How to Help Bullying Bystanders (2)

In the last bullying post, I wrote 25 tips to help bystanders who are involved in bullying. In the bullying game, there are the bully, the victim and the bystanders. Each of them is very important in eliminating the bullying phenomenon.

The bystanders are the people that watch a bully act and either get themselves involved or not in favor of the bully or the victim. As a reminder, here are the 5 types of bystanders:

* Ring Leaders
* Associates
* Reinforcers
* Outsiders
* Defenders

On average, when another person gets involved to defend a bullying victim, the bullying will stop within 10 seconds. Think about it: 10 seconds are enough for the bully to take a step back and for the situation to improve for everyone. Therefore, I am sure you understand how important it is for us to give power to the defenders (and inspire more of them), because they hold the key to making a big shift in bullying elimination.

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How to Help Bullying Bystanders

Bullying involves additional “players” besides the bully and the victim. All the other players are called “bystanders” collectively and include the “ring leader”, the “associates”, the “reinforcers”, the “outsiders” and the “defenders”. Here are the characteristics of each of these types.

Ring Leader – These are kids in power who orchestrate a bullying act by using their social influence. They do not bully directly but use a bully’s weakness to harass other weak kids.

Associates – These are children who actively join the bully. It could be because they are afraid of the bully or the ring leader, but they do not initiate the bullying themselves. In some strange way, they are also victims.

Reinforcers – These kids do not bully directly but give a feedback to the bully by commenting, smiling or laughing. They do not initiate an act of bullying towards other kids, but they increase the bully’s confidence by being a supportive audience.

Outsiders – These children are on the victim’s side, but they keep quiet when they witness an act of bullying. They are afraid of the bully, so they say nothing and do nothing in order to avoid drawing any attention to themselves.

Defenders – These kids are rare. They intervene and actively try to stop the bully and comfort the victim.

As you can understand, the involvement of un-involvement of all these characters can make a huge difference to the frequency and intensity of the bullying in any environment. On average, kids who get involved and defend a bullied victim stop the bullying act within 10 seconds. We need more of them!

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Stronger Together

I did not get my social skills from my agents, so I had to hold on to “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” and survive many “near death” experiences before the idea sank in: If I want to survive, I must have good relationships with my parents, siblings, friends and teachers and I had better learn the rules FAST!

The bad news is that grownups without social skills were once kids without social skills. The good news is that kids without social skills do not have to be grownups without social skills. They can change. In fact, you can improve your social skills greatly at any age.

I personally discovered the rules the hard way. At the age of 16, after being a total failure and being kicked out of school, without friends and having constant fights with my siblings and my parents, I figured there was something I needed to understand. By the time I finally got it, I had already had countless failed encounters with people around me that I had to get over. It made me vow that my kids would get good social skills from me from the second they were born.

So even if you are not the most social person in the world, your kids can be!

In his book “How to win friends and influence people”, Dale Carnegie wrote what I consider the bible of building relationships. Carnegie wrote his book in 1937 and it is amazing how relevant it is now. I copied the rules and used my explanation and suggestions for each of them. I hope you will find inspiration in those timeless rules.

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How to Help Bullying Victims (4)

The bullying game cannot be played without the victim. For bullies to gain power, they must find a victim to take it away from. If we help the victims not to be easy targets, it will make it a bit harder for the bullies to take anything away from them.

Many of the tips described in list series are useful both for kids and for adults. Much like any other list, some are easier to implement and others are less so, but I promise you that if you go over each of them and dedicate time each week to implementing at least one, the bullying will decrease and may eventually stop.

Again, if you are a parent concerned about your child being a victim of bullying, some of the tips here are mainly for you. You can arrange for your kids to get to school in a safe way, order food for them so they do not take money to school and even talk to their teachers and ask them to get involved. Do not expect your kids to figure this out all by themselves. It is hard to be bullied and harder to think clearly and come up with mature solutions, so take charge!

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How to Help Bullying Victims (3)

Bullying, as you may remember, is the 4th common reasons kids call helpline services. 13% of children aged 15-18 experience continual harassment and 14-48% of children say they have been cyber bullied.

85% of kids who have been bullied via their mobile phone know the bully and 87% of cyber bullies do it through text messaging (SMS), yet 58% of kids do not know how to report cyber bullying.

The results?

75% of victims have symptoms of post-traumatic stress and 65% of them still have those symptoms five years later. In the long term, bullied children are more likely to drop out of school, to use drugs and to use alcohol.

It is critical to our society that we stop this phenomenon.

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Workplace Bullying (2)

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.

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Workplace Bullying

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.

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Home of the bully (2)

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.

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The Cost of Happiness

It is Christmas season. Yay!

Actually, for most people, the reaction would be a sinking feeling at the pit of their stomach, caused by the idea of the excessive (some say insane) shopping set in motion by the coming holiday. Previously a European-style Christian celebration of the birth of Jesus, Christmas has been transformed by massive retail chains into a worldwide shopping frenzy observed by followers of pretty much every possible faith.

On the face of it, all this buying and sharing of gifts is intended to increase the happiness of both givers and receivers and create a festive and generous atmosphere. But in reality, people spend hours agonizing over gift ideas, finding out where they can buy them without mortgaging their clothes, actually buying them, wrapping them, hiding them, keeping the secret of what they are and wondering how they will be received by loved ones and those we just had to buy gifts for.

On the receiving end, people (especially kids) spend months waiting to get the special things they put on their wish list for Christmas, only to be disappointed with what they actually get, because nobody ever gets everything on their list, even if they get some of it.

Can you see the level of happiness going up here? I sure don’t.

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Home of the bully

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.

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