Bullying and Self-Esteem

April 29, 2016 ~ brianorbistc ~ Leave a comment

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 most 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.

The challenge is when we focus solely on self-esteem as theanswer 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

What do we mean by bullying?

January 7, 2015 ~ brianorbistc ~ Leave a comment

This blog summarises and improves on a couple of the speeches I have made on this issue lately – I hope you find it useful.

What do we mean by bullying?

There have been many different definitions and theories about what constitutes bullying, but it’s not helpful to define bullying purely in terms of behaviour, bullying is both behaviour and impact.

Bullying is not about just any kind of injury, nor just any negative impact. It involves a particular kind of harm. It is aimed at engendering a kind of helplessness, an inability to act, to do anything. It is an assault on a person’s agency (Sercombe and Donnelly 2012)

Bullying is a mixture of behaviours and impacts which can impact on 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.

This behaviour can include:

• Being called names, teased, put down or threatened

• Being hit, tripped, pushed or kicked

• Having belongings taken or damaged

• Being ignored, left out or having rumours spread about you

• Receiving abusive messages on social media or phone

• Behaviour which makes people feel like they are not in control of themselves

• Being targeted because of who you are or who you are perceived to be

This behaviour can harm people physically or emotionally and, although the actual behaviour may not be repeated, the threat may be sustained over time, typically by actions: looks, messages, confrontations, physical interventions, or the fear of these. Bullying is both behaviour and impact.

Online bullying

Online bullying, or Cyberbullying, is often the same type of behaviour but it takes place online, usually on social networking sites. A person can be called names, threatened or have rumours spread about them and this can (like other behaviors) happen in person and can happen online.

Advances in technology are simply providing an alternative means of reaching people – where malicious messages were once written on school books or toilet walls, they can now be sent via social media sites on mobile devices making their reach greater, more immediate and much harder to remove or erase.

Some online behaviour is illegal. Children and young people need to be made aware of the far-reaching consequences of posting inappropriate or harmful content on forums, websites, social networking platforms, etc. If a child or young person is being treated or threatened in a sexual way or being pressured into doing something that they don’t want to do, this is not bullying. There are laws to protect children from this very serious type of behaviour.

Persistence and Intent

Bullying is not defined by persistence or intent. This is relevant because if you were to look up definitions online and in peer reviewed articles, the vast majority of these will refer to bullying as persistent and deliberate behaviour.

We would argue that these are unhelpful criteria to apply to all situations. So much time can be lost trying to apply a range of situational factors, many of which are in fact subjective. Many incidents of bullying will include deliberate and repeated behaviour but these are not in our view, essential criteria to define bullying.

Making these an essential criteria to be met excludes a significant amount of incidents of bullying that are not deliberate or necessarily repetitive. We know from our work with children and young people , that bullying takes many forms and something need only happen once to have a severe impact.

Let’s look at intent– if you tell me bullying must be deliberate and then accuse me of bullying, what is my first response? – That I didn’t mean it. Intent is difficult to prove. It can tie situation up in knots and the focus on responding to what someone did and the impact it had is lost.

Schools can waste a lot of time trying to prove intent –I have been involved in examples when intent is denied the adults are stumped and do not know how to proceed. We must look at what someone actually did and the impact it had. If it wasn’t deliberate then they may be in a position to apologise or make amends sooner – of it was it may merit a more serious response.

Bullying is usually deliberate but not always – sometime children use language they hear at home and have no idea of how offensive or inappropriate it is. We should not get caught up in using this as qualifying criteria though – it’s too easily re-framed

Let us now consider persistence– that the behaviour must be repeated before it can be considered bullying – again this is something we do not agree with and neither do most young people we have spoken to. Persistence is difficult to define and also, is it more than once? twice? daily? weekly? Who defines when it’s persistent enough to intervene? Me, the person it is happening to or the intervening adult? Something need only happen once and the impact can be severe; a child may not get changed for PE after one incident were they were picked on, humiliated or threatened.

Is being humiliated by having your shorts pulled down in front of a class with 15 people laughing and pointing, some possibly taking a picture, bullying? Of course it is, is it repetitive? It doesn’t matter, we focus on the behaviour and the impact it had.

The fear of repetition can be sustained through looks or perhaps threats or just the fear of it happening again.

What you do about bullying is actually more important than how you define it.

We respond by asking;

What was the behaviour?

What impact did it have?

What do I need to do about it?

Every situation is unique. You might over hear some name calling in the corridor and discover this is chat between to close friends who are ‘winding’ each other up; it is not part of any power or dominance game.

What was the behaviour? Name calling

What impact did it have? None – made them laugh

What do I need to do about it? Nothing – perhaps remind them about language or being overheard

You may hear the same name calling ten feet further on but the person on the receiving end is upset and embarrassed in front of her peers.

What was the behaviour? Name calling

What impact did it have? Left someone embarrassed and fearful – who ran off

What do I need to do about it? Help this person get back into her routine, listen to how she feels and decide on next steps – you will need to challenge the people who called her names and look at possible consequences too

This does not mean we only focus on the impact behaviour has – this means that if someone shouts a homophobic or racist slur at someone and it bounces off them and they don’t care –this does not mean you do not need to do anything about the language used and the attempt to bully. Just because a person is not affected does not mean the behaviour they experienced should be ignored.

Just as not all attempts to bully are successful, people can feel bullied but not be – it is possible some people over react –you still need to deal with their reaction and their feelings but you might not need to do much about the behaviour the experienced – it could have been a harmless comment not aimed at them but they have assumed it was and got into a terrible state over it.

Focussing our response

Bullying and Agency

So when we look at impact – things like feeling hurt, angry, scared, frightened, that knot in your stomach- what is happening there? What do these reactions tell us?

Young people have reflected to us over the years in a range of ways that they feel unable to speak out and feel trapped when bullied – they draw pictures of themselves in large rooms feeling caged and so on. This learning helped us articulate the notion that bullying actually takes something away from people.

All of these feelings which are regularly articulated reflect a loss of being in-charge of yourself, of being capable of taking effective action, of making choices and of being an effective actor or agent in your own life.

When we use our agency, we have a degree of choice over what we do and how we respond within structures like families, communities and schools.

Young people get this notion – as it can be a bit if a head scratcher the first time you hear it – though when you explain a ‘typical day’ of meeting friends, going to school, laughing, joining in and knowing what is happening and how you’ll respond most children and young people recognise this day. Bullied children don’t have the same kind of day. Someone else is in charge of how they feel, where they go even or how they will participate in certain things, if they get on the bus or eat alone. They cannot exercise the same choice nor have the same autonomy as when they were not being bullied.

We learn from our past experiences, from imagining what we would do in future similar situations and what is happening to us now – these elements combine and enable us to make choices and act – this is agency.

Managing change and responding to challenges requires hope, a belief you can handle things – and agency and these underpin resilience.

If we re-visit the quote –

– we can see bullying is not even the establishment of dominance. The person bullying is not satisfied with dominance. Bullying can involve the attempt to deny another any settled place, even a subordinate one. It goes beyond subjection. In bullying, the goal is abjection

What does this mean for how we respond?

Considering that bullying is both different types of behaviour and a particular impact this should re-focusses our understanding of the dynamic – this can re-define an approach to bullying in a way that helps practitioners’ responds to feelings and actions. This is always more effective than checking off criteria and having uniform sanction based responses based on our view of the person who is doing it.

If we can accept that bullying takes something away from people, that they can no longer take effective action our response must focus on helping get that back.

This is the real shift in anti-bullying practice – how do I help someone get back a feeling of being in control of themselves and in a place to take effective action to feel safe and get on with their day?

Things like moving desks or even just excluding people won’t on their own help restore agency – young people must be included in what will happen next and given the chance to steer what direction it goes in. They need to be asked what they would like to happen and we need to take that seriously.

This is not always easy but it must remain our goal with every intervention – to help young people get back to a place where they are in control and can take effective action.

In reality – what does that look like? What does it sound like? You will need to ask questions like

What would you like to happen?

What do you think will happen if I tell his or her parents?

What will happen if I tell your teacher?

What are you worried about?

Be prepared for them to say

Don’t tell my dad – you will out me to him and I’m not ready for that

I just want you to know what is happening and if I need you I will come and get you

If you talk to his dad he will get a doing/beating and it’ll get worse

So you explore what options they do have and sometimes that means pointing out that you need to do something as not doing anything is dangerous

Open conversations like these promote communication – this promotes positive relationships and they promote and role model problem solving behaviours –these relationships can become stronger and children become more resilient to what is happening because of this strong purposeful relationship – even with just one person.

The process of listening and consciously trying to get back agency – a sense of being on control – won’t always lead to a perfect outcome but it will help the person being bullied

Labelling

Bullying is not defined by the type of person who did it either

Care needs to be taken because labelling is not without its risks, labelling a child or young person on the basis of bullying behaviour can result in a confirmed identity as a ‘bully’ or ‘victim’ resulting in ongoing behaviour patterns based on this identity.

This is not to dilute behaviour but is to keep the focus of the adult’s responses on the behaviour that is problematic, rather than the assigning characteristics to those involved. This is a solution focussed approach that is designed to help people change the way they behave, rather than attempt to change who they are. We help people change by telling them the behaviour that is unacceptable, being clear that what they are doing is bullying and that it needs to stop.

It is a fundamental part of behaviour management that we tell people what the behaviour was they did, why it is not acceptable and help them figure out what to do the next time they feel that way.

All of this promotes respectful relationships, this approach builds a young person’s capacity to respond more effectively, when we are helping young people learn to negotiate tricky relationships and when we involve them in finding solutions and repairing those that can be fixed, we help them to become more resilient.

Brian Donnelly