I have been talking to young people about bullying for a very long time – I have them to thank for changing my thinking and the subsequent definition used in Scotland, and elsewhere, that bullying affects a person’s Agency. It was children who illustrated the impact of bullying as something that was invasive and ‘took something’ from them, a feeling, an ability to respond effectively. It stopped them feeling like themselves.

They could recall and many hundreds have done this this year again, the fear and anticipation they experience when someone who has been horrible to them is in ‘one of those moods’ today.

They recognise the relief when that person is either happy or indifferent towards them today – today ‘I get to be me’ they say. Then there are the other days, were this person is angry towards them or looks at them in ‘that way’ and smiles or giggles.

That is going to be a different day. They don’t get to ‘be me’ on those days – they worry, they change their behaviour and mood, doubt themselves and do all manner of things to avoid that person. When they normally put their hand up in class, today they might not because of what might happen if they do. They night not go out at break and avoid doing what they normally do.

Children are more than capable of learning about this thing called Agency, I have spoken to children and young people about this many times – it is how they reflect back their understanding that fascinates me. They tell me things like ‘I can’t make the choices I normally do’ or ‘I spend too much time doubting what I am going to do that I don’t really do anything’ and ‘Agency is about me doing what I want and making my own choices’.

Recently though, we had a new way to look at this, one P7 said to me ‘it’s like, when you let people’s opinions get inside your head’. I was fascinated by this – I asked them to explain further then asked the class what they thought – the conversation lit up.

You don’t feel like yourself anymore

You can’t relax at all

You’re not really concentrating – just thinking about what might happen

You might even change how you dress or speak to fit in

You don’t act like yourself

You kind of freeze

You think ‘what if they are right about me?’

You’re too scared to say anything in case it gets worse

These all describe the impact of bullying very clearly – the reason this matters is because this is supposed to focus our response – stopping unkind and bullying behaviour is essential but recognising the nature of the impact it has is as important.

Children and young people need help and support to regain this sense of loss and influence over themselves. To do that they need to be asked what they would like to happen, who should we share this with and what do we actually want them to do. When I talk to parents and carers about how to respond in the moment – and suggest that asking ‘what would you like me to do?’ ‘what can we do?’ is the most important step to helping a child feel back in control. That simple act of compassion invites you to work together and find a way forward. If adults’ step in and fix things, our children never get the chance to learn how to figure this out and what steps work for them.

This is emotionally challenging for parents; I now form personal experience too. I have felt my anger build while my daughter is telling me what happened at school today and how vile and awful what people said and did was. I could see her see me get angry and her face sank. I realised then – it’s not about me, it’s not about how this makes me feel – what does she need? What does she want me to do?

Did she need me to dump all my feelings of anger onto her already troubled shoulders? No. Did I nearly do that? Yes, I did.

When bullying gets inside your head, like the children describe, this should change the way we respond. Children want us to help them figure stuff out and take small steps – they and I could not hear this any more in schools – they do not want an overreaction from grown-ups. It is a barrier to telling. ‘Opinions’ can stick in our children’s heads and we need to role model and demonstrate how to unpick these and help them learn ways to hear things and feel more in control of the impact they have. It is not easy, I know, but it is a vital skill.

When we deal with bullying well, we always deal with behaviour AND impact – it is not one or the other but both – always.

Brian

January 2021

This blog will hopefully give some context to this very serious issue and to explore why we take the approach we do when creating environments where people feel safe and included. It will also explore what protected characteristics are,  why they exist, and how do our values affect how we challenge prejudice.

Probably the best place to start would be with prejudice – to ‘pre-judge’
Noun

1. An unfavourable opinion or feeling formed beforehand or without knowledge, thought, or reason.

2. Any preconceived opinion or feeling, either favourable or unfavourable.

So, everyone can be and is likely to have some prejudices – some things we have favourable views towards and some less so. When we act on this prejudice and treat people less favourably, we are discriminating.

Bullying, as has been covered in many of these blogs, is a mixture of behaviour and impact that affect a person’s capacity to feel in control of themselves. This is what we term as their sense of ‘agency’. Bullying takes place in the context of relationships; it is behaviour that can make people feel hurt, threatened, frightened and left out.

When this behaviour is motivated by prejudice, we are talking about prejudice-based bullying.
Prejudice will be based on a personal characteristic or a group that someone either belongs to or people believe they belong to or identify with. So what might these characteristics be? Their gender? Are they gay? Is it their religion? Do they have a disability? Or is it how they look or what they wear? It can be any of these and more.

So why are some personal characteristics mentioned more than others?

Some personal characteristics are protected within the law – the reason for this is to address the imbalance – to address the years of unfavourable treatment experienced by some groups over the years.

The experience of women, of LGBT people, of black people or of people with a disability, has shown that they have received less favourabletreatment in many ways over the years – in terms of being picked on, excluded and not having equal access to employment and education. This was initially responded to through legislation such the Race Relations Act 1976, that ‘outlawed discrimination’ or the Equal Pay Act 1970, that was intended to address the less favourable treatment of women in the workplace. Legislation such as the Sex Discrimination Act 1975, was also intended to address discrimination on gender and married status.

These Acts were needed specifically because of the imbalance and the unfair treatment these groups were clearly receiving.

This has evolved and led to the Equality Act 2010 which is designed to protect people from discrimination in the workplace and the wider community such as in Education or as a consumer. This Act sets out that it is unlawful to discriminate against a person due to the following personal characteristics –
• age

• being or becoming a transsexual person

• being married or in a civil partnership

• being pregnant or having a child

• disability

• race including colour, nationality, ethnic or national origin

• religion, belief or lack of religion/belief

• sex

• sexual orientation

Based on the historical prejudice and discrimination experienced by people who have these, or are perceived to have these characteristics, they now warrant special protection under the law to address the inequality they experienced. These characteristics are protected and as such are referred to as The Protected Characteristics. Age and being married do not apply in Education.

Public examples of this have been highlighted in the media such as cases where people who refuse a service like a hotel room to same sex couples or build new schools that are inaccessible to wheelchairs, will be in breach of the Equality Act.

I get asked a lot why red hair, wearing glasses or being tall or overweight isn’t a protected characteristic too, people experience bullying for these reasons also. One of the most common reasons young people cite for bullying is personal appearance –that could be related to the music they like or the income of their parents.

The answer to this is that while people do get picked on and excluded for a variety of reasons, the groups protected under law have clear historical evidence of societal and cultural exclusion and less favourabletreatment. It may sound a little glib – but once all of the tall people get together and can reflect on and evidence years of collective exclusion, not getting work, missing out on promotion, being made to take only certain lessons at school like home economics, receiving abuse or suffering violence and intimidation on a collective basis ; then that too may become a legally protected characteristic.

This does not in any way mean that the bullying of a person because of the way they look is less serious or not as important as bullying based on a protected characteristic. The protected characteristics are not designed to create a hierarchy but to help address the imbalance experienced by certain groups. We know from our work that children and young people who are disabled, who are or are perceived to be LGB or T can experience bullying more frequently than other groups – this just means we need to be aware of and be able to challenge what values and prejudice lies behind this behaviour.

We must also remember to be very clear with children that they are not bullied because they are different, but it is to do with the prejudice the person bullying them has. We can sometimes make children feel they are responsible when we use language like ‘ he is bullying you because you are black, or because he thinks you are gay’. It is about their prejudice towards this.

We also know that children and young people bully others because they don’t get on or they don’t like each other – we sometimes forget the interpersonal elements of bullying situations.

You might not like a person who is gay or a different faith from you but that may not be the reason you dislike them – a person is capable of disliking someone and being mean about them without using a personal characteristic, protected or not, as the topic for their insult or behaviour. There is a difference between ‘I can’t stand him he is a pain and talks rubbish’ and ‘I can’t stand him, he’s a black (insert whatever word/insult here)’. The latter is a clear example of a racist statement showing prejudice based on someone’s race or ethnicity. Children are accountable for what they say, not what they think they ‘meant‘. if they meant no harm they should learn from your intervention. If they persist using language like this, then they are probably denying what they ‘meant‘.

We should alway she mindful that racism itself is systemic and historical, and should not be just seen as another ‘kind’ of bullying. Racism affects children and their families in many ways at an individual and societal level. It is vital we see tackling prejudice as part of the complex work required at local and societal level to address the historic and the existing impacts of racism on every day life. Racism should be addressed in school at a much broader level and not just as part of your anti-bullying work.

Research has shown us that where polices are explicit about what they mean by prejudice-based bullying, where we name specific behaviour they find unacceptable – adults and young people feel more confident to challenge these prejudices and behaviour. So your school has to say ‘Racism and Homophobia will never be acceptable here’ or ‘Racism and Homophobia are not in step with the values of our school. ‘It will never be okay to call our fellow pupils names or use racial, homophobic or any kind or personal slur when talking to them or about them’. and perhaps crucially, ‘No child can give another child permission to say it is okay to use derogatory terms towards them, it will never be okay for the school’. 

Policies that don’t mention things like homophobia, disability, race or even socio economic status are linked to environments where adults are unsure about challenging certain behaviour and language. This explicit commitment to equality and challenging inequality is clearly linked to better practice in dealing with and preventing prejudiced-based bullying.

Children who are bullied do not feel like themselves, they feel like they have something taken away from them. They feel they lose the ability to manage what is happening to them and worry a great deal about what might happen if they tell, if they speak up or if they ignore it.

Schools, services or clubs that are clear that they will challenge homophobia, that they will challenge bullying based on disability, race or ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, transgender status, religion and belief, socio economic status, appearance, if children are Looked After, are young carers or are refugees or their families are asylum seekers, will be creating environments that value difference and set out clear expectations about what behaviour is acceptable and what is not. Adults can then be held accountable to this as can children and young people.

This though presents a further challenge for the grown-ups. Are you confident to challenge prejudice? All prejudices or just the ones you object to? Confidently challenging some prejudice will be easy for many people – our own values and those of our chosen profession are compatible and we have the knowledge and passion to challenge and educate. Some of us need to get better informed on some areas – help is available form a range of agencies if you want to learn more about asylum seekers or migrants, about transgender people or a particular disability.

We normally learn more about things when we need to. When we are presented with behaviour or attitudes we don’t know much about, we go and find out about the issue to be better informed – the desire to do this is underpinned by values of fairness and equality. So what about the people whose personal values are perhaps not as ‘in-step’ as others?

This must link explicitly to your school values and be part of your every day language. A School I work in a teacher said to me ‘Brian, I do not see colour’ and I said, ‘then open your eyes, its there, see it recognise it, celebrate it, protect it, think about it, address the imbalance’. we are doing our pupils a disservice of we do not recognise this. Another of the schools I work with saw an ex-pupil who is now ay University, speak out last year during the BLM protest in Glasgow, she was, according the staff a ‘popular and well liked pupil who still sees her teachers locally and will say that she loved her school’, but she still spoke of the ‘everyday racism she encountered that people just did not see‘. This shook the staff but motivated them to be open about this challenge.

You may well work or have worked beside someone who is misogynistic, who says racist things, is sectarian perhaps and this only appears on nights out or in the staff room or on social media.
I do find myself saying to colleagues that we are not the thought police – we cannot tell people what to think or that they are not allowed an opinion – what we can do is hold people accountable to the legal and ethical boundaries of their role or profession. The reality is if a person is even a little prejudiced towards things like equal marriage, Syrian Refugees or women being as good as men at their job – this will be evident in how they challenge these prejudices. If adults have these prejudices they will not effectively challenge behaviour because it conflicts with their values.

Our values underpin what we do and they will always make themselves evident – some people are good at telling you what their values are at interviews but not so good at showing these when they hear certain language. They will say thing like ‘You are not allowed to say things like that here ’or  ‘someone might find that offensive’ or actually say and do nothing because they agree with what is being said. When prejudiced language or bullying challenges your values – you will challenge it with passion and clarity, and people will believe you.

Inequality is a huge issue for society – we are addressing historical and cultural issues and responsibility for this rests with people at all levels – not just those who work with our children and young people.

We have had some high profile examples of this – the Ryanair passenger who racially abused a fellow passenger – his defence was that was not racist or when footballer John Terry racially abused a fellow player – his friends defence of him was that they knew him, and he wasn’t racist. I always respond the same way – maybe that’s not his ideology, that’s not what he is 24/7 but what he said was racist – and he is accountable for that. Not what he thinks he meant or feels on other occasions – what he said was wrong.

So what can I do?
While these are huge cultural issues we can, as individuals and organisations, give children and young people a better experience, a different experience that values them, one that challenges inequality and involves them in setting the culture and ethos in places they go. When some of us talk about equality; we talk about treating everyone the same or the need to. For me, as a practitioner equality has always meant that I have a duty to challenge inequality.

The training I received helped me view my role as someone who is, for example, anti-racist – not simply ‘not racist’. I commit to challenging racism and racist language. I will challenge homophobia or practices that promote gender inequality and so on. This is what we can all do. On my shift, in my classroom, I will challenge prejudice and value individuals. The walls in our club or class, the activities we do, will clearly value diversity and we will learn about difference and respect.

We won’t achieve this by starting off from a point where we treat everyone the same – our goal is to achieve equity first and we need to address the imbalance –

Creating environments such as these and role modelling how to challenge prejudice and promote what makes people different, and to learn to accept this, is exactly what we sign up for if we work with or even have children.

If you require any support or help with this, please do not hesitate to get in touch

brian@orbistc.com

Brian

I have been talking a lot to colleagues about this issue and felt it might be an interesting issue to put out here for some discussion. I will kick off by stating my personal position: we have got this wrong for years. The linking of people who bully to low self-esteem and a belief that improving children’s self-esteem when they have been bullied is all we need to do, is taking us down the wrong path.

The focus and almost universal acceptance of self-esteem as the singular capacity we all need in order to have better lives and experiences doesn’t ever really stand up to scrutiny. So what is self-esteem?

Definitions tend to cover the following –

How you feel about yourself — your self-worth or your pride or confidence in yourself; A person’s overall sense of self-worth or personal value that involves beliefs about the self, such as the appraisal of one’s own appearance, beliefs, emotions, and behaviours.

We have for years seemed to accept that we must make sure nothing we do ‘damages’ a child’s self-esteem. From the mythically ridiculous beliefs that awards for excellence in participation and non-competitive sports days will help our children and young people flourish, to some genuinely helpful learning, like being able to identify and talk about how you feel.

‘People who bully have low self-esteem’. This is a generalisation, it can sometimes be the case but a lot of children who bully possess very high self-esteem, they feel great about themselves, are confident in how they feel and look to the point they can identify and target others. It is a truly unhelpful generalisation to suggest children who bully are secretly all ‘cowards’ who have low self-esteem and are scared of the people they bully. Some are of course but many are not.

When we start to believe the stereotypes we then ignore people who are bullying because they don’t fit in with how we think they should look or act. Children who bully need to have their behaviour challenged, their prejudices challenged and their values and beliefs that what they are doing is okay challenged.

Do we ever talk of ways to help lower self-esteem in children? ‘Oh that child is far too confident and thinks they are the bee’s knees, they need brought down a peg or two’. Now I am not suggesting some adults don’t think like that but it’s definitely not in the self-esteem workbook. So could a focus on improving self-esteem of some children who bully really do anything other than make them worse? Or does this lead to the absurd notion that they can perhaps get bullied a bit to lower their self-esteem to the required level for acceptable social functioning? I am not suggesting this but merely that our approach to self-esteem is a one way street.

‘Bullying can cause low self-esteem’. Of course it can, being bullied can make you feel terrible about yourself, it can affect your confidence, and how you see yourself. If you are bullied it will impact on the self-esteem you have, high or low. Bullying affects your agency, your ability to feel in control and make choices – we need to help restore that feeling, you need this whether you have high or low self-esteem.
And for many of us – something can affect our levels of self-esteem today, an incident or some bad news can impact on it for a short period – it isn’t a fixed thing as some things can lift it and some give it a dent. We can’t get hung up on trying to attain a permanent state of improvement and lifting of self-esteem.

The challenge is when we focus solely on self-esteem as the answer to or the cause of bullying. Trying only things we believe will improve a child’s self-esteem might not work. Telling a bullied child they are wonderful and the person picking on them is just horrible and envious of who they are can satisfy how we feel as adults but does little for the person being bullied. It’s not focussing on solutions.

Involving them in what they want to happen, exploring ways to manage these risks and to take steps to feel better and identify the ways they want to cope and respond is far more effective. They will be learning great life skills, learning how to manage relationships and difficulties. A focus on trying to make sure all our children and young people have high and/or improved self-esteem will not make them immune to bullying. They need to know how to respond, to explore choices and find ways to cope that they can have control over.

This improves their resilience and it might improve how they feel about themselves but they may still go through life with low self-esteem. They may still not boast about their skills and wonderfulness and may continue to underplay any achievements and take a while to get to know people, but that might be just fine for them. This is not a deficit that always needs corrected.

A few years ago I spoke at a school awards ceremony and genuinely struggled with what to say to a bunch of 14 year olds and their parents and grandparents. Some would feel bored, some would feel awesome and some might not have had anyone there to celebrate their achievements with. Everyone gets something though! No one leaves without an award of some description. So after a bit of thinking I decided to go for the message I have always believed in since I was a teenager and also one that has helped me through work and study as an adult.

I said ‘There will always someone who is infinitely better at something than you are, at playing the guitar, at singing, or at English, Maths or football. As good as you are, and it is good to be good at something, it is great to excel at things but if you can accept someone somewhere will be a bit faster, a bit smarter or just a bit better – you will do just fine’. I encouraged them not to judge their own success by what others achieve but by how hard they worked. This input actually went down quite well with the children and young people but with many parents and especially their grandparents.

For some pupils getting a B in English is a huge achievement, they have made sacrifices, worked as hard as possible, overturned challenges and that B signifies a developing growth mind-set, the beginning of a new belief that they can achieve things through hard work. It is a success. They may sit next to someone who has always got an A, will always get an A and it seems to come naturally to them. These pupils should not be judged against each other or one simply gets more praise for the higher mark, it’s the effort we must praise. The pupil with the A might have low self-esteem, they might be quiet and withdrawn and would never tell anyone that they think they are great at anything but they listen, they study hard and do well.

This is not about making these pupils ‘feel better’ about themselves, nor is it about improving their self-esteem. There is research that shows quite clearly there is no link between high self-esteem and academic achievement. In fact very high self-esteem has been shown to be a barrier to achievement in later life as these people find criticism harder to take and cannot reflect that they may have done poorly. I would always at this stage direct people to Jean Twenge’s wonderful book ’Generation Me’ to look at her extensive research and wonderful discussion of the impact this has had over the last 30 years.

There are two examples I use a lot from popular culture that I think highlight where we have ended up in relation to self-esteem as the be all and end all.

The first is X factor. It is an easy target I know and I have enjoyed watching it at times as much as the next person, although not for a few years to be fair! . I know it makes great car crash telly but what is interesting is the mantra given out by the judges and contestants and crucially by their families that ‘if you believe it and follow your dream and you can do it’ ‘How much do you want this?’ ‘I want this so bad and will do anything to get it, I will work so hard, and I am passionate and desperate’ ‘I want to make my mum proud’.

‘Yes, but can you sing?’ would be my response. You can want it all day, you can feel entitled to it, inspired by people, desperate for success and fame and fortune as a singer but if you cannot sing a note, you won’t win it. There is real devastation on the faces of contestants who sing as badly as I do which if I may quote Billy Connelly, is ‘like a goose farting in the fog’. The disbelief on their mums faces while wearing a t-shirt with their child’s face on it saying ‘X Factor champion 2015’. A parent who has always said they were a ‘wonderful singer and could easily win the X Factor with a voice like that’ has seen some people genuinely unable to accept the critique that they sang badly. They assume the problem is the judges not spotting the brilliance and potential their mum has seen.

I am a parent of three and I am guilty of not wanting to do anything that makes them feel bad, it is a perfectly natural thing to want to do but if I felt any one of my children was in fact a terrible singer, I am not sure I would go along or even encourage a televised audition! All in the hope that encouraging them to believe in themselves would improve their self-esteem and they could be immune or less susceptible to negative experiences. I’m just setting them up for life to give them a few slaps in the face.

The other is from Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City

‘The most exciting, challenging and significant relationship of all is the one you have with yourself’ and also she has reminded us ‘Don’t forget to fall in love with yourself first.’

I remember at the time watching this and feeling ‘what a dreadful line’ I had discussed a few times at home that I though the character of Carrie is, well ‘a bit selfish’ and of course should have kept Aidan rather than Big but that’s not the point here – the advice given appears just so self-centred. It is ‘me first then I can cope with others’. I think that if people do feel like this they may never be truly ‘happy’ or feel their self-esteem is at the required level. How about focusing on how other people feel? Or seeing things from their point of view? Be challenged on things or help people who it more, and then you need might find that relationships aren’t as difficult as you might have thought.

The point if all this, I suppose is, that the focus on self-esteem and indeed on the ‘self’ may actually contribute a lack of empathy, a lack of compassion or in some cases the belief that all we have to do is try things we are told ‘improve your self-esteem’ and all will be well. It is possible to go through life with low-self-esteem and excel, to lead your field academically, or in music or arts or just in your own house. Low self-esteem doesn’t mean you lack ability or competence; you just frame these things differently and for some, they may decide to give some things up early as a result or for others they may persevere and work harder because they are self-critical.

None of this negates the impact of bullying; it can and does have significant long-term impacts on people and how they feel about themselves and their ability to trust or sustain relationships. All I want to do is reframe it a little and move the focus away from the self and onto teaching empathy and compassion. Our job is to help our children to develop the skills they need to manage relationships and to deal with adversity. A focus on making everyone feel great about themselves is unfair on those who go through life a bit doubtful and self-critical and it implies they are in a deficit of some sort. It can imply that all the really successful happy people in the world have high self-esteem, or that it is a pre-requisite of success. This just oversimplifies who we are and the way we relate to each other.

All children and young people need adults who love them and who thinks they are wonderful, someone who accepts them and is there for them. We do this because we need love, praise and recognition to develop properly and not get lost on trying to imbibe a false or misleading sense of who you are and what you need to be like to be happy and safe or that if you do have lower self-esteem you are somehow immediately at a disadvantage.

Brian