Bully buster

Two powerful stakeholder bodies in the education sector have given full support to the Ministry of Education, Skills, Youth and Information’s anti-bullying campaign, stressing that any attempt to stem the dangerous physical and emotional tide sweeping the island’s schools, and which has been linked to the suicides of bullied children, must be welcomed.

The Jamaica Teachers’ Association (JTA) and the Jamaica Association of Principals of Secondary Schools (JAPSS) stressed that the problem is no longer a snapshot of deviance, but a widespread virus.

According to the bodies, the Government’s efforts must be laser-focused, with the precision, intensity and sustainability of the zones of special operations’ crime-fighting and intervention mechanisms.

Bullying is defined as “repeated, intentional, and harmful behaviour where a person or group uses their power to hurt another person or group”, and children engaged in such have been using strength of numbers to prey on the more vulnerable.

“This, and any programme to address this scourge, must and will be supported. This is not a problem of one school, it is across the board. As educators, we support this initiative, but certainly from a ministry and maybe a government level, it should not just be a campaign for the schools, but for the rest of the country,” Linvern Wright, the president of the of the JAPSS, told The Gleaner.

“If we are serious about it, and its sustainability, it is something that will assist us as a society. For, if we don’t clean up our social fabric, where people just figure that because you are stronger, because you have been around for a longer time, you can bully people, we are going nowhere. Bullying is not only in one [school] or just schools. It is widespread in the society and begins with the way we talk to our fellowmen.”

Many of the perpetrators of bullying may have grown up in violence, leading them to act out in the way they do. For children bullied at home and in their communities, and who come to school and suffer the same hurt, he said it is vicious, and described the trend as a dirty fabric that must be cleaned in a meaningful way.

History of neglect

According to Wright, the society is now seeing, in the open, the symptoms of deviant behaviours which have continued for years and which have led to retaliations where individuals are killed, or cases where persons kill themselves after suffering relentless bullying.

“If you trace where it all started, it goes back to bullying at different levels of an individual’s upbringing. In some ways, bullying is a graduation from the extortion racket on one hand and, on the other, it’s a combination of both. What we’re really responding to now is the effects of that kind of mentality and that kind of history of having neglected those things,” Wright sought to explain.

He said principals, guidance counsellors, and parent bodies must have a significant say in the programme.

“We neglect inner-city areas, and neglect what is happening with the abuse of children. We neglect the spaces like the buses, and what is happening on the buses. We figured that we can just turn a blind eye and it will go away. It won’t. It hasn’t,” he stated.

JTA President Mark Malabver said his association, which represents more than 25,000 of the island’s teachers, is all for the anti-bullying campaign.

“It is widely accepted that bullying is prevalent in our schools, and the last research I have seen pointed to at least 60 per cent of our students having either observed students being bullied or having been bullied themselves. We have always said there is a need for a public education programme and initiative by the ministry to treat with the issue of bullying, and here it is we are seeing that the ministry is responding to that call,” he told The Gleaner yesterday.

“I do support it and there is a clear need for it, and it goes beyond just campaigning. One of the things we also have to do, to my mind, is to pull in our guidance counsellors, deans of discipline, and school administrators and empower them as to how best to treat with bullying in schools, because it is a major issue which has led to students being pulled from the institutions where they are bullied,” the JTA president said.

According to him, for some children, the psychological effects have been devastating, and the different forms of bullying must be treated differently. He hopes the Government’s campaign will address the different aspects of bullying.

“I hope the start of the campaign is the beginning of a very targeted approach to treating with this painful matter. And, in that regard, the JTA stands ready to assist the Ministry of Education in whatever way it can to treat with this matter,” he said.

Wright insisted that not enough has been done to create the institutional and social support needed to tackle the problem. He said children who are delinquents cannot expect the same treatment as children who conform, comply and behave according to rules and regulations. Any disciplinary action taken must be with a view to effect behavioural change, and should not be abusive.

Meanwhile, Malabver said the Schools Resource Officer Programme, where members of the Jamaica Constabulary Force were placed at some schools, was still in place. The programme was not for all schools, and officers were placed based on risk assessment and would serve more than one school.

At one St Catherine school, the officer placed at the institution was withdrawn and not replaced. The Gleaner was told that there was urgent need for the return of the officer, as bullying and various other forms of abuse, including sexual assault, are rampant at the institution. Teachers at the institution are also victims of abuse from the board and senior executives.

Last week, the ministry launched the campaign, called BullyProofJA, under the theme ‘Block the hate, Build the love’.

erica.virtue@gleanerjm.com