Bullying

We have now moved onto the second pillar of our wellbeing programme and our focus is on Protecting against Bullying and Respecting Diversity.

Bullying is a tragic part of many students school lives. A reported 1 in 5 students may experience some form of bullying. It is also an unnecessary part and avoidable!

In our small groups, we first sought to understand what the student’s definitions of bullying were. A few struggled to put into words their thoughts on this and from the different nationalities and backgrounds, we had different definitions.

What is Bullying?

When a person uses strength to harm others

When someone seeks to harm

Its an action against others to harass a single person

A repeated, unwanted, aggressive behaviour

Threatening, forcing and dominating weak people

We then discussed our views on this and agreed bullying had to be a repeated offence. That the act had to be unwanted and that it was an imbalance of power.

Our formal definition is

Bullying is a deliberate and repeated unwanted aggressive act or word, involving a real or perceived imbalance of power. Bullying can be verbal, social, or physical, and includes communications made in writing or electronically. Students who bully use their power to control or harm others. Power can be physical strength, popularity, or access to embarrassing information.

We then continued to discuss situations in which we have felt the impact of this. How this made us feel and what we did about it.

We then discussed what we as individuals and as a community could do to try and prevent bullying here.

The student’s thoughts were:

We need to be respectful of others opinions

We need to show an understanding of differences

We need to smile more

We need to be more resilient

We need to educate people on the harm of bullying

We need to show a zero-tolerance towards bullying and if we see something, then we should say something