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Is your child a victim of the bullying monster?
A survey by IMRB and ParentCircle show that nearly 33% of school children are bullied. School principal Sukumaran suggests that schools should make older and younger students work as team. School counsellor Rina says, confidence-building, anger management sessions and workshops on regular basis
No one had imagined that 14-year old Raunak Banerjee who was terrified of heights would jump off from the 10th floor of his apartment on June 29. The class IX student from Baldwin Boys’ High School left behind a suicide note which read, “One of my schoolmates bullied me, it has been happening and it is intolerable. Those who I considered my friends have betrayed me.”
An equally painful case was that of Hari’s (name changed) who was tortured by bullies from a neighbouring school. The class IX students beat him up and demanded him to get liquor. Failure to comply would result in public beating. Hari did manage to buy a bottle and was about to smuggle it in his school bag when his father caught him. Shamed and dejected the 15 year-old decided to take his life by jumping in front of a speeding train, but not before he wrote a suicide note. Hari was extremely lucky as his mother traced him before he could take the leap.
A study conducted by research agency IMRB and ParentCircle (2015) show that nearly 33% of school children are bullied. The survey queried 2,700 respondents across the country with equal number of parents and children.
Opinions of Principals and school authorities corroborate the findings of the above research. They agreed to the presence of bullying on school campuses but it depends on the “kind of school your child attends. Bullying does happen but in schools it is a small thing,” says Maya Sukumaran, principal, Geetanjali School.
Uday Kumar, registrar of an international school in Bachupally says that CCTV surveillance in classrooms and corridors helps them to track children. “There are no committees as such but our teachers are approachable and we also have a counsellor who holds regular session with the students. Ragging and bullying is not something we tolerate.”
When counsellors were questioned about bullying, they did not mince any words about the practice of bullying. “Bullying is quite rampant,” says Rina Reddy, child psychologist and former school counsellor. She also said that bullying can be subjective as what may be a perfectly normal activity for parents, counsellors, teachers or principals may amount to bullying to a child. Another problem area according to Reddy is that most complaints against bullying are never reported. In many cases, the victim is too scared to approach the authorities while in others, they simply don’t have faith in the authorities as being capable of helping them out or even label their complaint as problem of bullying.
For example, Hari shared with the police that he had informed about the bullies to his class teacher, who ignored the complaint and actually told him to not speak about it to anyone.
Member of State Commission for the Protection of Child Rights, Achyuta Rao retorts that schools today are busy charging exorbitant fees and yet fail to provide holistic development. The child rights activist laments that despite there being a provision that mandates for schools to have a trained psychologist or counsellor, most, if not all, ignore it.
Whats the solution?
Bullying was one of the prime topics of discussion at a recent policy research conclave at Geetanjali School. A survey in the school revealed that as many as 45% of the students were ‘extremely concerned about bullying’. Students of class XI gave two suggestions to counter the menace. Firstly, a prototype was developed which had an in-built panic button that would immediately alert the authorities upon pressing. The second measure was the introduction of a blog where students can write anonymously.
School principal Sukumaran suggests that schools should make older and younger students work as team and not aggregate them. “This instills a sense of responsibility in children,” she adds. While agreeing that there is a need for a single window to deal with bullying cases, she quips, “Only for big incidents. But steps should be taken so that no such incidents happen.”
In school counsellor Rina’s view, confidence-building, anger management sessions and workshops on regular basis is the ideal solution to deal with bullies. “Group sessions and workshops must be held in classes at least twice a month to spread awareness about what bullying is and the impacts it has. These workshops should be followed up by team building exercises to promote comradeship between peers,” says Rina.
What unites both these suggestions is the emphasis on increasing the comradeship and comfort levels between older and younger students. Only when they consider each other as parts of a whole will this animal of bullying be tamed.
* Read the original story by Sadaf Aman on www.newindianexpress.com
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