Cyber Bullying? Are you sure?

 “You should be nicer to him,' a schoolmate had once said to me of some awfully ill-favored boy. 'He has no friends.' This, I realized with a pang of pity that I can still remember, was only true as long as everybody agreed to it.”  - Christopher Hitchens

There seems to be less bullying in our schools these days.  This is only based on my experience but I do work in education, two of my three kids are in school and I am a governor of a stellar academy in south east London.  So whilst I am no expert I am reasonably informed. 

Undoubtedly, part of that is because societal attitudes to issues such as race, disability, gender, sexuality and poverty - so often the foundations of any bully's repertoire in my day - have moved on a great deal since the 80s when I was at school.  But part of it is also because schools are much better at dealing with bullying than they were.  Effective campaigns are run, teachers are more aware of it and kids feel more confident in reporting it.

One of the tools schools use to combat bullying is the recording of data around bullying incidents.  Understandable given the second step in solving a problem is getting a handle on the scale of the thing (the first step in solving a problem is admitting you have one, remember?).  A lot of schools classify this data into 5 broad groups: 1) Racist bullying; 2) Homophobic bullying; 3) Sexist bullying; 4) Other and 5) Cyber bullying ... and for me this is a problem.  

You see, to you and me (the chair and treasurer of Will Carling's Boring Old Fart Club) cyber space seems like a disconnected unreal part of life which isn't as vivid or important as reality.  To the kids in our schools it is a space through which they navigate with seamless ease - transitioning back and forth from the virtual to the actual and back again without blinking.  This makes cyber space not a type of bullying but a space in which bullying occurs.

Don't get me wrong.  Understanding where bullying takes place can often inform strategies to deal with it - more staff on duty in the playground, staggered lunch times so the hall is less crowded etc. so the fact that this bullying takes place online is useful to know but it isn't the meat of the issue.  We need to understand the type of bullying that takes place online if we are to deal with it effectively.  If we carry on classifying it as 'cyber bullying' then schools may think that they have got a handle on racist bullying when in reality their problem has simply moved online and their assemblies and posters about tolerance, diversity and multi-culturalism are having little or no effect.

So I would encourage schools to drop 'Cyber Bullying' as a category and instead record it as one of the other categories to get a true picture of bullying in their school. Then reengineer your anti-bullying strategies to include the online space and educate and inform your school community.  Next week I will blog on some tips and tricks on how to do this.  Until then remember that unless you fully understand the nature of cyber bullying in your school then that homophobic bullying problem you thought you had dealt with may be alive and well and thriving completely under your radar.