All About Bullies

A verbal bully at my elementary school in Gwinner, North Dakota, helped make me the woman I am today. My story, however, is a story with a positive ending – unlike so many tales of bullies who have destroyed people’s lives, sometimes with deadly consequences.

Every single school shooting incident in this country has included a component of bullying – the most famous, of course, being Columbine. Even when bullies don’t go that far, however, the scars can last forever. Television talk shows have made it a regular feature to let people confront the bullies from their youth – it’s like a national catharsis to be able to confront someone who once made you feel small and worthless.

Experts say that bullying is not only getting more widespread – every day almost 160,000 children in the U.S. reportedly stay home from school because of bullying – but the intensity is getting worse.

The problem has gotten so bad in Arizona that this year the Legislature passed and the Governor signed a new anti-bullying law. It directs the state’s schools to “prescribe and enforce policies and procedures to prohibit pupils from harassing, intimidating and bullying other pupils on school grounds, on school property, on school buses, at school bus stops, and at school-sponsored events and activities….”

My bully was a classmate named Judy, who taunted me Monday mornings after her fire-breathing pastor delivered a sermon denouncing my father, who owned the local liquor store and bar, and who also is Roman Catholic. “Pastor Benson really got on your dad yesterday,” Judy would sass at me, telling how the pastor held up liquor ads and wailed against booze in general and my father in particular. I’d run away and cry. One day, I was so disheartened that I ran all the way home.

My dad, Rudy, is pretty unflappable, and when he found out what was going on, he gave me some verbal ammunition to use the next time I was taunted.

And so I waited – nervous, yes, but excited, too. And when Judy delivered her indictment, I was ready: “My dad says Pastor Benson is great for our business, because we couldn’t buy that kind of advertising.”

This time, it was Judy who ran away, and my other pals came forward. My friend Maxine came up and put her arm around me: “Well, it’s about time – we were wondering when you’d stand up to her. We couldn’t believe it took so long.”

I haven’t held my tongue or let a bully get away with anything since, but I thought about Judy as I drove out to Gilbert to meet with a junior high school class that is helping teach lots of little kids how to deal with bullies.

Teacher Leslie Mull’s class at Mesquite Junior High School in Gilbert doesn’t pretend it hasn’t had firsthand experience with bullying – from both sides. Ask them if they’ve experienced bullying, and several hands go up. Ask if they themselves have been bullies, and only a couple brave kids admit to it.

“I was new here, and didn’t want to get picked on, so I picked on them instead,” Jose admits. Kristi, a young woman with an attitude, doesn’t try to excuse her bullying: “There was a girl annoying me, and it was the only way.”

But Jose and Kristi spent last school year helping show their classmates, and kids in nearby elementary schools, how to combat bullies. As the class relayed it, their eighth-grade English teacher talked to them one day about the problem of bullies. She talked about school violence, and asked students to talk about what bullying meant to them.
As the kids opened up, it was clear that most had experienced bullying themselves, or stood by and witnessed others being harassed. “When I was a little kid, I thought junior high was scary and filled with bullies,” one student related. “In elementary school, we were afraid to go to junior high,” another added.

From those discussions, held in the safety of a classroom, a new idea evolved. What if these junior-high kids could help elementary students learn how to deal with bullies, and maybe erase those fears? What if these eighth-graders could find creative ways to really help younger kids arm themselves against bullies?

Their teacher approached her own principal at Mesquite, Ron Izzett, as well as Principal Sheila Rogers at nearby Gilbert Elementary. Both embraced the idea, and Mull’s class was faced with a real-life experience: developing a program for children, many of whom they personally knew.

“The biggest challenge is that a lot of kids think bullying is just a joke,” says eighth-grader Alex Perea. “But when they saw how many had experienced harassment, they started to take it for real.”

The result was a three-part anti-bullying program that plays to the strengths of the junior-high students and to the interests of elementary kids. One part was to perform skits that demonstrated bullying. Another part is a video program that goes through the different types of bullying. And the third part teaches notebook activities that kids can work on.
There are actually two skits, one featuring boys and the other girls, because the bullying is different. “Girls use verbal bullying, while boys use their fists,” one student explained.

Each skit features four characters: the bully, the target, the bystander and the ally. In the boys’ skit, the bully pushes the target down, while another boy yells at him to stop, and then runs off to find help, while the other just stands there, doing nothing.

In addressing the audience after the skit, the boys ask the audience members several questions:

• “Why do kids bully?” The answers they get include explanations of how the youngster is simply mad, or has problems at home, or is struggling in school, or would rather bully than get bullied himself, or, sometimes, the bully just wants to have a “fun time.”
• “Why should you never get in between a fight?” The audience wisely notes that you could get hurt yourself or get into trouble.
• “What else can you do other than stand there?” The answer comes back, “Go tell someone in authority what’s going on.”
• “How can you avoid being a victim?” is met with the suggestion that you should travel in a group, rather than alone, or take a different route to avoid the bully’s path. “You can never prevent bullying, but you can help kids avoid it,” A.J., a student, says.

Sometimes they experienced real breakthroughs. “I had one kid ask me how to say he was sorry to a target,” Jose explains. “And I told him to really mean it.”
In the girls’ skit, the bully taunts and makes fun of the target, while another defends the target and the fourth stays mute.

As the girls explained, in verbal bullying there’s name-calling, making threats, text and e-mail messaging, and intimidation – or “messing with stuff that hurts them.” But girls also used “social aggression” to bully, like excluding someone from a group, or leaving them out of a birthday party invitation, or getting friends to turn on them, or publicly humiliating them.

I asked the class which parts of these skits they had personally experienced, and most acknowledged that at one time or another, they’d been each of the four. But many agreed that they felt as much disdain for the bystander as they did for the bully – “don’t just watch,” one said. But Alex had another perspective: “You think being a bystander is the worst thing, but if you pick on someone – if you make someone afraid of you – that’s just wrong.”

By the time they were done, about 150 of Mull’s students had participated in the anti-bullying program, presenting it to about 450 elementary students. In addition to Gilbert Elementary, they expanded the program to Plaza del Ray Elementary. This year, Mull wants to repeat the exercise and take it to even more Gilbert elementary schools. One student suggested they videotape the entire program so that it can be shown in many schools.

Mull’s classroom proudly displays the 2005 Achievement Award the students received for their Bully Prevention Program from The Greater Phoenix Child Abuse Prevention Council.

When I first read this sentence, I knew it was true: “Like so many things about our schools today – sex, for one thing, violence, for another – the intensity of bullying and name-calling in 2005 is light years beyond what it was when you and I were in fifth, sixth or seventh grade.”

The quote comes from Kevin Jennings, executive director of the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network. This New York-based group sponsors the “No Name-Calling Week” each March, which has started catching on in some Arizona schools.

A national survey after the first event in 2004 showed “over 60 percent of students reported that they had been called names and bullied less often in school directly after No Name-Calling Week,” Jennings reports.

In trying to combat bullying – name-calling being one variety – Jennings stresses these impacts:

• “Bullying and harassment have helped to triple the rate of attempted suicide among kids 19 or younger” – he adds that one of 13 kids will try to end their lives this year.
• “Relentless and unchecked bullying is causing good kids to miss multiple days of school, fall behind in their grades, or drop out of school altogether.”
• “Bullying has moved far beyond simply shoving skinny kids into lockers. An entirely new dimension has taken hold in cyberspace, as vicious and untrue gossip is spread in chat rooms and through text messaging.”

All of this demands a different approach than would normally be used to settle conflicts, according to the Child Abuse Prevention Council: “Because it involves harassment by powerful children against children with less power, common conflict resolution strategies such as mediation may not be effective.”

To help Arizona schools develop an effective program, the council offers a free bully prevention program. (Lynne Marion runs the program; for more information: [email protected].) The prevention council will survey students on the extent of the bullying, and then lead an orientation program for school personnel, and conduct a program for the entire school staff on how to deal with the problem.

They offer the program under the theory that “every child deserves an environment where they can develop without the fear of aggression or cruelty.” Among the information the Prevention Council distributes is something I found most interesting: Tips for Parents of Bullies. Here are some of the signs:

• Bullies enjoy putting others down and “don’t care about others’ feelings.”
• They don’t respect authority or people who are different from them.
• They don’t obey rules.
• They “need to have power over others.”
• They “make jokes about violent acts or enjoy violence.”

The council advises parents who see these warning signs to “stay calm,” and work with their children to learn more positive behavior. “Talk about it,” the council recommends. “Ask your child why he or she is bullying others. Talk about nonviolent ways to deal with strong feelings like anger. Most importantly, make it clear that you think bullying is wrong, and set clear, nonviolent consequences for future bullying behavior.”

When I “talked about it” with my father all those years ago, he taught me to use wit to fight back. I’ve never thanked him, but I need to. It made a lot of difference in my life. I just hope other kids can turn the awful pain of being bullied into something positive, too. It’s nice to know there are folks in Arizona – from the Mesquite Junior High class to the Prevention Council to our new law – who are helping make that happen.