Practitioner

Articles

  1. A Fresh Approach to Peer Victimization – John Dominguez
  2. Why Punishment Won’t Stop a Bully – Alfie Kohn

Synthesis

The article from Education Week and the other from Reclaiming Children and Youth both draw attention to the importance of seeing bullying as a cultural problem, rather than a problem with a few select students. In both of the articles, there is a high level of stress that gets placed on reinterpreting what is actually going on during the bullying process and the reactions and punishments to it. The RCaY article touches on how in order to rid bullying, it has to be seen as part of a larger issue – a cultural issue that has to be given “no wind to sail or air to breathe” (Dominguez, 2013).  The second article from EW focuses on how punishment does not stop a bully, in fact it only reinforces these behaviors.

A Fresh Approach to Peer Victimization brings forth the idea that the programs that have been established in the 1990’s have faded out in part because it has failed to change the culture in schools. The author, John Dominguez, worked for 18 years in various children agencies and other schools. He decided to create his own program in Illinois after realizing that many students may say that understand what they’re doing wrong, yet won’t make the fundamental behavioral changes. He suggests that it is due to the social status that comes with bullying and and influence you have over other people. As a result of this realization, Dominguez used this program to test it on a school of 125 students and after 5 years he brought the results to the Illinois School Psychology Association, where he demonstrated a significant decrease in bullying incidence. In his program, he stresses providing social support to victims and by educating bystanders to confront their fears and to do the right thing. It is then, where students and teachers can come in as people who should look at bullying as less of a individual case and as a symptom of a larger problem.

In addition to the plea for a cultural change and a consciousness shift, there are also discussions in how punishing students and maintaining a zero-tolerance policy reproduces the bully problem. A lot of bullies are often facing punitive measures and are faced with consequences that do not help them learn, but rather make them less trusting of people that wield more power (teachers and parents). The Why Punishment Won’t Stop a Bully discusses how holding students accountable and to punish them severely only upholds a “moral imperative”, but does little to practically benefit the student. On top of this, there is an irony here – “punishing kids who bully not only fails to address the source of the problem, but actually makes things worse” (Kohn, 2016). Due to the punishment, children who are bullying others now feel like they are being bullied and there is a reinforcement of this idea that you can get your way by exerting your power over those that are weaker. Furthermore, these students are more focused on themselves and they will likely not care how their actions affect others. By challenging the way we view punishment, as a kind of bullying in itself, and by thinking how bullying can be expanded to people also like parents and teachers, there can be great change.

These articles both suggest that there needs to be a cultural change. It is important to recognize that bullying often has been viewed as an individual problem and as something that is defective with a certain child or his circumstances. Both Dominguez and Kohn demand that we look more introspectively and with more depth in understanding the bullying epidemic. Despite the overlapping similarities, Kohn disagrees that just encouraging intervention by bystanders can help and that in order to change the situation, we have to find ways that can curb bullying and restructure the entire environment on an institutional level. In order for bullying to be defeated, the ways in which we respond to it needs to change as much as we need to shift the way we think about bullying as an individual problem.