The popular Olweus program has the wrong approach to bullying. It experiences strange young people daily.
(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
This is a contribution to the «Engaged utterance» column in the weekly magazine Ny Tid, in print 28.06.2013. In the column come various idealistic organizations are speaking. The participants are: ATTAC Norway, Nature and Youth, Agenda X, Skeiv Ungdom, Changemaker, One World, The Future in Our Hands, Bellona, the Joint Council for Africa, the Norwegian Society for Nature Conservation, MSF and NOAH – for animal rights.
Measures. Bullying is a term that is constantly being talked about in the media and among politicians. There is a broad agreement to work against bullying in Norwegian schools and municipalities.
In spite of this, surprisingly few people have any good answer on how to specifically combat bullying.
Gay activists from all over Europe gathered in Oslo from 18 to 23 June, for the conference «Stop H8 – Combatting bullying in Europe». The conference was organized by International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer Youth and Student Organization (IGLYO) in collaboration with Skeiv Ungdom here at home. After the end of the conference, there is one thing that is very clear to me. Bullying is far from a one-dimensional and uncomplicated concept. Just defining what bullying is can be a complicated affair.
There are many definitions of bullying. A popular definition in Norway is taken from the Olweus program, a program used by schools to combat bullying. In order to qualify as bullying under this program, some acts that have bad intentions must be taken, these must be repeated for some time. and one party must be in a weaker position of power than the other. This is a randomly selected definition.
My point is that whether abusive behavior fits into a constructed definition of bullying or not, it does not change an individual's experience of a situation such as abusive, threatening, hurtful or similar. On the other hand, one can be exposed to behavior that by definition qualifies as bullying without necessarily experiencing it as bullying. Being allowed to define one's own situation and one's own experience of one's situation is incredibly important to the sense of power in one's own life. For someone who has experienced bullying and all that entails, this is extra important.
In many schools, combating bullying is left to teachers. In the aforementioned Olweus program, it is the teachers who define the type of behavior to be turned down, and it is the teacher who enforces the reprimand when unacceptable behavior is shown and determines the consequences for it. This becomes the wrong approach when one wants to combat a problem that is largely about young people's everyday life and behavior.
Playing with teams you want to change your behavior seems to me a better strategy than shutting them out of the process. The pupils in the school are the problem that is closest to them, and that is where the expertise in what goes on lies.
Another challenge related to combating bullying is the focus on behavior. By focusing solely on behaviors such as looks, comments and actions, you are missing something on the goal. To combat bullying does not mean that everyone should be kind to each other. It is best to combat a symptom that is relatively useless in the fight against an epidemic. All the experience we have in Skeiv Youth with combating bullying and discrimination indicates that a focus on the structures that create the bullying is absolutely essential. What makes it possible to bully someone without intervening? To a large extent this is, as we see it, about norms in society.
In connection with homophobic and transphobic bullying, which is what we work with most, we can clearly see that this has its root cause in society's norms. Adolescents who somehow do not adapt to gender or sexuality expectations are being sanctioned for this. If you, as a boy, are perceived as "too feminine", it is in some sense allowed to comment and comment on it. This is an example of how unconscious norms and expectations lead to legitimization of bullying, and there are similar mechanisms around very many issues.
Norms are largely reproduced through unconscious actions. To combat this, everyone in the school, teachers as students, must be made aware of the norms and structures one has in one's school. Then we can together make an active choice about how to want it at their school, instead of reproducing attitudes that, by the way, legitimize bullying. This is also a theme that is about daring to see and understand new perspectives and structures.
By looking at these structures, it will be easier to detect bullying and understand that this is what is going on. This is how youth, with the help of adults, can combat bullying at their school in a meaningful way. ■
(This is an excerpt from Ny Tid's weekly magazine 28.06.2013. Read the whole thing by buying Ny Tid in newspaper retailers all over the country, or by subscribing to Ny Tid -click here. Subscribers receive previous editions free of charge as PDF.)
