Approaches to Reduce Bullying

Reactive Approaches

Dealing With Bullying Incidents

Whilst all the measures described above will help to keep bullying incidents to a minimum, some will occur in all schools.
It is essential that bullying incidents are dealt with swiftly and effectively and are seen by everyone to have been dealt with effectively. Bullying can only be tackled, however, if staff know that it is happening. Pupils will find it easier to talk to staff in schools where there is an atmosphere of openness and trust and where pupils expect to be listened to and taken seriously. Even within such an atmosphere pupils may find it easier to have some anonymous way of letting staff know that bullying is taking place. Schools may choose therefore to have suggestion boxes around the school where pupils can discreetly deposit notes.

The Immediate Response

In deciding on an appropriate response to a bullying incident staff will need to take into account the seriousness of the incident and what they wish the outcome to be for all the youngsters involved. The response to any example of bullying will need to be consistent with the school's behaviour and discipline policy. In the most serious cases, where injury is involved, parents may wish to exercise their right to involve the police. Where parents or pupils report bullying which has taken place away from the school premises, it may be appropriate to help them to accept that involving the police is necessary.
Beyond this, the main consideration will need to be about what needs to done to make sure that the bullying stops and that the pupils involved in this incident do not become involved in others. The first concern should be to ensure that the victim knows that their situation is acknowledged, that action will be taken to stop the bullying and that they will be safe. It is not sufficient to tell those responsible that the bullying must cease, to implement sanctions and expect that to be the end of the matter. There must be some form of follow up.

Sanctions are used in schools to set and mark the boundaries of acceptable behaviour and to make clear that there are consequences in any society of breaking the rules about social behaviour. Punishment, however, is not an effective means of changing behaviour and certainly does not change the underlying attitudes which allow people to behave in an anti-social way in the first place. Punishment may actually serve to make those attitudes more entrenched. Inquisitions to apportion blame do not readily lead to solutions for change. Follow up work must address the failure to empathise with the victim and any prejudices which underpin that failure to empathise.
Bullying incidents are many and varied. What is appropriate in terms of response will depend very much on the individual circumstances. With some pupils who have bullied, talking about how their behaviour has made their victim feel may be enough to help them to reflect on and change their ways. This is an approach that teachers of young children use a great deal, and one which can usefully be extended to older pupils. It is easy to assume that children have learned appropriate social behaviour by a certain age and forget that they are subject to many contrary pressures and influences and that they, indeed everyone, needs to reflect from time to time on how the things they say and do affect other people.

Supporting the Victim(s)

Careful consideration will need to be given to whether the victim needs support. The emotions aroused by being bullied are devastatingly powerful. Victims may feel shame, powerlessness, degradation and guilt. In common with victims of crime they may feel that they deserve what has happened to them. They must receive the message that no-one deserves to be bullied. If there is an aspect of their social behaviour which makes them vulnerable to bullying, this should be taken up at a later date, not immediately when it might cloud this important message. They need also to know that their feelings are entirely normal and ones which anyone could expect to have in a similar situation.
When a serious incident has taken place a plan may be needed to help the victim to come into school again. This would normally involve parents and might also involve arranging for friends to meet him or her outside school, ensuring that there are arrangements for break-times and providing daily access to an appropriate member of staff to talk about how the day has gone and how they are feeling. The plan will also need to take account of how and when the victim will come into contact with those responsible for the bullying.

Further follow up work with the victim might involve making sure that they have a buddy, finding a way to give him or her status with their peers (e.g. by giving him or her a desirable role or responsibility or by teaching them a high status skill) or teaching very specific social skills such how to join in games or conversations. See case study 3.

Follow Up Work with the Bully or Bullies

Follow up work with the bully or bullies must also take place. This is sometimes made difficult by the strong emotions provoked by bullying. Our reactions to bullying incidents, particularly where the incident has been especially unpleasant, are understandably ones of anger and outrage. In these circumstances it is important to take time to reflect on what we would like the outcome of our response to the bully or bullies to be. There is a risk that adults will, in anger, react in a way which is in effect bullying of the bullies.
Some children and young people who bully are already themselves the victims of bullying in other circumstances, perhaps through abuse within their family. Their bullying behaviour has been learned through the way they have been treated themselves. Whilst it is necessary for them to understand the seriousness of their actions, it is important not to reinforce this behaviour by acting as adults in a bullying manner but to teach alternative ways of behaving. Many youngsters who bully have not been bullied or abused themselves, but equally need to learn different ways of relating to other young people.
The precise nature of the work undertaken with a bully will depend on the youngster's age, the nature of the incidents they have been involved in and their general relationships with both other pupils and with adults. Work will probably need to focus on changing the bully's attitude to those who have been the target. They need to be able to understand and to empathise with the hurt they will have caused. As has been mentioned, with some pupils it is possible to achieve this by talking together with the bully or bullies about the effects of their behaviour, having first gained the agreement of the victim. This discussion should conclude with the bully or bullies suggesting changes to their behaviour which will make the victim feel better. This could be anything from agreeing to include a child who has been ostracised, to undertaking to keep well away from another teenager who has been followed and taunted around school. Staff will need to judge and to negotiate with pupils (victims and bullies) what is realistic in a given situation.

With other pupils, particularly those whose relationships generally with both other pupils and teachers are poor, a more sustained programme to help them to appreciate the feelings and points of view of others will be needed. Staff should bear in mind that some youngsters who bully have very poor self-esteem and that any follow up work should seek to increase their feelings of self worth and certainly not diminish them in any way. However, it must be recognized that some pupils who bully have high self-esteem. Consideration will need to be given to ways in which their high self-esteem and confidence can be diverted into more constructive activity. Successful strategies have involved giving bullies responsibilities for working with and supporting other vulnerable youngsters, for example younger pupils with literacy problems.
Where a group of pupils have been responsible for bullying the response to them must not enhance their identity as a bully group, lead to reprisals or simply shift the focus to a different victim.

The Bystanders

As well as the bully and victim, any follow up work should include pupils who were witnesses. Without this an episode of bullying can be as damaging to them as unchecked bullying would be to the victim and bully. They should be given an opportunity to talk about their feelings about what happened, to say what they think the victim's feelings were, and to hear how the event has affected the victim. They should then be encouraged to suggest ways in which they could have behaved differently in order not to collude with what was going on.

Whatever follow up is decided as appropriate for a bullying incident the outcome will need to be monitored over time to check that the bullying has indeed stopped and that the objectives for the pupils involved are being met.

Parents

The way in which parents or carers are involved by the school in following up bullying incidents is crucial to the success of the work with pupils. The feelings which parents of both bully and victim experience will be similar but probably much more intense than those of adults in school. Parents of the victim may well, for understandable reasons, demand retribution on the perpetrators. The parents of the bully may be shocked, embarrassed confused and ashamed. These feelings may manifest themselves in a variety of ways: denial that their child could have been involved, anger at the school, claims that the victim was provocative, extreme distress and guilt, complete avoidance of confronting the issue.

School staff will need to listen to parents and to be prepared to explain the course of action the school proposes to take, and the reasons for this.

Published Approaches to Bullying

The approach to bullying incidents being recommended here draws on The Method of Shared Concern described by Pikas, a Swedish author, and the better known No Blame Approach of Maines and Robinson. Another approach, that of Bully Courts, is described in the Kidscape literature. Bully Courts require very careful implementation, without which they run the risk of sanctioning a kind of institutionalised bullying. They are not recommended here as an approach.

Support available within the LEA

Training:
1. Training for governors on bullying is part of the annual programme organised by Governor Support
2. Training for school staff is available through the Educational Psychology Service. Training may focus on developing an anti-bullying policy, whole school approaches to behaviour, (e.g. the Assertive Discipline Programme), on preventive approaches to bullying or on responses to bullying incidents.

Children who have been bullied are often reluctant for adults to take any action for fear of reprisal. Here a parent spoke in confidence to the headteacher who was able to take the matter up in a way that did not identify the source of the information.

Anti-Bullying Network Information Sheet

The way schools react is important

The most effective thing that a school can do to reduce bullying is to have a policy outlining how the issue is raised within the curriculum, and how incidents are dealt with after they have happened i.e. the policy must acknowledge the need for both pro-active and re-active strategies. But no school has the answer to every problem, and no single method can be used to deal with all bullying incidents.

The way in which adults react to bullying contributes to the ethos of the school and can help to make it more or less likely that bullying will happen in future. Ignoring the problem encourages it to flourish. A heavy-handed approach can drive it underground. However, a positive, open response will encourage young people to speak up about matters that concern them and will improve the learning environment by promoting more caring and responsible patterns of behaviour.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

How should schools react?

This will depend upon:

The circumstances - always assess the true nature of an incident before applying any strategy. Group bullying or "mobbing" needs to be handled differently from problems created by an individual who persistently bullies others. Such a person's bullying may be merely one manifestation of a plethora of problems.
The existing practices and resources of the school - for example, there is no point trying to encourage a counselling approach if potential counsellors are not given the training, time and support needed to fulfil the task.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Which strategies are best?

Schools are getting better at dealing with bullying but it will be some time before a quick resolution of all incidents can be guaranteed. Sometimes all that is needed is a simple word or two from a teacher to make children realise that what they are doing is wrong. At the other extreme some bullying remains intactable. The development of new ideas continues and all it is possible to do at the moment is to list some of the strategies for which success has been claimed and to provide a few words of commentary on each.

Punishments such as suspension or expulsion can mark the seriousness with which an episode of bullying is viewed and can also help to provide a safer environment for victims. It also has to be recognised that some types of bullying are crimes. Schools are subject to the law of the land so the possibility of punishment in response to very serious incidents cannot be denied. However, the great majority of bullying goes unpunished so some new ways of helping the thousands of hidden victims of bullying are needed.

Assertive discipline - a method developed the United States which involves a rigid system of rewards and sanctions consistently applied by all teachers in a school. It is claimed that this method helps to motivate learning and to reduce the level of classroom indiscipline, but its effectiveness in coping with bullying is not clear.

Bully boxes - a simple method whereby youngsters can put their concerns on paper and post them in a "bully box". What happens to these notes is the key to the success or failure of this technique. Can genuine comments be distinguished from frivolous or malicious ones?

Bully courts - the idea that young people should play a part in making school rules and in deciding what should happen to those who break them is not new. Some progressive schools introduced councils to do this over fifty years ago. More recently a few schools have tried to establish courts or councils solely to deal with cases of bullying. However, the principle that young people should sit in judgement on their peers, and punish wrongdoers remains controversial. What is clear is that adults must play an active and guiding role in such proceedings in order to protect the welfare of all the young people involved.

Counselling - a teacher or another adult may have the skills and time to offer support to young people involved in bullying. Both bullies and victims can benefit from this process. The main problems are that it is time consuming, the youngsters must take part voluntarily and there is a lack of trained counsellors in schools.
Mediation - some schools have introduced schemes where two parties to a relationship problem agree that a third person, who may be either an adult or another young person, helps to negotiate a solution. This seems to be helpful in many situations, especially where there is not too large an imbalance of power between the protagonists - but not in all cases of bullying. A bully may refuse to take part because he or she has no interest in ending the bullying. A victim may feel that a negotiated solution is not appropriate when it is the other person who is entirely in the wrong.

Peer counselling - a small number of secondary schools have used older teenagers as peer counsellors. Good training and continuing support is vital if these young volunteers are to be able to help victims who may be quite seriously distressed.

The 'no blame' approach - a step by step technique which allows early intervention because it does not require that anyone should be proved to be at fault. A group of young people, which includes bystanders as well as possible bullies, is made aware of a victim's distress and is asked to suggest solutions. This approach is particularly useful in dealing with group bullying and name-calling, when it may be difficult to use more traditional remedies.

"Solution focused approaches" share much of the philosophy of the previous two strategies but can be applied to problems other than bullying. This is helpful because the task of finding out the facts of an incident and then of making a judgement about whether it should be called bullying or not is sometimes impossible. Relationship problems amongst a group of children can be very complicated indeed. They can also be very damaging to the personal development and education of some of the individuals involved. Being able to intervene without wasting too much time trying to untangle emotional knots has obvious attractions for busy teachers.

Reporting systems - it is most important that schools should have efficient ways of recording reports of serious bullying so that a check can be kept of patterns of behaviour. This can also help to ensure that incidents are not overlooked.

"Safe rooms" have been set up in some schools at break and lunch times as a refuge for bullied children. Although this may provide safety in the short term, it could have the effect of making the rest of the school seem even more hostile to the children who use it.

Telephone help lines - services such as ChildLine provide valuable support to children who are afraid to speak out about bullying. However, the fact that they exist is a signal that some schools are failing to provide conditions in which children are able to discuss their problems openly. One or two schools have set up their own internal help lines in an attempt to increase the opportunities for worried children to seek help.

Talk - no strategy will be effective unless all members of the school community, pupils, parents, teachers and others, are prepared to talk about bullying openly and seriously.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Anti-Bullying Network

© Copyright
This information sheet may be photocopied or reproduced for use within schools and other educational establishments providing the Anti-Bullying Network is credited.

Site Areas