Bullying needs firm action

Bullying is a perennial danger in all schools, although it very rarely

reaches the level we saw last week, when a Founders High School boy was fatally stabbed by two Hamilton High boys in Bulawayo, but that exceptional case was simply the apex of a vast amount of bullying at lower levels.

Some of the research work done in Africa shows that pushing half the children in the earlier forms of high school in most countries, including Zimbabwe, have suffered some bullying, all the way from verbal insults to physical violence.

The unpleasantness is difficult to define, and it can be difficult to draw a limit between telling someone that you dislike them and do not want to be in the same vicinity as them, which sometimes does need to be said, and actively being unpleasant for the sake of being unpleasant, and the thrill of hurting someone.

Schools, by their very nature, are open to bullying. Every school, primary and secondary, has a range of age groups, with the older age groups being larger than the younger age groups.

So, you get bullying of younger learners by older learners, as well as bullying within age groups where a bunch of children turn on one of their own in their own class or form.

And it can become institutionalised to a degree, with victims of bullying in form one feeling they have the right to carry on what is seen as a tradition when they are in the senior forms.

There are all sorts of excuses, such as younger learners need to be taught their place, or it helped the bully to become tougher and fit in when they were younger.

And you can get school cultures of growing up, that this is part of life and children need to be able to cope with it. You even get parents feeling that it is not that bad a thing for their child to become tougher quicker. Thus, we get even teachers suggesting that new members of a team are “initiated”, usually by being interrogated or made to do what can be seen as humiliating actions, such as bunny hopping across a room.

There are even cases of senior staff telling prefects or others to make life miserable for a child who is seen as too independent or difficult.

If the child gets tears in their eyes, well, that is seen as just part of life and a lesson in not being so cocky. We have all seen and all heard these things, and hopefully found them unacceptable, even when there was no physical bullying.

Bullying takes many forms, starting with the verbal, where there is derogatory name calling, threats, poking fun at accents or geographical speech forms, insulting those who stand out a little physically for that genetic inheritance, insulting them because of who their parents are or were.

The list can be endless and almost any individual can be isolated for something they say or look like or just what sort of family they come from.

The point is to find some element where they can be considered different and then use that to hurt or humiliate, probably both.

You can easily find that a comment, expressed between friends who understand and accept diversity, becoming a weapon for a bully. In some cases, although not all, the context does matter as well as the intent of the person making the comment.

So, you can find among a group of friends at a Harare school that a child with a pronounced Masvingo accent can acquire an affectionate provincial nickname and relish their individuality and background in the group, but that same child can be the target of verbal bullying for the same accent perceived as different.

As we move up the scale, there is less potential innocence and very quickly we reach the stage where there can be no friendliness or any ambiguity.

Physical action is almost always totally unacceptable and just pure bullying.

Bullies bully because they have dominance and like to exercise that dominance, to make someone else feel that not only do they not belong but that, because they do not belong, they can be hurt and humiliated.

Psychologists report that most bullies are themselves insecure people and need to bully to prove their status, which they might have earned simply by being older or more senior.

A lot of this happens in later life, of course, in work environments as well.

Sexual harassment is a prime example, with the harasser not even that attracted to the person they harass, but using the harassment to express their dominance in a particular environment and to show that they can make life miserable and even unbearable to the person they harass.

The killing in Bulawayo seems to be a combination of several factors. First, inter-school rivalry, something that needs to be limited to who you support in a soccer match, has got well out of hand and moved towards gang warfare.

But within that, there was extreme bullying, two boys of one school bullying a single boy from another just to hurt him. Then the tragedy.

Another boy moves in to protect his friend, and gets knifed. The juvenile justice system, and the professional staff it employs, are going to have a very difficult job untangling all that disaster and horror.

Bullying can be stopped, and stopped quickly, if those in authority are willing to take firm action.

We see this in adult environments where sexual harassment in the workplace can be halted immediately, or at least after a couple of people have faced a disciplinary committee and have to find alternative employment, so long as the top manager or managers take action and show a determination to stamp it out. The same attitude is needed in schools.

There have been cases over the years where a culture or tradition of bullying had taken hold in a school, with even staff turning a blind eye or encouraging some of the bullying. A change at the top, and a determination to stamp bullying out, has worked.

One well-known boys’ school many years ago, a school that prided itself in producing tough young men, won a new head and deputy head as bullying went out of control and won, simply by making it almost impossible through a range of measures.

You could ignore someone you disliked, but you could not take any verbal or physical action.

Much depends on the head of a school, and those who appoint heads need to take that into account as one of the many qualifications a good head must possess, just as a board of directors needs to include that qualification when choosing a chief executive along with the business leadership and acumen the job requires.

And something like the tragedy in Bulawayo requires at least two heads, and possibly all heads in the city, to take combined effective action.