Bullying

Why are there bullies? Why DO they bully? I have a friend/bully who sometimes does mean things. But I never tell on him cause he wouldn't be my friend anymore.

The next question would be how to stop or decrease bullying from different stand points (that of a friend, like desmo, or a teacher, like myself).

When I did work experience for a couple of months in a school, I witnessed, what I thought was a positive process the teacher undertook in order to deal with such issues within the classroom.

Whenever any children had any fights, terrible disagreements and problems with bullying, she'd take time at the end of the day to sit them all down in a large circle, and have a kind of "lessons in empathy" session with them, as I would call them. She'd encourage the children to be open and honest about how a certain thing affected them, and then empathize with them about it, relating this to the rest of the class at the same time. If there was a child who bullied someone, she'd get the person who was bullied to state how they felt and then ask the bully themselves how they felt and why they did what they did. She'd also offer advice on ways to handle these problems again in the future.

The children seemed to react very positively after these sessions, and they all seemed so able and unafraid to express how they were feeling, because they'd actually been doing these sessions for the whole year.

How old were these kids? I doubt such a method would work with older students (or adults).

Hmmm..... he is 11 and about 3 or 4 inches taller than me.

They were 9 to 10 year olds.

Hmm, I think if we're looking at high schoolers, that is a different matter.

I saw something on TV a while ago, where these people set out to try to help high schools actually get rid of their typical group segregations - you know, the jocks, the nerds, the preps, that kind of thing.

What they did was take a portion of the students, a few hundred, however many they could handle, and sat them down in the school gym with chairs arranged in small cricles. All of the students were set down with people from other "groups" and asked to introduce themselves. They were then asked to share other small bits of information about themselves, building up to a time where they were then asked to share deeper secrets about themselves. It seems majority of these teenagers got around to sharing huge things about themselves - relating parent issues, abuse issues, issues with depression. A lot of crying was involved, and they all seemed to start to realize that they could relate to each other on these deep levels. They interviewed teenagers after the programme and many of them said that it changed their whole perspective and understanding of other people within the school, for the better.

I don't remember if anyone actually said this improved the schools issues with bullying, but it was such an amazing thing to watch, and I really would think that these kinds of programmes would benefit teenagers in terms of demistifying the sense of isolation and alienation that so many of them can become so prone to within schools that suffer from those types of segregation and bullying issues.

One weird thing. My bully never gets caught doing the bullying and never gets in trouble. Sort of a charmer.