Bullying in Ireland: 'Schools are in denial'

Bullying is much more common than many of us – including school principals and parents – would like to admit. Kate Holmquisttalks to one girl who has lived through the nightmare

THE RELENTLESS bullying started in her first year in a mixed secondary school in Dublin. Ciara was branded a “loser” and a “nerd” because she was highly academic, small for her age, wore glasses and had braces on her teeth. She refused to conform to the girls’ style code of having a fake tan and straightened peroxide-blond hair – and performing sexual favours for boys. In first year.

Ciara believes she was picked on because she stuck by her morals. “I wasn’t drinking and smoking or flirting like a Playboy bunny . . . The bullies told me to kill myself . . . And I knew I couldn’t win with them.” The daily insults, which included cyberbullying, intensified in second year, and she had to leave school when the stress made her ill.

Life became so unbearable that Ciara secretly self-harmed, cutting herself with whatever was “available and sharp”. By the age of 15 she had twice tried to hang herself. She had also overdosed on tablets and insists that these weren’t cries for help. She really wanted to die.

“I could see no other way out of this nightmare,” says Ciara, who is now 16 and doing well after therapy. “What was happening to me was exactly the same as what [I understood] had happened to Phoebe Prince.”

Ciara was eventually pushed down the stairs at school. Several girls had ganged up behind her when it happened, so she didn’t know which one had actually pushed her. It got to the stage where Ciara knew that every time she had to use the stairwell “something bad would happen”.

In second year Ciara was admitted to a children’s hospital because she was too anxious to eat, so her body-mass index had dropped to 12. Doctors treated her for anorexia but never asked about her feelings, she says. “What I really needed was somebody to talk to. I couldn’t eat because of the stress.”

She felt the doctors blamed her for not eating and says they even told her “to stop crying and act her age”. Three times she was admitted to hospital, where she asked for counselling but was never given it. Instead, antidepressants were prescribed.

Ciara felt she was to blame, bottled up her anger and hated herself so much that she cut herself. “I thought the pain would make me feel better. Harming myself was the only way to unleash my anger, because I knew I would make the bullying worse by expressing it verbally.” When that stopped bringing relief, she became intent on suicide. “I had nobody. Life was not worth living. I forgot I was only 15 years old and had a whole life ahead of me. I was going to waste my life.”

The turning point came a year ago when, following another suicide attempt, Ciara’s mother learned about Pieta House, a psychotherapy service for people who self-harm and attempt suicide. The school was told about the bullying, which was investigated. “The girls admitted to everything. It turned out that my ‘best friend’ was the mastermind . . . She was the one who pushed me down the stairs.”

Ciara believes there are many other victims of bullying just like her, which is why she wanted to tell her story. “A lot of people being bullied are terrified to tell somebody. Schools have to see how serious it is.”

DR JOHN CONNOLLY, founder and secretary of the Irish Association of Suicidology, says: "A lot of schools are in denial. Even schools that have a policy on paper are not implementing it . . . The victim is always blamed and feels ashamed and afraid to tell people." One in four secondary-school students has been bullied. One in five second-year girls has been cyberbullied, and one in four has received threatening phone calls.

Ciara’s story is not unusual, says Prof Mona O’Moore, co-ordinator of the Anti-Bullying Centre at Trinity College Dublin. She has “met girls and boys who have said ‘the only way to stop this is . . . suicide’ ” and personally knows four cases of Irish girls taking their own lives as a result of school bullying in recent years. These include Leanne Wolfe, who killed herself a few weeks after her 18th birthday, in 2007, leaving behind diaries describing her torment.

“This subject is not being taken seriously, because leadership is lacking from the Department of Education. It’s an extraordinary indictment that they won’t pick up on the studies that give strong evidence to show that if you implement a whole-school approach to bullying – a national intervention programme with mandatory implementation – you will get a significant reduction,” says Prof O’Moore.

In Finland, school bullying has been drastically reduced with a programme involving the entire community, while, in the US, New York and Massachusetts are developing legislation in reaction to the Phoebe Prince case.

Yet in Ireland, where only a few schools take a positive approach, the greater community is still in denial, says Prof O’Moore. “So bullies know they can get away with it, because there is no risk of negative consequences. People in Ireland are too PC and try to hush things up, so bullying gets swept under the carpet. If people feel victimisation is weakness, victims’ parents don’t necessarily want to talk about it, and you’d be amazed at the number of schools that are totally defensive if a parent comes in to say their child is being bullied,” Prof O’Moore adds.

“We are a very competitive society that is always looking for ways to blame the victim for not being resilient enough – no matter how resilient you are, you will snap. Who would not be broken by being isolated and singled out and made a fool of by a greater force?”

The long-term social cost is enormous, because as adults these victims may have so little trust in others that they experience long-term mental-health problems, such as depression. And she says persistent school bullies will pay a price if they are not confronted and helped. “They have a very poor prognosis.”

The Irish Association of Suicidology is holding a conference on self-harm on Tuesday, Oct 5. See ias.ie. Pieta House is at pieta.ie