Be Bully Free. Catherine Thornton L.
computer screens, mobile phones, people or bits of paper in between the bully and the recipient. It can be physical or verbal. Physical bullying can include hitting, kicking, pinching, pushing or damaging the property of someone else. Verbal bullying can include put-downs, racist or homophobic comments, insults, teasing or verbal assault. Sometimes it can even be a facial expression.
2. Covert bullying
This is more subtle and harder to detect. It is not physical, more out of the way and hidden. It is intended to harm someone’s social reputation and/or humiliate them. People don’t readily acknowledge that it exists because it is out of sight. Some common examples include:
3. Cyberbullying
This is bullying that occurs via information or communication technologies. It can happen via the Internet, text messages, email, social networking sites and other programs where images and text can be stored and/or shared. It can be overt or covert. It can happen at any time, be public or private. The audience to the bullying can be just the recipient or much, much broader.
The Effects of Bullying
People respond to bullying in many ways. Sometimes the response is immediate, such as when being physically bullied. People are obviously aware of the hit, shove or trip. However, in lots of situations, people don’t always know they are being bullied until later on. This can happen if the bullying is low key and hidden, such as a series of personal ‘put-downs’ or social exclusion. In these cases the victim may believe that they are at fault but they don’t know what they are doing wrong. It can sometimes take a while for a person to recognise they are being bullied.
Initially bullying affects a person’s sense of self. ‘I’ve felt okay before, so why am I starting to feel bad… I really must be a social loser?’ or ‘What’s wrong with me that people are acting like this towards me?’ When this happens, victims become very aware of their behaviour and psychologically ‘zoom in’ to everything they say and do, so as not to stand out in any way. As you can imagine their anxiety thermometer gets very hot.
When a person thinks that it’s their behaviour that is ‘causing’ them to be bullied, the easiest way to deal with it is to ‘avoid’ – hang out in the library, the toilets or even not come to school in the first place. They feel like a failure and would rather be on their own than ‘cause’ someone to make or think negative comments about them or attack them physically. Together with avoiding certain situations, when a person ‘thinks’ about what is happening, they can feel nervous, teary and shaky. Their heart might race when they know they have to walk past the place where the bully usually hangs out. And they may also spend long periods of time on their own, thinking about what they may have done wrong or why people are being so mean. They might even imagine how to get revenge. All this thinking and worrying can certainly make a person feel very tired, which again makes it hard to think clearly and look at options and plan what needs to be done.
It’s not hard to imagine that when you’re feeling worried and tired your concentration and interest in your schoolwork or hobbies may be affected. Your marks may drop and you don’t have the motivation to complete your homework, which will only add to the problem as now you have your teachers and parents on your back! Often all of this leads to sleeping and eating problems. What else needs to go wrong? It’s reasonable to say that when a person is being bullied nearly every aspect of their life is affected, especially if it is over a long period of time. Depression and anxiety are common, indeed quite ‘normal’, responses to being bullied.
The Scenarios and Strategies
The scenarios are all set out in a standard and similar pattern. The story is told, before a variety of strategies are suggested. The strategies written are guidelines only. You might find there are similar strategies in a number of the stories. Hopefully this will be reaffirming for you. The scenarios don’t have to be read in any particular order. You can search via the titles in the contents to look for something that might be relevant to you, or browse through them – they’re in no particular order, but cover the range of common bullying situations described in the earlier section on types of bullying.
Sometimes the strategy is simply a continuation of the story. Perhaps the character in the story has thought through the situation and taken a course of action that requires no intervention or assistance from someone outside. By their words and/or actions, they are demonstrating a worthwhile strategy to help them resolve the problem.
#1
Simon – who gets an
orange thrown at him
by a group of boys
Type: Overt – Physical
‘Sorry!’ I heard one of the boys shout. I looked at the half-eaten orange on the pavement.
My name is Simon Woodfield. I am 11 years old. I really like school. My favourite subjects are maths and science. I work really hard in all my subjects but especially those two. My teachers sometimes give me extra hard work to do at home and sometimes even in class.
In class I like answering the teachers’ questions. They’re usually quite easy. I don’t put my hand up all the time but if no one else knows the answer then the teachers usually ask me and most times I’m able to give them the correct answer.
At recess and lunch I go to the library. Colin, Lindsay and I are working on writing a computer program. It turns a two-dimensional object into a three-dimensional object. Mr Hutton asked me to demonstrate it in class yesterday.
I hooked my laptop up to the oversized screen and showed the class. Mr Hutton asked me some questions about it and so did one of the students in the class.
During lunch while I was walking past the bench near the canteen on my way to the computer lab, I felt a hard thump on my back. I dropped my books. It didn’t really hurt much, it just gave me a fright. ‘Sorry!’ I heard one of the boys shout. I looked at the half-eaten orange on the pavement. I picked up my books and the orange and kept walking, dropping the orange in a nearby bin. I could hear their laughter. I glanced around at them again. They certainly didn’t appear to be sorry.
At the end of lunch, it happened again. This time one of the boys ‘accidentally’ bumped into me.
‘Sorry!’ he said again, holding his arms up. I managed to not topple over.
‘That’s okay,’ I muttered, feeling totally stupid, because it obviously wasn’t okay. This made the boys laugh again. ‘What have I done to deserve this?’ I wondered, walking quickly to class.
Bullying is always hurtful, and when it hurts both emotionally as well as physically it is especially awful. Trying to avoid the bullies is an effective strategy. The plan here is to work on not being where the bullies are, to work out other ways to get to where you are going. Of course this is not always easy. Having some support with you, friends like Colin or Lindsay, will make the trip more comfortable if you do have to be near them.
People