Getting bullish on bullying

At 32 years old, Karen* still bears the emotional scars of being bullied throughout high school. She recalls how the repeated abuse from her peers at a prominent Corporate Area institution gnawed at her mental health to the point where she no longer wanted to attend classes.

“It was fun and joke for them until it became really too much,” she shared with The Sunday Gleaner last week before bursting into tears.

The bullying, she said, came from her male classmates who would relentlessly jeer her and make her the brunt of jokes.

“The first time it happened, I didn’t make so much of a complaint, but it continued, and after the second and third times it happened, it just went on. It wasn’t just one instance; it was something that continued like literally an entire day, and just continued and continued and continued,” she said.

Karen said eventually she reported the abuse to adults around her, but did not feel supported as many saw it as simply a rite of passage. Eventually, she steeled herself to ignore her bullies, and channelled all her energy into doing well academically.

Karen is now pursuing her second degree at university, but she said the bullying hampered her ability to build friendships as she developed a deep mistrust of people.

“It was a horrible part of my high school,” she said. “I have no fond memories. None.”

It is an outcome such as Karen’s predicament that John* said he is trying to protect his seven-year-old daughter from. After noticing some changes in her behaviour, he enquired and learnt that she was being bullied at school.

“She’d come home upset, but wouldn’t open up, especially if pushed to do so. One morning she was livid, crying. Eventually, after a bit, she complained that she hated the school and that it was a bully school. It took a bit of reasoning with her for her to start telling me her experiences and she did so over a few days,” he shared with The Sunday Gleaner.

He said his daughter explained that the children would shove her or pull her hair and call her names, jeer her and take her things. Although angry, the parent explained that he was not surprised as his daughter was an ethnic minority in her class, and he had experienced similar taunting in his days.

Unable to bear it any longer, his daughter begged her parents to homeschool her. Eventually, they compromised and withdrew her from the school.

‘RESCUING OUR YOUTH MUST BE AN URGENT PRIORITY’

In recent days, the issue of peer-on-peer bullying and abuse in school raised fresh concerns of the traumatic and harmful impact the age-old problem can have on the victim and even the aggressor.

In the last 10 days, there were reports of three separate incidents at three different schools where three students ended up being hospitalised after reportedly being violently beaten by their schoolmates. In one of the incidents, the perpetrator was arrested and charged with assault occasioning grievous bodily harm.

“I strongly believe what we are seeing manifesting among our young people today is the breakdown of societal values that didn’t start yesterday. It has been in the making for decades and we did nothing to cauterise it,” pastor and counsellor Charles Francis shared with The Sunday Gleaner.

“It started in the homes, where parents no longer placed any value on bringing up their children on moral teaching, discipline, love, kindness, patience, respect, self-control … the fruits of the spirit. So many youth today are so angry, resentful, bitter, undisciplined, lacking principles and the basic value for life because of how they were raised. In some communities, they are left to the mercy of the dons and criminals, who groom them for a life of crime.”

The pastor added, “Rescuing our youth must be an urgent priority for us as a society if we are to stem the moral decay and the unravelling of the social fabric of our society. If we are to put an end to the violence in schools – and almost every minute there is a new video of students engaged in some form of altercation – we must start at the root: in the homes.”

POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER A LONG-TERM CONSEQUENCE OF BULLYING

A study conducted eight years ago by the Child Development Agency, now the Child Protection and Family Services Agency (CPFSA), revealed that 60-65 per cent of Jamaican students have been bullied at some time in their lives. With 1,867 students participating in the study, 57.6 per cent cited being teased or called names; 31.5 per cent reported being hit, kicked and shoved; 28.6 per cent indicated having lies told on them; and another 13.7 per cent reported that they were excluded or ignored.

Additionally, there were children who reported experiencing more than one form of bullying, whether consistently or at different points in time.

While acknowledging that a new study is needed to determine the current data on the prevalence of bullying in schools, Dr Warren Thompson, director of Children and Family Programmes at the CPFSA, noted that the situation could have worsened since the last study was done. He shared that the agency is working internally to do a study that looks at child abuse, which would include bullying.

Thompson said common forms of bullying include physical attacks, spreading rumours, being excluded from social circles, making repeated threats, verbal abuse, extortion, cyberbullying, and verbally ridiculing other students, repeatedly.

Psychologically, he said this can lead to the victim developing anxiety or depression, or a decline in academic performance. Victims, he said, may also have difficulty trusting others and could even exhibit self-harming behaviours such as cutting and suicidal ideation.

“Very often, children who are bullied will have low self-esteem, unless they have other protective factors. For example, if they are living in a family that would have given them affirmations and encouragement and so on from beforehand, then when they are faced with a bully, they may be more resilient and able to deal with it,” he said. “But unfortunately, many Jamaican children don’t necessarily grow up in environments like that.”

Thompson highlighted post-traumatic stress disorder as a long-term consequence of bullying, and pointed to the recent incident at the B.B. Coke High School in St Elizabeth, where a student was beaten unconscious by a schoolmate, as an example. The aggressor had reportedly been previously suspended from school for disrespectful and violent behaviour towards teachers and fellow students.

“Let us say that that is a child who was being bullied, and even if prior to now, the abusive behaviour was not repeated, even this one incident of being beaten unconscious like that can cause the child to develop symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder,” the CPFSA director explained.

Linking bullying to violence in schools, Thompson believes all schools must develop clear policies to deal with the issue.

“Where you have children who are coming from communities where gang-related violence or domestic violence is the norm, when they go to school, they’re going to replicate that kind of behaviour … . Schools have to counteract that,” he said.

‘DO IT WITH LOVE’

Dean of Discipline at the Papine High School in St Andrew, Demarley Williams, said his school is ahead of the curve. Along with a policy that discourages bullies with clear sanctions, he said there is also an anti-bullying campaign dubbed ‘Do It With Love’, which was first staged last year.

“It was a month-long campaign. We had devotional sessions addressing different types of bullying, we had persons coming in talking to different groups of students, we had signage added to the campus with positive messages, and skits at the drama room during lunchtime that identified certain forms of bullying,” he said, adding that the campaign yielded positive results.

Williams said the school has a population of over 1,300 students and serves a lot of volatile communities, hence counselling sessions are an integral part of how it addresses incidents of bullying.

“It’s not just a case where we look at you as a bully and that’s it. We often try to find out why this is happening … and usually we find out there is a back story,” Williams shared.

Like Williams, Cornwall College Principal Michael Ellis told The Sunday Gleaner that his school also has a clear policy against bullying, which is outlined in the school’s rulebook.

However, he contends that bullying is an interminable problem.

“You have a school where it is all males, you’re gonna have that,” Ellis said, while stating that it is not a chronic issue at the 127-year-old St James-based institution.

He noted that the school discourages bullying through counselling and sanctions such as demerits and detention.

Meanwhile, immediate past president of the Guidance Counsellors Association, Tracy Ann Taffe Thompson, said students are often not keen to report their bullies, and guidance counsellors have to be proactive in identifying the signs.

“A lot of times, how the counsellors even know what is happening is through the sick bay. You have quite a few students who are frequent visitors to that bay, and if a student is complaining almost every day of stomach issues and so forth, we take it as a sign that they are anxious about something or they don’t want to be at school, so the counsellors work alongside the nurse, the deans of discipline and the classroom teachers,” she said.

She believes the home environment not only plays a critical role in buffering the impact of bullying but also in discouraging children from being bullies. Taffe Thompson suggests that parental influence on a social level is the key for bullying to be addressed.

“If parents have a stronger influence over their children, I believe you will definitely see a decrease in it,” she said. “What are the parents saying about how my child should defend themselves? What do I teach them about interacting with others? How do I even demonstrate interacting with others? Am I manipulating other people? Am I belittling other people? What am I doing to demonstrate my disapproval of you, my child hurting someone else?”

EITHER PAY A PSYCHOLOGIST OR PAY A LAWYER

Child psychologist Dr Orlean Browne-Earle shares a similar view and calls for early intervention from parents to stem this kind of behaviour.

“Some parents, even though the behaviour is identified from the primary level, they don’t go and get the help for it the formal way. Some may say they don’t have the money, but realistically, it’s either you pay the psychologist or the counsellor now or you pay a lawyer down the road. It is just common sense,” she said.

John, in the meantime, told The Sunday Gleaner that he will continue to build his daughter’s spirit by affirming her.

“Knowing you’re in their corner 100 per cent if they’re doing their best to make the right decisions will build their courage,” he explained.

“After all of that, she’s still a softie. You can’t kill ants without having her rebuke you ... unless they bite you,” the father said with a warm smile.

[*Names changed to protect identities.]

sashana.small@gleanerjm.com