How would you handle a bully? We’ve all come across them, whether at school, the workplace or in our social lives.
Most of us have witnessed their insidious intimidation campaigns at close quarters; some of us have suffered horribly at their hands.
Many a fantasy is harboured about the bully getting his or her comeuppance. ‘That one needs to be taught a lesson,’ we observe.
We delight in seeing the lesson play out. The film industry teems with depictions of just this scenario.
It turns out we rather enjoy justice, that retribution satisfies something inside us and even inspires us in building our own defences – or planning our counter-attacks – against bullies.
I remember a difficult period in my childhood after my parents separated when I enrolled in a new primary school in a town where I knew no one of my age.
A bully, sensing vulnerability, moved in.
My mother was beside herself with rage after I endured one unpleasant day of taunts from the classroom thug and made her feelings clear in the headmaster’s office that week. I was never troubled again.
New woke Scottish Government guidance warns that branding children bullies is ‘disempowering’
Solution
My father’s solution seemed more problematic to me at the time but, the older I get, the more it appeals.
‘Stand up to him. Don’t let him win. Remember, the bigger they are, the harder they fall.’
Whatever your solution for dealing with bullies, I’d wager it is founded on a single objective – removing their power to make victims suffer.
Power is, after all, the currency of the oppressor. When coupled with egotism or cruel intent, it can create monsters.
Schools are places where monsters in the making should be invited to change their ways before it is too late for them.
These are my views; I would not have imagined they were controversial – but then, I never imagined a government as hell-bent as this one on overturning everyday common sense in slavish adherence to something called wokeism.
According to the latest guidance from the Scottish Government, teachers who persist in calling bullies what they are – bullies – should cease and desist.
Unhelpful
The reason it is no longer acceptable to tell them the truth is that it can be ‘disempowering’ for a label such as this to be attached to a pupil.
Yes, it turns out this knowledge could be upsetting for them and prove unhelpful in supporting them to change their behaviour.
In this one word – ‘disempowering’ (a cornerstone of the woke lexicon) – the challenge to antiquated morals crystallises.
Here we were, convinced since the year dot that the very removal of the bully’s power to cause misery was the whole point of any sensible attempt at a solution.
We now learn that preservation of their sense of power is a key objective in addressing their transgressions.
Take them down a peg or two? Give them their just desserts? Make sure they get what’s coming to them? Heathen talk from last century, it turns out.
The way we handle bullies in schools today is we walk on eggshells around them and, above all, avoid hurting their feelings with careless language.
Can you imagine the language bullies themselves deploy in the average inner city Scottish state comprehensive as they seek to belittle classmates?
Does it mark them out as sensitive souls to you, or young louts sorely in need of a telling?
The guidance for teachers – which runs for 57 pages without mentioning pupil exclusion once – also advises avoidance of the term ‘victims’, for this can be disempowering too.
Well, that is the thing about being the victim of a bully. They are already disempowered, are all too aware of it, and feel rubbish about it.
They are, in my experience, more concerned with making it stop than with matters of linguistics – particularly when the word teachers must not utter is the one which exactly describes their circumstances.
The term is ‘unhelpful’, says the guidance, ‘in scaffolding their recovery from a bullying experience’.
When recoveries are to be ‘scaffolded’, when bullying is ‘a bullying experience’, we know the author is already hopelessly adrift in an ocean of woke.
Henceforth, teachers are advised, the acceptable terms are ‘child displaying bullying behaviour’ and ‘child experiencing bullying behaviour’.
Where do they suppose this is going? Is an arsonist an arsonist or merely someone displaying the tendencies of a fire-starter?
When he burns your house down, are you properly a victim or merely the experiencer of behaviour of one displaying proneness to torching others’ property?
At what point on the scale of misdemeanours, I wonder, must the culprit own who and what they are?
And, more pertinently, how is the mollycoddling of bullies working out in Scottish schools thus far? By any measure, disastrously.
So emboldened are the disruptive elements in classrooms by the dearth of meaningful measures to control them that many have moved on from bullying classmates.
It is the teachers they target today. More fun – and look, they can do nothing about it.
Our schools are awash with teachers at the end of their tether. Many face daily verbal abuse from pupils whose feet would not have touched the ground a generation ago if they had dared to speak in such a way.
Other teachers are punched and kicked. A former music master I spoke to months ago was spat at, attacked, had his classroom trashed and his car keyed in the school car park – all in the space of the single year he was prepared to stay in his job at a state comprehensive in Dundee.
A national survey last year by the Educational Institute of Scotland found that 80 per cent of teachers had considered leaving the profession because of the rising tide of violence.
A second survey, carried out among Aberdeen teachers only, detailed their frustrations as they battled to control classes with too few resources and too little in their armoury to deal with daily bouts of aggression.
Sickening
Many railed at the ‘restorative practice’ ethos now in play, whereby sickening pupil behaviour is addressed in a conversation with the offending child to establish how they might work together to improve their discipline.
Others spoke of ‘gaslighting’ by senior staff who would invite teachers to consider how they could have handled the situation better.
Isn’t this latest guidance part of the same playbook? And isn’t the evidence now beyond overwhelming that it simply doesn’t work?
Bullying needs to be confronted head on. It needs to be nipped in the bud wherever in schools it occurs and if that experience is a sobering one for the bully, too bad – they had it coming.
It is to be hoped that the lesson they learn in childhood will set them on a better path for the future.
Better to shudder at the errors of youth than to keep making them in adulthood because schools were too concerned about our feelings to point them out.
And yet, what has taken place in the last decade of SNP power is a sea change in the moral syllabus in schools.
The old order is not only left untaught, it is – on the orders of government – actively traduced and dismantled.
Witness the results.
