Sucking Eggs · Mon Jul 17, 18:38 by Eleri Straker
It’s been a long time since I started teaching. Sometimes it seems too long. However, one of the advantages of having taught for so many years, many of them at the sharp edge of special needs (i.e. dealing with ‘problem’ kids no one else could handle.) was the ability to recognise and to deal with bullies. It was recently suggested, following my revelation about my Chav princess’ latest attack, that I stop putting myself into the bully’s victim’s shoes and put myself into hers.
Over the years I have had to repair the damage done to the victims of innumerable bullies. I have watched as one child after another is destroyed by the deliberate malevolence of others. And I, along with my special needs colleagues have had to do the patching up afterwards. You might think that the choice of the word ‘malevolence’ is rather dramatic, but if you have any knowledge of language, you will know that the work is absolutely accurate. A bully is malevolent. It may not be the ‘motiveless malignity’ of a Iago, but it is malevolence. How else could you describe the deliberate harming of another, simply because you could?
I have heard all the suggestions made by those who feel that bullies are ‘misunderstood’ or ‘have problems’. To these people I say that I don’t really care. It’s not that I don’t care about the child, I do. What I don’t care about is the reasons for their behaviour. Many of us are ‘misunderstood’ or ‘have problems’, but do not resort to hurting others. And what about the victims? A victim does not choose to be bullied. I have heard colleagues of mine say that a certain child, the victim of a particularly unpleasant bully ‘brought it on themselves’. How? Did this child go up to the bully and say, “Excuse me, can you bully me?” No. Nobody chooses to be bullied. A bully, however, does make a deliberate choice. There is no such thing as an ‘accidental’ bully. A bully sees what they perceive as a ‘weakness’ and homes in.
So, what would I do to a bully? No I wouldn’t have them put in the stocks or publicly flogged, tempting as the idea might be at times. This kind of retributary justice might make us feel good for a brief moment, but it actually solves nothing.
A wiser head than mine, after years of trying to deal with bullying issues, discovered that making the bully face up to his or her victim, publicly, and having the ‘audience’ discuss the bully’s behaviour in front of them, was a far more effective method. It’s more than public humiliation, it’s holding up a mirror to their actions and forcing them to look into it. Not a pleasant experience. This form of restorative justice has been tried with criminals, when perpetrators are made to face up to their previously faceless victims and see the damage that they have caused. It’s apparently a sobering and effective way of dealing with ‘minor’ crimes.
The victim of bullying does not need to put themselves into the shoes of the bully, as my ‘advisor’ recently suggested. The bully however, does need to walk a mile in the shoes of his or her victim. They need to know and to really understand the effect, long term, of their malicious behaviour.
And as for my ‘advisor’, I know why Princess tries to bully me, it’s because she wants her own way. Years of bullying have shown this person that if you are consistently vicious and unpleasant to someone, eventually they will give in, because they are afraid of what else the bully will do. I, however, unlike Princess’ other victims, have years of experience of dealing with unpleasant characters. I know exactly what inadequacies make her do what she is doing and consequently have no need to ‘walk in her shoes’. As my father used to say, “You know what a shipwreck is, why would you choose to experience it?”
Princess is, in fact, a rather pathetic figure, with neither looks nor brains. So I have no particular desire to teach Princess a lesson, after all, with what she has NOT got going for her, life will do that soon enough.
