Silence: a bully's best friend

A boy of 16 described his bullying as ‘the breaking down of a person’. But how can parents deal with bullying claims without making the problem worse?

LAUREN DWYER was such a bright, confident child, her teacher recommended that she skip the infant classes in primary school and go straight from Montessori into first class when she turned five. Otherwise, the teacher suggested, she might be bored.

It proved to be a big mistake. Looking back, Lauren believes it was the catalyst for years of bullying which followed. “I was a year younger, I wasn’t used to the whole system and I stuck out like a sore thumb.”

She was parachuted into a class of girls who had been together for a couple of years and encountered four or five who picked on her.

“Because I was always a confident child, I had my head above the parapet and I stuck up for myself, which made things worse.” She saw other girls targeted too, some of whom were so desperate to become friends with their tormentors that they would “join in on the picking” once they were accepted into the core group.

There was no physical bullying; it was name calling, exclusion, pranks, hiding possessions and “snide comments if you answered a question in class”. Every day it was something.

She remembers her third class teacher saying she had “schoolitis” because she kept going home sick. “I didn’t want to be there anymore.”

She had loved learning as a younger child but the bullying changed that. “If I was seen to know the answer to something, I got so much grief, I said, ‘Okay I don’t want to know the answers to things anymore’.”

A couple of other girls who were bullied told their parents but, apart from the ringleaders being warned, nothing else seemed to be done.

“It was always found out who told and it made their lives even worse,” Lauren recalls. “I always felt that telling was not an option.”

She had a very good relationship with her parents and she knew that if she told them they would be up to the school straight away, doing whatever they could. “I had seen that was not going to work.”

After sixth class, Lauren wanted to get away from those girls, so she opted for a mixed secondary school in Dublin where few, if any, from her school would go. However, many of the first years had come from another school together, so she was going in not knowing anybody again and, of course, was still at least a year younger than her classmates.

It was not long before one of the girls said something that hurt Lauren’s feelings and she instantly thought, “This is it starting again”. She went home distraught to her mother, who had never seen her like that. “I was thinking I can’t take another six years of this.”

When Lauren went in the next morning, unaware that her mother had contacted the school, she was called to the year-head’s office.

“I walk in and isn’t the girl sitting there with her face like thunder.” The teacher said he had heard there was a problem between the two of them . . . She has no other memory of the conversation except when they left the room, the girl turned to her and said: “You’re a rat and you’re dead.”

“She told everyone and because everyone knew her and nobody knew me, they took her side,” says Lauren. “From that time on, I was not to be trusted or to be hung out with. So it did all start again.”

Exclusion and verbal slagging made her increasingly anxious and led her into depression.

“There was a group of girls I hung out with and, I know this sounds awful, but it was because it was better than being on your own.”

One incident in second year, when they were on a school trip to Barcelona, is seared into her memory. “I kissed a boy there, my first time to do that. The next day all the girls were saying, ‘Oh, you kissed a boy; we told him to do that, he is not really interested in you’.

“When I got home I had a bit of a mental breakdown because I could not bear going back and giving them more ammunition. I was so confused. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t function.”

She was just 14 and her parents took her to the doctor. “They did not know what was going on as it was so out of character for me.” She was still terrified of them finding out.

Being put on medication made Lauren think perhaps there was something wrong with her. “All I needed was somebody to talk to, to get to the bottom of it.” But having spent so long not talking about it, she did not know how to start.

After her Junior Cert, she bluffed her way out of that school, telling her parents she wanted to go to the Institute of Education to concentrate on studying for the Leaving. The move finally brought the cycle of bullying to an end.

Looking back, Lauren (23), who has just graduated in business studies, sees how her fear that she might be bullied again at secondary school “was like a self-fulfilling prophecy”.

Nothing would have happened, she suggests, if she had not reacted the way she did to that girl’s initial remark – “it was probably just a normal kind of comment, I can’t even remember what it was” – but she can also see how the well-meaning teacher handled it all wrong.

Schools have come a long way in the past decade in developing the now mandatory anti-bullying policies and raising awareness of the issue among teachers, students and parents. But victims still face that dilemma of if they tell, will it make life worse?

The director of the Anti-Bullying Centre in Trinity College Dublin, Dr Mona O’Moore, gets calls from parents whose teenagers are being bullied and who will not approach the school because their child is adamant that it will aggravate matters.

“You would wonder what sort of strategies schools have that youngsters can feel so absolutely terrified,” she comments. “Is it that certain schools are still so clumsy in their tactics? That is kind of scary.”

When somebody is being bullied, their fundamental fear is if I report this, am I going to be better or worse off – and that is a huge question, says Dr Brendan Byrne, a counsellor at Coolmine Community School in Dublin.

It helps if schools have a peer- mentoring scheme in place as that creates another layer where children who are being bullied can go to safely, he explains. A number of “ports of call”, such as year head, tutor, chaplain and counsellor, are needed and the hope is that a student will trust one of those enough to confide in them.

“The key to it is to get them to go to talk openly to somebody who they are comfortable with; they may not want anything done initially but, if the trust is there, the adult will be able to bring them to the next step. The one thing we have learnt about bullying is that if is not reported, it does not get better.”

Children are not able to deal with it on their own. “They miss school more often; school performance begins to go down and self-esteem is hammered to the point where their whole lives are affected.”

Paradoxically, a happy home life may make it more difficult for a child to tell a parent. “If you have a close, loving relationship the last thing you want to bring home is that you are being bullied in school,” says Byrne. “It is a protective thing on the part of the student to the parent.”

One of the best definitions of bullying he has heard was from a boy of 16 who described it as “the breaking down of a person”. “That is what it eventually does,” says Byrne, “it is gradual, it is insidious and it builds, and where is the breaking point? That is the real worry.”

There is no better way to reduce bullying than through a whole-school approach, says O’Moore, who has written a book for parents and teachers, entitled Understanding School Bullying, which was published yesterday.

The most important thing is getting the school ethos right and then having the mechanisms for reporting, investigating and dealing with incidents. The approach can be restorative rather than punitive, she explains, and bullies as well as their victims need ongoing care.

The Cool Schools programme was an anti-bullying initiative that was devised by the former North Eastern Health Board and implemented in 50-plus secondary schools before being rolled out by the Department of Education as a pilot project in Dublin schools between 2006 and 2009.

In evaluation studies with students who had taken part in the programme, 60 per cent reported that they would tell a teacher about bullying – a significant improvement on previous research, in 1997, which showed that just 20 per cent would tell a teacher.

After the pilot project, elements of the programme were incorporated into the Social, Personal and Health Education (SPHE) that is compulsory for all students in the junior cycle of post- primary schools.

Typically, schools run an Anti-Bullying Week during which pupils learn about the characteristics and types of bullying behaviour – including cyber, homophobic and racist – and how to act positively as a bystander and how to ask for help.

While generally parents are more aware of bullying, they may not be as well informed as they think they are, suggests consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist Dr Maria Lawlor.

“Very well-educated, intelligent people sometimes fall apart when faced with a distressed child coming home and they need to see the school about it. It is a difficult thing to manage.”

She recommends that parents praise children for telling them and then try to persuade them to report the incident themselves to a person designated in the school’s anti-bullying policy.

“If there are tears and they say they can’t do that, then ask would they like you to go in. And if they say ‘no, no, no’, you need to think about what you are going to do.”

She stresses that it is a mistake to let it go. “If you deal with it quickly and do it well, the chances are it is less likely to happen again.” Silence, as O’Moore writes in her book, “is the bully’s best friend”.

Lauren, who is a member of the youth advisory panel for Headstrong, a national advocacy organisation for youth mental health, is well aware that bullying is a significant factor in suicide.

“I would have been miserable if I didn’t have the parents I have. When I went home, it was sanctuary.”

She can’t imagine what it would be like to go through the sort of bullying she experienced without it.

“I definitely don’t think I would be here if I didn’t have that: it was that bad and it was that long.”

Consultant psychiatrist Dr Maria Lawlor is leading an information evening for parents and teachers on bullying in secondary schools on Tuesday, December 7th, at 7pm in the Lucena Clinic, Rathgar, Dublin. Admission is free but booking is essential on 01-4923596 or by e-mail: Marie.McCourt@sjog.ie

Understanding School Bullyingby Mona O'Moore is published by Veritas, €13.99

For more information on bullying, see abc.tcd.ie

WHEN YOUR CHILD IS THE BULLY

PARENTS TEND to be very defensive when a school contacts them to say their child has been involved in bullying, but that attitude is not helpful and does your child no favours.

“It is better to listen and see what is going on,” says consultant psychiatrist Dr Maria Lawlor. Generally, your child will deny it, protesting that “I was only messing”.

“Try to establish the facts of the situation, what exactly happened, and then discuss it with your kid in the calmest tone of voice you can muster,” she advises.

“Tell them that you are disappointed that they behaved like that because they are so good in other ways, and ask is there something upsetting them?”

They need to be told the behaviour has to stop or there will be serious consequences.

Some children play out their own unhappiness in aggression towards others, while some bullies come from home situations where family members are shouted down or abused.

However, adds Lawlor, “a lot of very nice kids with very nice homes behave rather badly”.

A child’s aggression in school could be due to very transient situations in the home, explains Dr Mona O’Moore of the Anti-Bullying Centre in Trinity College. “Maybe they feel overlooked; maybe parents are spending too much time with another child, or somebody’s sick, or there has been a bereavement.”

A lot of bullying is motivated by jealousy, she adds. “Bullies may go to people who are superior to them in order to bring them down. Girls, for example, may be jealous of the very attractive girl who is going out with a fella.”

Signs to look out for:

Erratic mood swings.

Reluctance to go to school and won’t say why.

Returning home with torn clothes or missing possessions.

Looking for extra money when there is no apparent need.

Disimprovement in school performance.

Not wanting to go out with friends.

Loss of appetite.

Anxiety and sleep disorders.

Frequent headaches and stomach aches.

Sudden mood changes after being on computer or reading text messages.