Six-year-old Adam Keeper is the youngest. Typically they’re adolescents like Dawn Marie Wesley, Hamed Nastoh, Emmet Fralick, Greg Doucette, Reena Virk, Justin Vasey. Even older teens are not safe. Tyler Trihart, Travis Sleeva and Joshua Melo would have soon moved on to adulthood.
These are just a few of Canada’s fallen child soldiers. Their names are published in news media, but most are not remembered. Their stories are remarkable similar to each other and to the rest of our child soldiers — children who go into battle everyday: at school, at social events, at playgrounds. These are the children who asked for help and were ignored or who couldn’t find anyone to help them.
For the most part, their deaths were due to suicide, though some were murdered. All of them were victims of bullying — bullying so severe it took over all the happiness in their lives.
These young children from all across the country, from all walks of life, died because we did nothing to prevent their deaths. Bullying is rampant in our country. In Canada, a child is bullied every 20 seconds.
How do we handle this? We train more child soldiers to fight the battle adults should be fighting. We go into schools and tell children to stand up to bullies. Or we ask other children to intervene when a peer is bullied. We train and we demonstrate and we show children what bullying looks like, how it feels, what can be done.
But the bullying doesn’t stop.
When an adult is assaulted or threatened, he or she goes to the police.
Charges are laid, perhaps a restraining order is obtained. No one expects the assaulted victim to spend time in the presence of the person who hurt him or her.
When a child is assaulted he is asked to attend a conference with his assailant. Or she is told to be more careful — not to make herself a target. Maybe they spend a day or two out of school — essentially being punished themselves for their bully’s crime.
Child victims are asked to spend every day in the company of their assailant. Now, with the pervasiveness of social media, assailants follow their victims into all facets of life — harassing them via Facebook, MySpace, and text messages. There is no escape.
And so, the only escape becomes death. For a young person, regularly assaulted and tormented, helped by no one, suicide becomes the only considered option. Or, for the child that fights against his or her tormentors, death through beating becomes an inevitable finale to their fight.
God forbid we punish the tormentors before the tormented die. God forbid we admit that we have done a poor job supervising children or that our strategies may be wrong.
God forbid anyone actually do anything real and tangible to make this tragic violence stop.
For years, schools and community groups have offered bullying prevention programs aimed at getting children to understand bullying and to prevent it amongst their peers. But while we’ve made children more responsible for self-policing, adults have become less responsible.
And if you see your child being bullied, stop it — whatever it takes legally. -
Numerous studies have shown that adult intervention and supervision is the biggest factor in reducing bullying. Instead of adding more supervision, we’ve asked children to fight for themselves. And they lack the tools to do so. Despite studies that have shown that 75 per cent of children will say that telling a bully to stop is the right thing, less than 40 per cent of those self-report as having actually intervened.
The whole reason programs that train children to prevent bullying arose was because of studies that showed that children see a lot of bullying that goes unnoticed by adults. Roughly half the time when kids intervene they’re successful.
So instead of adding more adult supervision, we’ve trained children to be little soldiers, defending our school grounds for us. And yet, it’s not working. Only 40 per cent intervene — only half of those are successful. Does this sound like it works?
What does work is immediate adult intervention with swift and seen consequences.
Bullies should not be ushered off into offices to discuss their actions with a group of their peers or the victim and his or her family. According to the American Psychological Association, it is important that bullies be called out and disciplined in front of other student bystanders to demonstrate that bullying behaviour is not acceptable.
Schools and playgrounds and places where children and teens gather need more and higher quality adult supervision. Consequences for bullying must be swift and strict.
Expulsion and exclusion are the most powerful weapons against bullies. Communities must agree that bullying is not a school problem, but a social one. Police, social workers, psychologists and parent volunteers need to work together with schools to prevent and respond to bullying in the community.
When it comes to outside the school setting, the majority of bullying happens on social media networks such as Facebook or via cellphone texting. The solution here is simple: Parents, monitor your children.
If your child is on Facebook or other social media site, you must have access to their profile. If your child can receive and send text messages, you must be able to monitor them.
And if you see your child being bullied, stop it — whatever it takes legally.
If your child is the one doing the bullying, you are fully to blame for whatever the result of that bullying is. Take your child’s cellphone away, cut off their Internet access, make the consequences clear and swift.
If not, you may find yourself with blood on your hands. Literally.
In my experience, bullies get away with it because adults in schools carefully select who is going to be corrected, monitored, punished or disciplined by only taking on those kids who will result in the lowest repercussions– this is particularly true in high school. Those kids with a wide circle of influence Either because of who their parents are or because of their popularity) get away with wearing an improper uniform, using a swear word, disrupting class or being late etc. etc. because to speak back to that student will result in all those in the circle of influence giving the teacher/ coach/principal/ EA/ you name it a hard time. No one wants to come to work and face a crowd of people who are doing whatever they can to annoy or intimidate or make your day difficult. So, the student that no one else likes gets corrected sometimes excessively and the popular crowd gets away with murder – literally. this also communicates to the other students that it is safe to pick on this kid – because even the adults in the school do. It is a game of survival and it is a game that kills the most isolated kids – it is Darwin’s natural selection theory applied but what makes this game truly sick is that we have placed adults in the environment with authority and all manner of tools to help the bully and they do. If anything they make the problem worse. Who do I blame for bullying…sorry to say it the adults in the school. They are supposed to be leaders; they are supposed to be immune by their maturity from peer pressure, they are not supposed to care about being popular with students they are supposed to set an example that is positive – Do they? In my experience no they do not. Too many are trying to relive their own youth and become part of that popular crowd they missed out in when they were in highschool, or they are intimidated and stand by. Students at this age are even more isolated because the schools themselves discourage parent involvement calling those of us who want to protect our kids helicopter parents and all other manner of demeaning terms. So now the most vulnerable among us are sent into a huge building everyday completely unprotected –where the students with the subliminal encouragement of the adults erode their sense of self, and justice, their hope, their esteem, their physical well being. They are corrected for every tiny infraction resulting in the rest of the population making it even worse because this tells them – this person will not be protected by anyone including the school adults. These adults who are supposed to lead are in my opinion as much a part of the problem as the bullies themselves. To every teacher who ever admitted to premarital sex in a class of high school students, or to the use of contraception, to everyone who admitted to drinking, smoking dope and breaking rules, to every one who bragged about their university party life, wore torn jeans to class and presented as a maverick, to everyone that stepped away from wearing professional clothes that would separate you from the crowd as an adult I say this – my kids have friends their own age they do not need a 35 year old teacher/coach/ EA etc. as a friend, what they need is a leader. If you are not comfortable with the role of an adult then go back to school and stay there – you do not get to have the priveleges of an adult without the responsibility of one. What our kids need is someone who plays by the rules sets an example is not afraid to protect the weak and who demonstrates a sense of integrity when doling out discipline – in the exact same way for every single student.