HEALTH PLUS:Bullying at school must be tackled in a co-ordinated national approach, writes MARIE MURRAY
CHRISTMAS HOLIDAYS are but a reprieve from being bullied at school for many primary school children. It has been so since the pioneering Scandinavian research of the 1980s into school bullying first revealed the extent of bullying that children suffer. It continues to be a blight on children’s lives – on their confidence, self-esteem, physical safety, emotional development, psychological wellbeing and even their future mental health.
Bullying is an assault on children’s happiness. It involves a range of cruelties designed to undermine, upset, insult, isolate, exclude, intimidate, frighten, physically hurt or emotionally wound those who are bullied. And it is very sad to think that current nine-year-old children’s accounts of being bullied, which are reported on in the Government-funded longitudinal study of children, Growing Up in Ireland, differ little from those of previous generations, other than that technology has provided an increased facility to extend bullying electronically beyond the school yard and the school day.
Despite anti-bullying programmes, school policies, parental awareness and educational interventions, each new generation of children suffers the same agonies and ignominies of being bullied at school as the previous one. Only the cohorts of children who are victims change. What characterised school bullying and adults’ response to it in the 1980s, 1990s, in 2000 and once more, depressingly, in this longitudinal study, is how children hide bullying and consequently how the majority of parents remain unaware of the awful extent of childhood suffering.
And even when adults are aware of bullying, the explanations by adults in the Growing Up in Ireland report shows that many ascribe the problem to some quality in their own child. This is one of the most interesting aspects of this valuable research: the relative lack of adult appreciation of children’s victimisation and its causation, vis-à-vis children’s own accounts of their school lives.
If adults perceive the problem of bullying to lie in their children’s appearance, school performance, physical or learning disability or ethnicity, which were among the reasons given by some mothers interviewed for the Growing Up in Ireland research, then children will appropriate negative ascriptions of themselves and their problems, and they will blame themselves for being bullied. They will think they are the problem. They are not.
Bullying is not school rough and tumble, the squabbles of childhood, jockeying for position, normal competitiveness or petty jealousy. Children cannot “sort” bullying out among themselves. They cannot “give as good” as they get, or “stick up for themselves”, or “fight back” and not let the bullies “get away with it”. They cannot “ignore the bullies”, feign indifference, or demolish them with witty verbal retorts.
Yet adult advice to children who try to disclose being bullied often takes this form, which leaves children emotionally more raw, less secure, more helpless and undermined than before they sought help.
Children who are being bullied may be touchy, moody, irritable and angry. Also, when children are being bullied their academic achievement may deteriorate. They may show happiness during holiday time, but term-time misery. They may refuse to talk about friends or school. They may look for extra money (to placate the bullies). They may want to be driven to and from school for protection.
Children who are being bullied may have excessive unexplained damaged or lost possessions. They may have too many “accidents” with bumps, cuts and bruises. They may be silent, sullen, sad or anxious and angry. And there is little they can do to help themselves.
The problem of children being bullied must be tackled by adults, not by children on their own. If adults remain unaware of the extent to which bullying is happening, and if adults do not know how to tackle it, then the problem cannot be solved. Adult helplessness and children’s hopelessness are closely allied.
For the truth is that one of the major reasons why bullying continues is that adults do not always recognise it, understand it, monitor it, challenge and confront it, relentlessly, with every child, in every class, in every school, each school year in a co-ordinated national approach to the problem.
Clinical psychologist Marie Murray is director of psychology in the UCD Student Counselling Service. She is co-author of The ABC of Bullying published by Mercier Press. Her radio slot, Mindtime on Drivetime, is on Wednesdays on RTE Radio 1