much as the build up their child's self esteem they should be also teaching them kindness and connectedness. The most important advice for a child according to experts is to tell someone they trust, ideally someone their age as well as a trusted adult.
This book was an audio book of 10+ hours. It was very interesting and discussed may issues objectively. Bazelon talked to many different people and reported from all sides, consulting with those who were bullied, those who bullied, school staff, parents, social media companies and those involved in the court cases. It was thoroughly interesting although the stories at the start were heartbreaking to think of how some of the students suffered whilst the adults in power at school turned a blind eye or did not follow through after meetings with parents.
It was interesting to note that while many are bullied the percentage that take their own lives are small, these students are most likely to be suffering from mental illness ie anxiety. These are the students that need the most protection.
No comments:
Post a Comment