The many faces of bullying
Those who bully and their victims get all the attention, but the quiet acceptance from the witnesses is a requirement for bullying to take place at all. In that light, it makes sense to consider bullying a social rather than individual problem, according to an expert in the field, Helle Rabøl Hansen.
By Anders Lindskov (anli@dpu.dk)
Class has been cancelled, so the pupils are out in the school yard when three of the boys raise another boy to the top of the flag pole and not because he wants to? The victim hangs several metres in the air, and out of sheer fright he wets himself, while his class watches from below, laughing.
How do you explain that? How do you explain that twenty quite ordinary children can bring themselves to watch a brutal and painful humiliation like that and not react? And how do you explain that afterwards, the pupils seem not to have any regrets or bad conscience about it?
The answers lie in the very nature of bullying: It has not one, but many faces. Bullying occurs in communities where even the passive onlookers play an important role and carry their share of the responsibility. At least according to Helle Rabøl Hansen, who has studied bullying for several years; first for The National Council for Children, later for the organisation Children's Welfare in Denmark, and now as a PhD-student at the Danish School of Education, where she is a part of eXbus, which is the first major interdisciplinary research project on bullying in Denmark.
Moral meltdown
The project was, among other things, inspired by Holocaust research. Although there is a vast difference between a Danish school yard and Auschwitz, there are also certain similarities in the role played by passive bystanders. "It is easy enough to point out the SS-officer, who forced a victim into the gas chamber at gunpoint, but what about the thousands of ordinary citizens who all did their part? What about the railroad administrator, who facilitated the transport? It is illumination to examine closely the explanations people give for remaining passive when they see atrocities play out. Of course there is a world of difference between Holocaust and bullying in school, but we can learn a lot by analysing the way witnesses rationalise their own behaviour," says Helle Rabøl Hansen.
'Moral meltdown' is the term Helle Rabøl Hansen has come up with to describe the witnesses' reaction. Passive witnesses to bullying know that they are witnessing something which is utterly wrong by normal moral standards, but in order to cope with the brutality, they develop a sort of parallel morality. This parallel morality makes the transgressions legitimate and normalise the actions, which makes it possible to repeat the pattern of bullying. "In the interviews I have conducted in classes where bullying takes place, compassion is a rare commodity. It is striking how the pupils accept the brutal actions. The class know full well that they have gone too far, but at the same time they keep using arguments that legitimise the actions, such as 'Camilla was being so annoying all the time'," Helle Rabøl Hansen explains.
Bullying leads to bonding
The pupils' conscience will strike back eventually, though. This becomes apparent at class reunions, Helle Rabøl Hansen says. This is when old regrets surface: "Boy, did we ever give you a hard time!" The bad conscience kicks in late, at a time when the bully and the victim no longer depend on each other. "Bullying is a particular kind of exclusion that plays out in fixed social settings. It happens in schools and in workplaces, but less powerful in settings where the victim has a chance to escape. When kids play after school, they just leave if someone bothers them," says Helle Rabøl Hansen.
Formal social communities are enforced communities. In other words, these are communities where the participants may or may not have something that binds them together outside of the stated purpose. "One hypothesis is that mobbing establishes a social order that replace the absence of a shared interest such as learning. Bullying establish a shared intimacy, because of the immense amount of energy it takes to determine who is in and who is out. It can take years," says Helle Rabøl Hansen. The social order of bullying should, however, not be confused with hierarchies in general. According to Helle Rabøl Hansen, it is quite normal that some children in a class are more dominant than others. The key issue is how this dominance is enforced. While negative dominating characters base their leadership on exclusion, on determining who is in and who is out, positive dominants are those who take initiatives, those who start new games, while remaining open to other children's ideas and participation.
Sweden as role model
If you want to know more about how to end bullying, or at least reduce it, Sweden has some inspiration for you. "Bullying has been a field of research in Sweden since the late 1960s, and the psychologist Dan Olweus was one of the pioneers with his work on bullying among boys. Sweden also has a very dynamic legislation. For instance, schools have been required to have anti-bullying programs in place for the past twenty years," Helle Rabøl Hansen explains.
The combination of research and political attention seems to have borne fruit. The international Health Behaviour in School-aged Children, HBSC, which is a survey conducted by the WHO, places Sweden at the top in terms of children's well-being. In the most recent survey, dating from 2002, 5.4 pct. of the 11-year-old boys responded that they had been victims of bullying twice in recent months. The corresponding figure for boys in Denmark, the Netherlands and the US is 14 pct. Helle Rabøl Hansen believes that the difference can be at least partly explained by the different approaches to bullying in the different countries. "In Sweden, I found that they focused on the 'we' of the situation. Bullying is considered a community problem. In Denmark, bullying is considered almost a private matter, one that directly relates to the characteristics of the individual. The explanations focus on the 'visible' children – the bullier or the victim, and on them being poorly raised or weak and easy prey. But that is far from a complete picture, because there are plenty of school classes with the same kinds of children where no bullying takes place," says Helle Rabøl Hansen.
The Danish focus on the individual is reflected in the legislation. In Denmark, you can transfer a bully to another school, an approach that, according to Helle Rabøl Hansen, does little to address the real issue: "You blame the individual instead of the institution. In effect, you mark the bully as a criminal. I have more confidence in focusing on the institution and its responsibility to act on bullying," says Helle Rabøl Hansen, and warns the Swedes against copying the Danish model.
Regulations for bullying
One approach, and a more productive one than merely removing the bullies from a class, is to work out a set of rules for social behaviour. The class should make their rules together. One such rule could be that 'When we play together, and someone says stop, you must stop'. Another frequently used rule is 'You can choose your own nickname'.
"It's not as if the rules just make all problems go away, but the process is important because you learn a lot about other people's personal limits, and you come up with something you can weave together. Merely thumb-tacking a list of rules to a door for a year won't make any difference. The rules must be adjusted and nurtured so they become the foundation for the mental and social interplay in class, and to make a copy of them and bring them home wouldn't hurt either," Helle Rabøl Hansen explains. From her work as an anti-bullying consultant, she has seen how groups of parents can quickly turn into a panel of judges that pass verdict on certain children as 'problematic'. On the other hand, there are also examples of groups of parents who make an extra effort to make everyone participate on equal footing for a birthday.
And finally, you have the teachers, who play a key role for the well-being of the entire class. For her research project, Helle Rabøl Hansen will observe the teachers when they talk about the pupils in the teachers' lounge and when they interact with, or 'confront', the pupils in class. The aim is to determine the importance of the individual teacher as well as the entire faculty for the establishment, maintenance and dissolving of patterns of bullying among the pupils. In her previous role, Helle Rabøl Hansen met many newly trained teachers who found it difficult to deal with bullying. The student teacher organisation in Denmark has requested more specific training about bullying in the pre-service training, which Helle Rabøl Hansen supports wholeheartedly. The interplay between social well-being and learning is vital in order to combat bullying. "If we can establish a comfortable atmosphere around learning as the focal point of the community instead of patterns of exclusion, we have a pedagogically viable approach to fight bullying," Helle Rabøl Hansen says.
Bull about bullying according to Helle Rabøl Hansen
Bullying is caused by an overly egotistical generation of children
Bullying has been around for generations, and we have examples as far back as when the public school was established. You oversimplify bullying if you use it to put a label on this particular generation of children. The same group of children is also described as much more self-reliant and self-motivated than previous generations, so the label is very much in the eye of the beholder.
Bullying is a natural phenomenon and there is nothing we can do about that
This argument is often accompanied by examples from hen yards and lower primates. It is easily refutable, because bullying is not a static biological phenomenon, but a social one. The context can facilitate or reduce bullying, as shown in Norway and Sweden, where is has been amply demonstrated that bullying can be significantly reduced.
Bullying relates to personal characteristics
This ignores group dynamics as well as context, and leads to a focus on 'guilt'. Bullying is the result of interplay between groups and individuals. The problem with this obvious conclusion is that the apparent solution would be to remove the so-called problematic individuals, the bullies. Bullying, however, also establish communities. Someone gains from bullying, at least in the short term. You also overlook another very exposed group, the 'buctims', those who can very well be bullies and victims at the same time.
Fashion is the cause of bullying
Bullying has little to do with external looks, but much more with what the hierarchy has determined to be the criteria for acceptance. In some classes it is considered cool to excel in school, in other classes it is socially unacceptable.
About Helle Rabøl HansenM.A. (Law) and a PhD-student at the bullying research program eXbus, which is funded by a DKK 8 million grant from the Tryg Foundation. Helle Rabøl Hansen has worked with bullying in the organisations Children's Welfare in Denmark and the National Council for Children. Stay updated on eXbus on the project website.
Visit Helle Rabøl Hansen's personal website.
Helle Rabøl Hansen
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