When psychologist Jennifer Ryan was called to talk to teenagers who had been in a fight at school, her gut led her to speak first to the one who threw the punch rather than to the one who received it.
“I just knew something was up,” she recalls. “He looked at me, this big teenager with tears in his eyes, and he told me he couldn’t take it any more. He had put up with being bullied for years and he didn’t know what to do. He put up with it until he decked this guy.”
Punching someone is obviously not a desirable response, but this was one of many eye-opening moments for Ryan, whose work as a counsellor has introduced her to numerous children who put up with bullying. “Over the years, I became aware that many of these kids had not been getting appropriate intervention or good advice about how to deal with it.”
Building assertiveness skills
Ryan believes that a child who is being or has been bullied can benefit from building up confidence and assertiveness, and she set up a social enterprise called MyLife Solutions to help children and their families understand more about it.
“The kid who is bullied, being targeted day in day out, is often passive; they don’t make eye contact, they pick up a book and bury the head in it, they pull the scarf up to their eyes,” says Dublin-based Ryan, who considers it important to offer the training outside the school environment.
“This child isn’t going to benefit completely from someone coming into the school and talking to the whole group, where the kids who are hurting them are sitting beside them, so we take these kids out of the school environment and we do one- day workshops for the kids and, separately, for their families.
“We teach the child the skills to stand up for themselves.”
The workshop techniques are based on the ZAP assertiveness training developed by a UK charity, Kidscape, which Ryan came across while watching a TV documentary. “This programme seemed to be working and I’m not a fan of reinventing the wheel,” she says, “so I went to the UK and I trained in the techniques.”
As well as learning about the verbal and body language that can help them deal with bullying, children and teenagers on the courses can also benefit from seeing there are others in a similar boat, Ryan adds. “They don’t know the other kids in the room and they look around and see that bullying happens to other people too.”
The effects are almost immediate for some of the participants. “Some of the kids come in and at first they won’t make eye contact, but the parents tell us later that the skills their children learn with us have changed their lives completely. They can deal better with the bullying, or the bullying stops, and you can see a change in them even over the course of the workshop, that is what keeps us going.”
There is a fee, but Ryan is developing business models to keep it as low as she can. At the moment, the workshops are for children who have experienced bullying. Ryan and her colleagues work with schools to help improve awareness about anti-bullying skills, but ultimately she hopes to work with the children who are instigating the bullying too.
Surprise
Even though she set up a social enterprise, Ryan admits she is surprised to be described as a social entrepreneur. “The idea that I am an entrepreneur baffles me; I don’t have a business head,” she says, “but I have developed a board with people with the skills I don’t have, and I have a good idea that I know works. This service has to happen in Ireland and I have seen it change kids’ lives.
“It’s so magic to see kids walking in with their heads looking down, not wanting to talk about themselves; and then, after the workshop, they skip out the door.”
