Practical strategies
by Maria Kazmierow − 2003
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Practical anti-bullying strategies
The lottery of damages when seeking legal accountability for school bullying offers the potential of financial punishment. It is not a preventative strategy, and cannot claim to effect the cultural change that is necessary to remedy the culture of cruelty so prevalent in our schools today.
Cultural change requires a wider spectrum of potential solutions, that are transformative and preventative in focus.
Schools that have strategies in place to deal with bullying and who put them into action with school community acceptance can experience two-fold benefits. First, they are actively taking a best-practice approach to rooting out bullying. Second, they are limiting their legal liability by ensuring they are trying to prevent harm to both pupils and teachers by taking all reasonable steps to provide a safe environment.
A selection of strategies used currently for students and teachers is examined.
A whole-school approach to student bullying
The following are the recommendations of "Stop Bullying! Guidelines for Schools", developed by school principal Mark Cleary and Police education officer Gill Palmer. These are school guidelines to prevent student bullying.
- Developing a school-wide 'code of conduct' or anti-bullying policy creates a common understanding and definition of the problem, and agreed ways of dealing with bullying.
- All members of the school community need to be engaged in the construction of policy, from staff and students, to parents and boards of trustees. This encourages the development of a united front to bullying throughout the school community.
- Implement the school's code of conduct or anti-bullying policies. Actions always speak louder than words.
- Include anti-bullying programmes in the school curriculum, such as the Police's "Kia Kaha" programme. Programmes such as these help students to identify and label bullying behaviour, and know how to deal with it.
- Teachers must have clear guidelines and procedures to follow when they find out bullying occurred. Consistency of approach is crucial to eliminating bullying behaviours.
- A 'telling' environment for students should develop if they witness policies put into practice, and fair resolution of bullying incidents.
The Police further recommend:
- supporting the victim with reliable peers, teachers or other specialists such as counsellors
- providing a safe room with adequate staff supervision so there is always a bully-free environment
- having adequate numbers of teachers monitoring all 'danger areas and times' − for example, before and after school, at school breaks, in play areas, fields, and hallways
- acting to change the behaviour of the bully by adopting an intervention programme such as 'no blame'
- involving Youth and Family Services, Special Education Services, or another appropriate agency for persistent bullies.
Other useful strategies include peer mediation programmes, such as Cool Schools Peer Mediation Support Group. This is run in primary and secondary schools. Students are trained as a third-party mediators to assist in conflict resolution.
In addition, there are external sources of support for students dealing with bullies, such as phone counselling lines like Youthline and Kidsline, websites, and obviously trusted adults and professionals.
The key to creating safe environments is not to just 'say', but to do. As it has been observed, policies designed to combat bullying "are of little value unless they are also put into practice".
Bullying prevention strategies for teachers
As with students, a staff anti-bullying policy should be agreed to cooperatively, documented, and implemented.
Bullied staff should be encouraged to keep a 'paper trail' of dated and documented incidents of bullying, and the strategies they adopted to try and stop it. Once a pattern of bullying is identified, then the policy processes of the school should be followed.
Staff training programmes on how to deal with bullying in the class or staffroom provide tools and techniques that are consistent across staff and 'match' the agreed policies. There needs to be a clear understanding of what bullying is, the options for dealing with it, and support available for those targeted. This could include 'offsite' counselling, with no feedback loop to the school.
Complaints of bullying need to be treated seriously and responded to with speed. Many experts in this area suggest that workplace bullies (that is, teachers) be provided with personal development training to attend to their behaviours.
Some experts feel that a proportion of workplace bullies are clinically dysfunctional. Where an individual "feels entitled to use power to control others … lives in a pretentious fantasy rather than reality, and...consistently views him/herself as superior to fellow human beings and craves being told so, [they have] a mental disorder called narcissistic personality disorder". In this instance, psychological treatment is the only option, and out of the control of the employer.
It is unsurprising, given that teachers and students are facing the same behaviours, that similar practical strategies are suggested to transform behaviour and prevent bullying occurring. It is also recognised that a functional anti-bullying workplace policy, cooperatively introduced and consistently followed, will help to minimise the potential legal liability of schools for bullying.
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