Jesse McDonald is a rural pre-medicine student at Selkirk College in Nelson, BC. She has been working at BYTE this summer researching bullying behaviour and the best and worst practices globally that approach the issue of bullying. She’s used her research to help improve our Ending Bullying workshop, which we’re hoping to deliver in communities around the Yukon this fall.
Here, Jesse uses her research to respond to an article from the National Post written in late July.
Is bullying “in the genes”?
By Jesse McDonald
On July 27, the National Post wrote a widely shared article about some new research on bullying from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. The researchers found that bullying behaviour is “literally in the genes, and is an inherited trait that actually helps build social rank and sex appeal.†The SFU researchers also found that “bullies were the least likely to be depressed, had the highest self-esteem, and experienced the greatest social status.†These findings give us a glimpse into the complex issue of bullying, but we need to take these findings into a wider context.
Firstly, there is an important difference between normal childhood aggression and the problem behaviour that we call bullying. We need to be careful about labelling a young person a ‘bully.’ If we are talking about a bully, we are talking about someone who is hurting someone else with intention. The reality is that most of what we describe as bullying behaviour is exhibited because an alternative has not yet been learned.
The adolescent brain is still developing and is incredibly sensitive to social approval or disapproval. Teens are more responsive to emotionally loaded situations – teenagers may seem like they are being really dramatic with their emotions, but in reality they are experiencing them very intensely and often for the first time.
Learning to deal with aggression
Like all skills, social-emotional skills take a long time to fully develop. It takes years – if not decades – to master these skills, which is a fact that gets lost in our current discussion of childhood aggression. Children must learn social-emotional skills in the same way they learn any other skill, and they must be taught as patiently and intently as any other subject. We should aim to look at bullying behaviour as the result of a flawed system, not as a problem that creates the flawed system.
As adults, we have a responsibility to help young people develop social-emotional skills, just as parents have a responsibility to help teach their infant children to walk. To truly understand this, it requires us to re-frame how we think of bullying behaviours. We would never claim that a one-year-old child who can’t walk has a physical disorder, so why do we automatically assume that an adolescent who bullies has a behavioural disorder?
Every child will fail at managing their aggressive impulses at some point because every child gets frustrated and angry and makes mistakes– every one of them, not just the problem bullies or “bad†kids. It is completely unrealistic to tell kids that they must peacefully coexist at all times and never cross the line into persistent unfriendliness, name-calling, teasing, or exclusion.
Teaching youth how to appropriately express themselves and articulate their emotions is no different to teaching an infant to walk. In adolescence, social-emotional development is of equal importance as learning to walk for a one-year-old – thinking otherwise is to miss the essence of development entirely.
This is why the Zero Tolerance approach will never show success. Children have to learn how to manage their aggressive impulses and get along, and they also have to learn to be resilient – these are acquired skills. We could reasonably argue that at the root of every bullying incident is a skill that hasn’t yet been mastered. Promoting social-emotional skills, healthy expression, and active listening to youth is what adults and mentors for youth should focus on.
For this reason, the first form of contact in addressing an ongoing bullying problem should not be punishment; it should be a curious conversation.
Creating effective programming to address bullying
From the best practices I have seen globally, there are 4 themes in establishing an effective intervention: awareness, measurement and reporting (determining size and scope of the problem), prevention, and remediation.
Bullying is a systemic problem and we need to look at a systemic change in order to combat the problem. Using a whole school approach means addressing behaviour in a holistic manner that reaches all parts of the school community. It also involves taking a look at broad factors that influence behaviour among students. This is where we will address the need for change in the school climate by employing appropriate behaviour policies on three levels: individual, classroom, and school-wide.
An effective prevention and intervention strategy would ideally include resilience and empathy building components that would teach youth different approaches to conflict resolution. The focus would be on recognizing the power imbalance in bullying behaviours and shifting youth to strive towards power with others instead of power over others. I recommend teaching youth active listening in order to develop effective communication. If young people are unable to communicate effectively, unhealthy behaviour is the result.
Appealing to a youth’s self-interest is necessary in an effective prevention and intervention strategy, particularly for problem bullying situations and for youth who don’t empathize with others. Adolescents who bully but have difficulty feeling empathy need an approach that will appeal to their self-interest. Empathy-inducing interventions or punishment alone will do nothing except put a temporary Band-Aid on immediate bullying situations.
The National Post article cites an example of using self-interest to combat bullying when it mentions the pilot project at an Arizona school that sought to steer bullies into high-status “jobs.†This is just one example of how self-interest could work to redirect bullying behaviour; however, more needs to be done to promote systemic change. It is important for us to ensure that all students have the ability to healthily express their emotions and manage their aggression, as well as satisfy their need for power through success in school, athletics, the arts or some other responsible pursuit.