During our house assembly and following our wellbeing program, tonight we focused on Racism and Stereotypes and how they lead to bullying.

We discriminate because we feel we protect ourselves, as a group, from those who are not just like us. Bullying is a result of a stereotype which quite often does not represent the truth.

There are several types of bullying that teenagers can experience, though some can be more obvious than others.

Being capable of identifying the forms of bullying and where they come from is the first step to enhance the awareness and feel confident to effectively tackle it around us.

Four common types of bullying :

Physical Bullying- This type of bullying involves hitting, kicking, punching, pushing and tripping, or stealing or damaging personal property. Physical bullying can cause both short term and long term damage

Verbal Bullying- Verbal bullying involves name-calling, insults, teasing, threats or homophobic or racist remarks. While verbal bullying can start out harmless, it can mount to levels that start affecting the individual target. Some signs of verbal bullying include things such as being withdrawn, becoming moody or a change in appetite.

Social Bullying- Social bullying, referred to as covert bullying, is often hard to recognize and can be carried out behind the target back. It’s often done to harm someone’s social status and/or to cause humiliation. Signs of this type of bullying include shifting towards being alone, mood changes and becoming withdrawn from a group of friends. Examples of this type of social bullying include:

• Lying and spreading rumours
• Rudely mimicking someone
• Playing nasty tricks to embarrass and humiliate
• Negative facial or physical gestures
• Encouraging others to exclude someone
• Damaging someone’s social acceptance or reputation

Cyber Bullying- This certain type of bullying can be overt and covert bullying behaviour. The bully would use digital technologies, including hardware like computers and smartphones, and software such as social media, texts, websites and other online platforms. Cyber can happen both in public or private and sometimes only the target and the bully know it’s occurring. Signs of cyberbullying may involve your child, after being on their phone or social media sites, more and becoming sad or anxious afterwards. Cyberbullying includes:

• Abusive or mean text messages or posts, images or videos
• Purposely excluding others online
• Posting nasty gossip or rumours online
• Imitating people online or using their log-in to hurt them

We also watched this interesting video about stereotypes and bullying.