We were discussing bullying not long ago; I thought of you and X when I wrote down this story of a recent incident at the school my children attend. I'm curious to see what comment you have...
I just had my first experience with bullying (as a parent; I had quite enough as a kid); it was not at all what I expected. I wonder if anyone else here has seen anything similar.
I live overseas; my kids attend a small international school with kids from two dozen countries. There are only 200 students in the whole school, and no class has more than 20. Parents are very much concerned and involved, and though there is considerable discussion of bullying and how to prevent it, we have seen very little bullying.
We have now discovered that in my son's 5th grade class, it's been going on for quite some time. We haven't seen it because it was not what we were looking for, and it was not where we were looking for it. We were looking at the boys, and expecting physical bullying. What we've found is that a group of girls has selected one girl in the class for total ostracism, imposing written "hate contracts" on girls outside the group, by which the girls agree to hate the selected target on pain of being ostracized themselves. It has been very effective; none of the girls dared to cross the line, and the exclusion of the target has been total, except in the classroom, where the hate group agreed (stated in the contract) to relax the rules only enough to conceal the ostracism from the teacher. Because the school is a neighborhood school and there is little opportunity for social interaction with kids outside the school, the ostracism has effectively extended well beyond the school.
The result, I am convinced, has been as traumatic for the child as any physical bullying could be. It is also particularly disturbing because of the amount of thought and planning that has gone into it. This is not just kids reverting to instinctive physical hierarchy-building on a playground, it is a sustained campaign of organized cruelty, aimed at a person that was, until fairly recently, a close friend of many of those involved.
Now the whole thing is out in the open, and various methods of intervention are being pursued; I'm not sure how effective they will be. It is relatively easy to punish a child for hitting another child; how do you punish someone for refusing to speak to or acknowledge another child?
I've been largely a spectator; none of my children are directly involved, but I have a younger daughter, and I've been asking myself how I would respond if she were involved in something like this, either as participant or initiator. I've yet to come up with a good answer.
I asked my son if he knew what was going on, and he replied that of course he did. His only comment, when pressed, was that "Girls are sick". An excessive generalization, of course, but in this particular case I have to say he got it about right. |
