People need to notice the bullying going on around them and refuse to put up with it, SuEllen and Paula Fried told an audience of Girl Scouts and community residents Saturday.
The two women were the keynote speakers at an anti-bullying conference at Emporia State University. Their book, “Bullies, Targets & Witnesses” examines the ways children find to abuse each other and what can be done about it.
“It’s so endemic you become numb to it and forget it’s there,” said Paula Fried, a clinical psychologist and former Girl Scout troop leader. “But kids have a tremendous amount of power they can use for the good... There are more kids who are witnesses than are bullies or targets. We need to involve them.”
She and her mother, SuEllen, who is an expert on child abuse, first realized how serious bullying could be when Paula was working with a 10-year-old girl who had cancer. The girl had to have repeated chemotherapy and was not expected to live. Still, she eagerly awaited the new school year, with one exception — recess.
“Recess?” SuEllen Fried asked curiously.
“Well, you see, at recess, there’s some kids who think it’s fun to pull off my wig,” the girl explained. “And then they form a circle around me and point at me and make fun of me because I’m bald.”
“We could never let go of the memory of a girl who was trying to figure out how to let go of her life, how to go about the journey of dying... and her biggest problem was kids making fun of her because she had no hair,” SuEllen Fried said.
How serious can it be? Youth suicides have doubled over the last 20 years, the Frieds said. Many left notes reading “I just can’t take it anymore.” Still other studies have shown connections between bullying and later criminal behavior, or how children who are bullied can’t concentrate on their schoolwork.
And bullying covers a lot more than just demanding lunch money on the playground. It can be the rumors that get spread singling out a person. Or a series of harassing “instant messages” on line. Or even outright sexual harassment.
“Some of the boys will talk about what they want to do to you and stuff like that,” said 11-year-old Melinda Wainwright, who was part of a girls’ panel on bullying at the conference. “They’ll say... wrong things.”
A lot of it can go unnoticed by adults. One study cited by the Frieds said that 70 percent of teachers believe they almost always intervene in a bullying situation, but only 25 percent of the students agreed with them. One parent at the conference said she had had a principal take a “no blood, no foul” approach — if there was no physical injury, there was nothing the school could do.
That’s where the witnesses come in. About 30 percent of children are either targets or bullies, the Frieds said. But 100 percent of children are witnesses. All of them can notice what’s going on and choose not to participate.
‘We’re not asking you to challenge the bully,” SuEllen Fried said. “Not everyone is confident enough to do that. But if you can do nothing else, you can take a target aside and say ‘I want you to know, I witnessed what happened and you don’t deserve to be treated that way.’ For a child who has been picked on day after day and has begun to internalize the comments, for one person to say ‘you don’t deserve to be treated that way’ is like water to a thirsty person.’”
So what can the targets do? Best of all is to stand up to a bully, the Frieds said. Sometimes ignoring works, if it’s done with confidence — head high, not slinking away with chin down and shoulders hunched. Sometimes even confusing the bully can work or using humor. One child who had routinely been called “pizza face” because of his zits, the Frieds said, deflected it by joking about it: “So, do you want pepperoni? Anchovies? Extra cheese?”
Whatever you do, the Frieds said, don’t give up until the bully stops. And parents, they said, need to pay attention. If their child seems to stay home from school a lot, or seems more withdrawn or aggressive than usual, or if their school performance is suffering for no obvious reason, there may be some bullying going on in the background.
“It’s not something that just happens there,” SuEllen Fried said. “It happens here.