Last week, I wrote the first 25 tips to help victims bullying cope with and avoid being bullied. As I have written before, I believe in a holistic approach to stopping this phenomenon of bullying, which is a cycle of violence and abuse.
Building the victims’ confidence to function as a “bully repellent” is a good start. In some cases, this will stop them feeling so weak they have to bully someone else to restore their personal power.
Here are the next 25 tips to help the bully victim.
The bullying game is played by more than just the bully and the bullied victim. There are the bystanders, the home of the bully, the workplace, the schools and society in general. Each of them needs help in gaining power to make sure they do not try to steal it from someone weaker.
I believe that all players in the game need help. There is a dynamic that needs to be broken and each participant, whether directly or not, can break the bullying cycle. In the next chapters, I will write tips to help each of the players to break the bullying cycle. This post contains tips for the bullied victim.
Since I believe a holistic approach is best in creating social change, I will direct these tips at both kids and adults. Helping bullied kids and adults will make sure they do not continue the cycle by bullying others to gain some perceived power that was lost.
There are 100 tips on the list (25 in each post). Each of them separately can make a huge change in your life. Study them carefully and find those you think are easy enough for you to apply. If you are a parent and you want to help your bullied child or prevent your child from being bullied, find techniques that are easy enough to explain and to apply and focus on each of them separately. Most of the tips are about building your emotional and social intelligence, so anyone can use of them.
Read How to Help Bullying Victims »
If you look at the forms of workplace bullying listed in Bullying (10): Workplace Bullying, you know that almost everyone who works for others has been somehow bullied at work. The expectation to stay at work late has increased in the last 20 years so much that when you talk to people about getting home on time to be with their kids, they are 100% convinced that leaving work at 5pm (as they should do) will threaten their job, their career and their financial situation.
17 years ago, when we lived in California, all my women friends said their husbands returned home at 8pm, barely had a chance to kiss the kids goodnight and only spent weekends with the family. For everyone – the wives, the kids and the workers – that was part of life and they felt they had to accept it.
Read Workplace Bullying (2) »
When we talk about bullying, we mainly think of children and the perceived increase in acts of bullying at schools. However, as we discovered in Home of the Bully, it is very likely that the parents or older siblings who are raising child bullies have been bullied by their parents or are being bullied at work themselves. Therefore, they are merely trapped in a cycle of bullying.
In Australia, it is estimated that 1 of 6 people are bullied at work. A research done by Duncan and Riley on the staff of a school cluster found that 97% of staff thought they had been or were still being bullied by another person at work.
In 2002, it was estimated that workplace bullying cost the Australian economy 36 billion dollars a year, not including stress leave people took due to bullying.
But the implications of this phenomenon are far more devastating than the financial toll society pays for bullying. People who are bullied and made to feel weak at work have a higher chance of finding someone weaker to pick on to regain their power. If they have kids, those kids might become their victims at home.
Besides the “obvious” workplace bullies – employers and managers (“the boss”) – anyone may act like a bully: subordinates, colleagues, clients, suppliers, individually or in groups. Anyone who feels weak may use bullying to regain their power by putting another down.
Read Workplace Bullying »
In my work for Together for Humanity, I must have read hundreds of articles while looking for solutions to specific forms of bullying and there was very limited mention of parents. I can easily understand why there was so little focus on parents’ role in eliminating bullying. It seems there is a fear of addressing the issue, as if pointing a finger at the parents will only make things worse.
Although I believe blaming is not a good strategy in solving any problem, I do think that shutting our eyes to the importance of the parenting style in creating the problem is not going to get us any closer to the solution.
Parents are the most important role models for their kids and the most valuable socializing agent. When their parenting style supports bullying behavior, they do not do it because they are mean and abusive. They do it because they do not know any other way or are not aware of the effects of their parenting on their kids and on society.
I think that avoidance and fear of discussing the parenting side is not doing parents any favors. By drawing attention to the importance of parenting, we can actually give parents back the power they need in order to run their family life in a productive, supportive and positive way. As a result (almost a side effect), we will also be reversing the bullying trend.
Read Home of the bully (2) »
Bullying is not something we like to talk about. There are big groups and organizations out there trying to convince us to start talking about it, because life is getting worse and bullying is on the rise. I think they paint this picture of society for two reasons:
* To create awareness of something that many have bravely decided to stop tolerating and a sense of urgency in finding a solution for it
* To ease our guilt feelings about having accepted it as part of life until recently
As you might suspect, the first reason is closer to my heart and to my educational and social agenda, but I am not happy with the second reason, because I believe bullying is a fundamental part of our society (just think about bosses, kings and other people in power) and without acknowledging that, we will keep dealing with superficial issues and never really eliminate it.
I remember myself living in a bullying environment. I was bullied for my height (I am still short), I was bullied for my financial status (we lived on the poor side of town in a house and believed those living in a flat in a buildings were superior to us), I was bullied for my low academic achievements by my siblings (yes, it is hard to admit, but school was not my best experience), I was bullied for my bad health and using threats to get what we wanted was our way of life.
In the past, when a husband was a bully towards his wife and children, it was very acceptable. If any parent physically hurt their child, it was called “education” or “discipline”. Authorities did not even consider it a problem. I think that even today, many parents do not recognize their role in raising a bully in their home.
It is time to wake up and take responsibility.
Research about bullies discovered there were certain types of homes that raised bullies.
Read Home of the bully »
It is commonly thought that the bullying game is run by two main players, the bully and the victim. However, there are many other players taking part in this game. Understanding the role of the other players can greatly change the dynamic of the bullying act. Their weaknesses are not obvious, so they are not easy targets, but do they defend the weak? Encourage the bully? Do nothing?
As a group, the kids who are watching an act of bullying are called “Bystanders”. Research studies claim that in 85% of the situations, there are other kids witnessing an act of bullying. Most bystanders feel very uncomfortable with the bullying, but do not intervene for different reasons. As a parent reading this, you probably say to yourself, “I’d rather my kid leave the scene and not get into extra trouble”. Well, this is very wise, but more often than not, bystanders leave without getting the help of anyone else.
Statistically, 57% of the times, when another child intervenes, the bullying stops within seconds! So bullying bystanders have lots of power. They just do not know it. The main problem is not that they do not help the victims. It is that they help the bully by being an audience for his act of power.
Read Bullying Bystanders »
Last week, I talked about the character traits of Bullies. Today, I will cover the personality of the Bullied or Victims of Bullying. It is obvious that for someone to be a bully, they need a victim. You probably wonder why some kids are bullied and others are not? Well, it is because there is some dynamic between the bully and the bullied and some behaviors are easy targets for the bully.
The most obvious reason kids become a target for bullying is being different in some way. It is not easy to avoid being different somehow, because something as small as your type of hair or the size of your body can be easily used by the bully as a weakness.
During the school years, fitting in is very important for kids and by trying so hard to fit in and hide the differences, they attract bullies to their weakness. In his 2007 research, Field found that children who are bullied have 2 main problems:
* They stand out as being different
* They have challenges with their social skills
Read Victims of Bullying »
Understanding the dynamics of bullying is very important in finding the solution for it. In the next two chapters of the bullying series, I will discuss the characteristics of two main players in the bullying phenomenon – the Bully and the Bullied (victim). I say two main players, because there are many other players in the game, but they will be discussed later on.
From a very early stage of the bullying research, it was obvious that bullies have special characteristics. Research done in 2007 by Field found that bullies have difficulties with schoolwork, health and self-esteem. Field also found that bullies have personal, social and interpersonal difficulties, including challenges in dealing with emotions and conflicts, lack of compassion and inability to express empathy.
As the challenges bullies have are all associated with their inability to manage their feelings, it is easy to see that bullies have low emotional intelligence.
Read Why Do People Bully? »
As hard as it is to admit, computer games have made our kids quicker thinkers and given them great satisfaction for hours have not been a good substitute for face-to-face social interaction and physical make-believe games.
Social skills are a very important part of our personal development and from a very early stage, make-believe and dressing up are our ways of growing emotionally in a safe way. While computer games are limited by the availability of technology, the make-believe and dress-up games are only limited by the players’ imagination.
Last week, our 15-years-old son Tsoof went to a party. It was an 60’s party and just before he left, he went into the loft, took out the costume suitcase and looked for inspiration to dress up. Eventually, he found some hippie-looking clothes that made him happy.
Later that night, Gal and I went to bring him back from the party, which was in a beautiful garden at his friend’s house. It was just lovely to see a group of 15- and 16-year-old teens all dressed up in hippie clothes, singing with a guitar, couples hugging and kissing and you know what? We felt good! Really good!
Read Low-Tech Games »
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