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 Some signs of verbal bullying include things such as being withdrawn, becoming moody or a change in appetite.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 Signs of this type of bullying include shifting towards being alone, mood changes and becoming withdrawn from a group of friends.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.

Today we had our First Virtual Parent & Teacher Meetings and we are so proud of the girls and all the positive feedback we received.

We would also like to thank our Teachers and staff from Collège du Léman, which are directly and indirectly involved in their education and wellbeing. We are sure they are on the path of Lifelong learning, the voluntary act of learning throughout life. Discover the benefits of a learning mind-set for personal and professional development and we can only thank everyone for providing them with that.

Congratulation girls, for all your efforts and dedication.  We are proud of you!!  This is the way to go.  Go ahead  !!

After our October Break, we started the Second Pillar of our Wellbeing Programme, focused on Protecting against Bullying and Respecting Diversity. 

Through the next seven weeks, we will be asking students to explore an area of interest relating to this pillar through a podcast or other research area. We will be asking them to take note of their thoughts and feelings. The aim of this experience is to have a lasting impact on how the students view diversity or bullying. 

Tonight, during our weekly house assembly, we discussed what bullying is, what bullying includes, and how to deal with bullying at school.  Furthermore, and as we did in our First Pillar, students will think about an individual and a community project to carry out during this period, until the Christmas Break.

Tonight we had a special guest, Mrs Jody our boarding counsellor. The girls were happy to meet Mrs Jody and very grateful for this wonderful workshop.