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Bullying
Home, School and Community
Delwyn Tattum, Graham Herbert, Delwyn Tattum, Graham Herbert
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eBook - ePub
Bullying
Home, School and Community
Delwyn Tattum, Graham Herbert, Delwyn Tattum, Graham Herbert
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About This Book
First published in 1997, Bullying presents a comprehensive overview of the widespread and persistent problem of bullying which results in the anxiety and distress of many thousands of children and young people. This book is based on the premise that bullying is learned behaviour that has to be challenged wherever it occurs, be it in families, schools, or to other community contexts. It provides tested intervention and prevention programmes in a wide range of environments and institutions, concentrating not only on the behaviour of children and young people, but on the behaviour of the adults who set their models of behaviour. This book will interest teachers, parents, community, and social workers and those in the police, legal and medical professions.
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PART I HOME
DOI: 10.4324/9781003289128-1
This introduction on the home, prefaces four chapters predominantly on the early years, but it is not intended that this introduction should be exclusively about pre-school aged children but about what influences the home has upon children who become bullies or victims during their subsequent years of schooling. And, in that way, the introductions to the three sections of the book may be read in combination, as they aim to offer an integrated theme from preparing for school until adolescence. They are not intended as summaries of the chapters, these will speak for themselves, but as a means of introducing some new thoughts on the problems relevant to the theme of the section.
The last chapter in this book describes an anti-bullying programme in a Young Offendersâ Institution (YOI) and Figure 14.3, the model of the Cycle of Violence, illustrates the cyclic career of many young bullies who continue through the ages into adolescent offenders and on to a life of violent adult crime. Many of these young men become fathers and, as Farrington (1991) demonstrates, continue in significant numbers to abuse their families and start the cycle again through teaching by example that aggression is a ânormalâ way of behaving! How much better if we concentrated more of our efforts on preventative programmes by intervening in the early years. That is, by providing pre-nursery education and even parenting courses for young adolescents and new parents. Our national aim should be to finance more early years programmes rather than building more boot camps. For money spent on nursery education works better than prison, since it is preventative. The American Head Start programme, started over 30 years ago, targeted children in the most run-down, crime-prone communities and provided them with two years intensive nursery education. In a longitudinal study, the children were followed through to adulthood, and many have done well in their personal lives. They have committed 30 per cent less crime, they are five times less likely to draw welfare, they own their own homes and keep down good jobs. That in itself is a significant outcome in human, let alone, national terms.
Bullies are not born, they are created by those most influential in their lives â and the persons providing the most influential role models in a childâs formative years are parents or carers. Children may be born with psychoneurological conditions, such as, hyperactivity, attention deficit disorder and so on, but it is the nature of the home climate created by the adults (parents) that has the major bearing on the development of a bully. It is believed that attitudes and values regarding aggressive behaviour are hardened and entrenched by junior school age and therefore secondary school may be too late. Therefore prevention is again the best approach, that is provision of appropriate early education to negate aggressive tendencies, especially for children who are regarded as âat riskâ because of the socio-economic circumstances of the family; and parenting courses for teenagers and for parents in the community before bad behaviour is learned and acted out.
The majority of bullies come from homes that are abusive and violent, where parents are authoritarian, inconsistent, negative or indifferent. Discipline is harsh and inconsistent â there is too little love and too much rejection. The limits of acceptable behaviour vary with mood and the children are confused by the warmâcold response of authority figures. Discipline is physically aggressive and parents often argue and abuse each other. In recent studies of battered wives, fathers have drawn the children into the physical and verbal bullying of their mothers.
In such homes where a physical response is accepted, the adults have little understanding of the harmful effects of physical punishment. They think spanking is fine, when really they only demonstrate that the person with the bigger stick gets his or her own way. Excessive use of spanking also injects hostility and resentment into a relationship, which is then re-enacted on the school playground. In fact, the links between school bullies and adult bullies is developed in Chapter 1. Children can become locked into a bullying family tradition. It can be the case, as many schools have found to their cost, that many bullying parents see their sonâs or daughterâs behaviour as admirable â âA chip off the old blockâ. Their response is often that they taught their child to get in the first insult or blow. This is a very difficult dilemma because it can result in the school punishing a pupil for behaving in a way the parents wholeheartedly support, which makes resolution of a difficult problem even more complex.
In many ways it is a defensive action where the neighbourhood requires its citizens to be rough and tough in order to survive in a physically and socially hostile atmosphere. Some of the studies in this section describe such neighbourhoods that are not safe, and survival demands a protective shell of aggressiveness. Similarly, with the increase in single mothers and a decline in the immediacy of an extended family a young boy may be missing an appropriate male role in the home. They may be left unsupervised for long periods, while mother is out working, and become bored and uncontrolled. Older siblings frequently bully young children, once again demonstrating that the only way to gain control is through being prepared to wield a big stick.
Aggressive children display their aggression in many ways. Children who are bullies will wreak their abuse on teachers and so disrupt the class. Similarly, bullies have scant regard for other peopleâs property which results in petty theft and vandalism. Thus the persistent bully may also be a disrupter, thief and vandal â that is, a threat to the good order of a school. Equally, children who are bullied may refuse to attend school or, when they get older, may become persistent truants. In these ways, the behaviour of a bully can have long-term adverse effects on a range of people; and how long those harmful memories can have an inter-generational effect can be seen in the results in a recent pilot survey of parents conducted by the National Confederation of Parent Teacher Associations (1996). They received 1,186 returns which accounts for 10 per cent of their circulation to 11,000 member schools. Unsurprisingly, the majority (80 per cent) of the returns came from women who spoke of a cycle of misery. Some 62 per cent described how they had been bullied in school and almost 60 per cent of their children had also been bullied. Those parents who had been bullied and responded to the survey were more than twice as likely to have children who have been bullied. One wonders to what extent they transmitted their personal anxieties to their children. And as the report acknowledges, we must be wary of applying these figures on a national basis, as it is possible that it was a self-selecting sample of respondents.
The above data reflects the way in which bullying can remain with an individual into adulthood and the memory continue to be a blight on their family lives. For 23 per cent of parents the effects on them were long-term and for some these were never resolved. They experienced unresolved anger and resentment, and there was a great loss of confidence and often an inability to make friends as they felt that people could not possibly like them. For bullying not only affects the victim but the whole family often suffers the hurt.
A bullied child tends to disrupt life, causing stress at home due to mood swings, aggressive behaviour and refusal to help in the home. Often children are tearful, sometimes crying frequently or irritable and bad tempered. They pick on younger siblings, lashing out in an attempt to vent their frustrations. In extreme cases toys and possessions around the home are hidden or go missing, or extra money is requested.(NCPTA, 1996)
And we may add that in extreme cases children may try to commit suicide, and in some instances succeed in taking their own lives.
Finally, a survey into health and bullying was conducted by the School Health Education Unit at Exeter University. The survey (Balding et al., 1996) involved 11,613 pupils in a range of secondary schools in seven local authorities distributed throughout England. The 65 schools that participated covered ages 11 to 16 years, and represented ability groups, social class and ethnicity. On health matters they found clear links to higher frequency of illness and disease, and referral to the doctor was evident among those most likely to fear bullying. And in favour of a model of the family where children experience shared support for their well-being from both their mother and father, the report linked traditional family life as a source of confidence building, low levels of anxiety and fear of being bullied at school.
CHAPTER 1 Pre-school children: experiences of being parented and the routes to bullying
DOI: 10.4324/9781003289128-2
Despite the popular mythology created by the media and those who seek to portray schools as the breeding grounds of bullies, there is considerable evidence that the roots of much bullying are nurtured in the homes of perpetrators where aggression is learned and honed by deviousness into bullying. In some areas, characterised by high levels of aggression, bullying is an endemic community problem imported into schools and fiercely resistant to change (Randall, 1996). The purpose of this chapter is to examine the roots of the early aggression that becomes bullying by demonstrating the variety of parenting experiences associated with it. The âTheory of Mindâ model of cognitive dysfunction is used to typify one major result of these experiences and suggests an approach for promoting better social learning.
The development of aggression and its inhibitors
Human aggression does not manifest itself as a fully-formed schema of activity; instead it is the product of observable developmental phases, each of which develops alongside mediators of aggression that normally keeps it in check (Landy and Peters, 1992).
If a combination of biological and environmental factors are optimal then childrenâs aggression becomes channelled into assertiveness or only arises appropriately in response to severe provocations or threats. The role of the primary carers is to ensure that this optimal combination is realised. The quality of their own behaviours and interactions with the child are of paramount importance. This remains true from the earliest interactions during infancy onwards through adolescence. Although there is no single successful pattern of interactions, certain principles are important. These include:
- The earliest contacts of the infant with the primary care-giver, usually the mother, are vital because they provide a high level of response to the infantâs needs at a physical level. If these contacts are satisfactory the patterns of interaction begin to be formed that later develop into social relationships and styles of interacting with other people (Tronick, 1989).
- Tronick also makes the point that a happy emotional tone conveyed through loving affection during these early contacts between infants and care-givers is crucial for the formation of attachment, the regulation of behaviour and emotional development in general. Parents who are happy to be with their infants and use soothing interactions when they are distressed are more likely to transform unhappy, negative emotional states into more positive ones, particularly when frustration, sadness and anger are liable to overwhelm the infant.
- Infants are helped to tolerate negative and frustrating occurrences because of the support they gain from high quality interactions from primary care-givers. Later on language becomes important in these interactions, such that the infants are able to use language or pretend play in a manner which reduces frustration. Gradually the nature of the interactions, if successful, shows them that they have a right to express anger but encourages more symbolic ways of doing this than through displays of overt aggression. Language enables children to âlabelâ their feelings and so reduces the need to express them physically in terms of aggression.
- The quality of interaction also should enable children to develop independence whilst at the same time acknowledging their need for security. In teaching children that they may explore in safety, a message is conveyed that there is no need to resort to aggression or other strong emotions in order to regain the security of contact with the primary care-givers.
- It is also the case that the behaviour of primary care-givers is a potent model for the childrenâs own behaviour. Thus adults who model empathy, turn-taking, comforting, negotiation and caring promote pro-social behaviours that are incompatible with the physical expression of anger through aggression. Ultimately such learning will help children to terminate their aggression in order to avoid causing other people pain or distress.
- The quality of interaction between care-givers and children is also established through the way in which limitations on the children are set and maintained. High quality interactions provide children with the security of known limits and the assurance of reinforcement for correctly identifying those limits and behaving within them. Consistent sanctions discourage acts of aggression and consistent reinforcement encourages pro-social behaviour. Although some care-givers may not be aware of the learning theories on which this social teaching is constructed, they are nevertheless able to devise appropriate strategies for maintaining the consistency that is needed.
Adverse parenting styles
It is clear that primary care-givers, usually parents, have a considerable role and responsibility for the development of childrenâs ability to inhibit aggression. Their style of interaction with children will help them become individuals able to take a normal and co-operative place in their community. The fact that there is an increasing number of pre-school children entering educational provision with significant aggressive conduct disorders (McQuire and Richman, 1986) indicates that this process is all too frequently going wrong. One of the reasons for this seems to be bound up in the kinds of beliefs that the parents of aggressive children hold.
It is axiomatic that the behaviour of individuals in a social context is governed by a set of beliefs and social attitudes which are linked to the requirements society has for the conduct of individuals. The beliefs and attitudes held by parents are mirrored in their behaviour which is there to be observed and so becomes the template for their childrenâs own social and anti-social behaviour. The mothers of aggressive children are shown to hold beliefs about social development that are considerably different from the beliefs held by mothers whose children are not aggressive and who appear to be learning normal social behaviours (Rubin and Mills, 1992). The mothers of aggressive children appear to believe...