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Hell in the playground: bullies harm their victims immeasurably, but are they just mirroring a nasty society?




Susan Flockhart



A FRIEND of mine – we’ll call him Donald – was ostracised as a child. They didn’t call it “bullying” in the 1950s. Back then, the term was reserved for the practice of torturing victims with sticks and stones to break their bones , and children subjected to playground taunts were comforted with the lie that names could never hurt them. As it turned out, of course, Donald was deeply wounded by the years of sly comments and exclusion, which have left him permanently lacking in self-esteem.
Nowadays, we all know about the traumatic impact of psychological persecution, no matter how insidious. School anti-bullying policies – on paper, at least – target any kind of behaviour that makes a child feel picked-on or left out. And last week, celebrities endorsed a campaign urging children to wear special wristbands in order to “take a stand” against bullies.

Would such an enlightened approach have helped Donald? He’s not sure. Firstly, he’s not convinced it would have been fair to label half his school population “bullies” just for failing to disguise the fact they didn’t like him. Distressingly, he adds that even if he’d been given the support network provided in many contemporary schools, he’d never have approached a teacher or senior pupil as he wouldn’t have expected anyone to care about a louse like him.

I mention Donald’s story because it illustrates the complexity of a subject generally portrayed as being clear-cut. Bullying is bad, its perpetrators are wicked and if we all don our wristbands and join hands, together we can drive the bullies to kingdom come. Furthermore, any school that doesn’t succeed in eradicating the genus “bully” has failed to do enough to stamp out the menace, and criminally liable for any victimisation on its premises.

Some of which is sometimes true. Bullying is always horrible and occasionally fatal. Between 15 and 25 children are known take their own lives each year because of the experience, and suicide notes and diaries provide harrowing insights into the hell experienced by victims. “Monday: My money was taken. Tuesday: Names called. Wednesday: Uniform torn. Thursday: My body pouring with blood. Friday: It’s ended. Saturday: Freedom.” So wrote 13-year-old Manchester schoolboy Vijay Singh, who was found hanging from a banister on the ominous Saturday referred to in his diary.

But the term “bullying” covers a vast spectrum of behaviours, including physical abuse, racial or religious persecution, teasing, name-calling and simply failing to include another child in conversation. Of course, there is no “simply” about being excluded or ignored. The point is, though, that the experience of bullying is thoroughly subjective: what cuts one child to the quick will be water off a more confident pupil’s back. So how should the perpetrators be punished – according to the severity of their actions or the impact on their victims?

To the parents of a bullied child, none of this nitty-gritty will matter. Watching your son or daughter suffer is excruciating and it’s just been revealed that the number of parents who called ParentLine Scotland because of concerns about bullying doubled last year. The charity Childline reports a 42% rise in the number of children seeking counselling because they’ve been bullied. Meanwhile, up to 50% of children say they’ve been bullied at one time or another.

Unless contemporary playgrounds really have become seething pits of hatred and cruelty, these figures surely reflect an encouraging awareness of the significance of bullying, and a broadening of the definition. But here’s another statistic. Up to 40% of children admit they’ve bullied others at some stage – and it seems likely that there are more who won’t confess their guilt.

So next time you attend a school “anti-bullying awareness evening”, have a look around at the parents who have gathered to hear teachers’ plans to protect their children. Chances are, every second person there has a kid who’s been responsible for some other child’s misery. You might even be one of them.




Nobody likes to think their child is that monstrous thing called a “bully”. It’s far easier to assume that those responsible for playground cruelty are mini-Hitlers – just as we prefer to believe that the soldiers who abused prisoners at Abu Ghraib were fiends. In reality, says Princeton University psychologist, Susan Fiske, they were ordinary people “conforming to the culture and expectations of their environment” and suffering from extreme stress. Fiske has performed wide-ranging research on torturers in order to “develop a scientific understanding of what causes evil actions, and how they can be prevented”. And that, I think, is what we need to do about bullying. Rather than branding kids with the B-word, we have to face the fact that these are ordinary children, examine the reasons for their nasty behaviour – and find a way of changing it.

Anti-bullying policies are a start. But those subtle acts of treachery – where groups of girls “forget” to include Janie in gatherings or boys imply, with a sneer and an eyeball roll, that Jamie isn’t cool enough – are hard to pin down. Some experts believe the answer is to encourage “bystanders” to intervene on their peers’ behalf. And although children are often reluctant to challenge bullies for fear of losing their place in the pecking order, research suggests that they can be encouraged to become more altruistically minded.

We can’t leave it to schools, however. With reality programmes like Big Brother and Wife Swap encouraging participants to pick on each other, and celebrities routinely slated in tabloids and magazines for their physical imperfections, our culture has become saturated by nastiness. So unless we want our kids to replicate, or tolerate, this kind of cruelty in the playground, parents have to instil values like kindness, and intervene when their offspring slag off a classmate or say that Jade Goody off the telly is a fat pig.

Ultimately, I suspect calls for bullies to be eradicated are futile. Like the poor, they will always be with us. But at least we can lessen their power by looking under our own roofs and targeting the enemy within our midst.