Any school in the country that had a pothole at its entrance that routinely caused children to fall off their bikes and hurt themselves would fix it pretty smartly. Fear of serious injury and expensive legal action combined with parental concern for their children’s safety would force even the most cash-strapped school to find the money to sort the problem.
Not all schools have potholes, but every one of them has a bully. In a recent study headed by Dr Mona O’Moore, the Anti-Bullying Centre at Trinity College found that almost one in three primary school pupils have been bullied at some time. At secondary level, the figure is 16%. That means about 200,000 Irish children are currently experiencing bullying. If you have a child at school, you can be certain they are either aware of, have witnessed or are themselves victims of bullying.
The effects of this intimidation are potentially far-reaching. Victims suffer stress and fear of going to school. Later they become prone to problems with their schoolwork as well as insomnia and bedwetting. Then there is the loss of confidence and appetite, the mood swings, depression, stomach problems and, ultimately, according to the Anti-Bullying Centre, the risk of nervous breakdown and suicide.
Even those lucky enough to escape the attention of bullies do not remain unscathed. Children who witness bullying can suffer feelings of powerlessness, stress and deep upset at their inability to intervene on behalf of a friend or classmate.
Scared children have an excuse for not halting the bully’s activities: principals and boards of management do not. Thanks to a watershed case last week, school authorities will now be aware that cosmetic solutions are not going to absolve them of responsibility any more.
Just because a school has an impressive anti-bullying policy in place does not mean it is tackling the problem. Unless it is followed through with determined action, such a policy is about as effective a legal defence as a sheet of Astroturf over that pothole. It may look neatly fixed, but if somebody gets hurt, the school will have to pay up.
Last week, a 10-year-old boy who was bullied at his primary school in Leixlip for two years was awarded €10,000 compensation by a circuit court judge. Given the possible effects of serious and sustained bullying, as identified by the Anti-Bullying Centre, it seems to me that the school got off lightly.
The boy suffered physical and verbal abuse from at least two other students. He was punched, kicked, spat at and pelted with stones. Cillin O Donnchadha’s parents complained to the school, Scoil Chearbhaill Ui Dhalaigh in Leixlip, and were promised that the matter would be investigated, but nothing happened.
Cillin told his mother that he didn’t want a party for his seventh birthday. Nobody would come, he said, because all the other children in his class hated him. One day his mother found him doing press-ups, to make himself stronger to fight off the bullies.
She raised her concerns with his teacher, but was assured that all was well. The child began to fall ill on schoolday mornings. In the afternoons he’d return home desperate for the bathroom, because he’d been afraid to use the lavatories in school. His mother bought him an Action Man jacket, but he was afraid to wear it in school in case it drew attention to him. He began to suffer mood swings.
The school continued to assure his worried parents that nothing was amiss. Finally, Cillin’s mother waited at the school gates one morning and watched her son walk into the playground. As she looked on, he was attacked by two boys, who thumped him without any evident fear of punishment. She took her child out of the school that day and never brought him back.
If that had been my child, I’d have taken him straight to the nearest garda station to make a formal complaint of an assault occasioning actual bodily harm.
Physical assault is the most visible form of bullying, but it is by no means the worst. There’s extortion bullying, where a child may be compelled to steal from home to satisfy the bully’s demands, gesture bullying, verbal bullying and e-bullying by e-mail or text. Perhaps the nastiest form is exclusion bullying, where the victim is isolated and humiliated by being told, as Cillin was, that he has no friends.
The difficulty for parents and schools is that bullying is sneaky and secretive. Victims are often fearful of speaking out and worried about seeming weak and cowardly. The put-upon kids don’t necessarily arrive home looking like the Billy Bunter character portrayed in cartoons, all smashed specs, gashed knees and torn shirt.
Your child may be suffering silently in school while you attribute her mood swings, withdrawn nature, declining performance and lost appetite to prepubescent hormones. Parents can easily remain in the dark about bullying but, from now on, it will be tougher for schools to plead ignorance.
Once a parent raises a concern, the schools are formally on notice of a problem. Simply promising to “keep an eye on it” is no longer good enough. Hopefully, Cillin’s case will herald a heightened obligation on schools to be proactive in rooting out bullying.
Until now, they could get away with protesting that they didn’t know, especially if children were reluctant to come forward, but arguably now the law imposes a positive duty on school authorities to inform themselves about bullying on a continuing basis.
One simple technique that should be common practice in all our schools is the box and interview method. Once a week, every pupil is asked to fill in and sign a form answering three simple questions: during the past week, have you been bullied; do you know of anybody in the class who has been bullied; do you know of anybody in the school who has been bullied?
The forms are dropped into a locked box, examined by volunteer teachers and the results passed on in confidence to a nominated anti-bullying co-ordinator. Substantive complaints are then investigated by interviewing victims, bullies, parents and other students. Crucially, children who don’t fill in the form are interviewed as well.
In an already overstretched school system this would be a time-consuming exercise, but the system calls for the goodwill of volunteers from teaching staff. Their incentive would be happier, more attentive, more confident pupils, not necessarily extra dosh in their paypackets.
We are always being told that bullies have their own problems and need to be understood, but many of them are just nasty, cowardly brats who need to be identified and stopped. So let’s sort out the victims first and worry about the perpetrators later.
