While most bullying is relatively mild, involving intimidation rather than physical harm, experts fear ‘kids are getting meaner’. These bullies – from all classes – are generally good kids until something goes wrong, says psychologist Kiran Sarma
TWO 13-YEAR-OLD girls are walking in a park near their homes in a leafy middle-class southside Dublin neighbourhood. They are approached, taunted and then assaulted by a gang of girls who knock them to the ground, kick them and pull out fistfuls of their hair. When the parents of the victims report the incident, it turns out the gang leader has caused trouble before and already has a J-Lo, teenage parlance for juvenile liaison officer.
A 12-year-old boy playing football with friends in a seaside area is attacked by a group of older youths. The gardaí respond sensitively to the victim and the parents learn that the teen ringleader is already known to gardaí and was implicated in three previous reported incidents on the same day.
Summer is a time when hormone-pumped teens want and deserve to have fun and stimulation. While most of them manage to find constructive activities, there’s a minority whose efforts to escape boredom become a public nuisance for adults, and a source of fear for other teens.
Usually the troublemakers are annoying, rather than deadly – ordinary adolescents let out of school for the summer who congregate in groups in public spaces: parks, beaches, shopping centres.
Sometimes things go bad due to the dynamics within the group and it doesn’t take much for problems to escalate, says Dr Kiran Sarma, a psychologist at NUI Galway who has trained gardaí at Templemore in how to handle adolescents.
These are generally good kids until something goes wrong, says Sarma. When five or six of them are together, one will set the agenda. To become the leader, he or she needs to be more extreme in attitude and behaviour than the others in the group.
When group members copy the leader’s behaviour, the leader feels compelled to remain leader by outdoing them, creating a cycle of more and more extreme behaviour, and sometimes violence.
“All it takes is one person in the group who is a bit mean and it goes from being a nice group to a mean group . . . It has nothing to do with class or culture,” says Mary Ellen Ring, a lawyer who deals with anti-social youths in court.
“I do worry that kids are getting meaner,” she adds. Maybe what we’re seeing this summer is a self-centred post-boom generation with too much confidence, too little respect for others and low boredom thresholds because they’re used to getting everything they want, she suggests.
Social networking sites encourage bullying by depersonalising people, a factor that has led to teen suicides. Add to this mix parental neglect – “every bully has a parent who bullies them,” in her experience – and you get arrogant teens with no empathy for the feelings of others.
Yet while psychologists and lawyers have explanations, the parents who have to deal with the consequences for the victims of these bullies feel frustrated nothing seems to be done about it.
Some parents encourage their children to shrug it off, but being assaulted by a gang of your peers has serious psychological consequences for young victims, says Sarma. Parents and other members of the family may also feel affected, which in turn can affect the family dynamic. It needs to be taken seriously.
Some parents don’t report incidents to the Garda because they fear it will have repercussions for their child, making them the target of further abuse.
At a barbecue in a well-off Dublin suburb this summer, dozens of parents are gathered around discussing the latest incident, where a few of their boys were victimised by a local gang. About eight out of 10 of the parents are opposed to complaining to the Garda because it will only make things worse. Sure, didn’t that sort of bullying always happen and don’t the boys just have to learn to toughen up and deal with it.
“There is under-reporting,” says Maeve Ryan, co-ordinator of the Crime Victims Helpline, which sometimes hears from parents in a quandary about how to respond to their teenage child being victimised by a gang of other adolescents. Attacks by girls on other girls have been particularly vicious, she says.
Parents tell Ryan they fear making a statement to the Garda will result in their child being targeted again by the gang. Teens worry if they tell anyone, they will be called a “snitch” and be victimised all over again.
When teen ringleaders do come to the attention of gardaí, they may eventually end up with a specially trained juvenile liaison officer and in what’s known as the “diversion” programme.
“Usually these are good kids who have done something stupid,” says Sarma. Teen offenders and their parents meet with juvenile liaison officers in an attempt to motivate the teen to change their behaviour. But while gardaí who become juvenile liaison officers are “the best in the force”, says Ring, their interventions may fail.
“I suspect that when interventions don’t work, it’s because the parents haven’t followed through.”
While most bullying incidents are relatively mild, there is always the fear for parents that their child will be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Says Ring: “We all know of kids being left for dead or in a bad condition.”
‘People are getting bored and starting fights for no reason’
MEGAN HAYDEN (18), from Dalkey, was walking along when someone in a car threw a milkshake at her.
“It was pretty crazy.”
She also had her bag grabbed and destroyed while waiting at the Dart station. Taunting gangs from other schools have shouted at her that she’s a “posh-over” because she went to Loreto Dalkey. The behaviour is intimidating rather than physically harmful.
Southside Dart stations and the main street in Dún Laoghaire are the riskiest places. Gangs will try to pick a fight by taunting. “Look at your fancy phone . . . What’s that you’re wearing.”
Megan is on a summer workshop in Cabinteely with Dún Laoghaire Youth Theatre. She talked with her friends on the workshop about bullying: “Everyone agreed that it definitely happens and lots said it has happened to them.”
Out and about over the summer, you get shouted at from across the road or approached and “pushed around a bit”. The hurt is more mental than physical.
“You do feel a bit frightened,” says Megan, who is waiting for her Leaving Cert results and hopes to study psychology at university in the autumn.
Why does she think people gather in groups and behave this way? “Everyone is kind of trying to find where they can fit in and be happy, and there’s probably an element of fear to that. There’s also a power complex, people wanting to be the centre of attention.”
Becoming leader of a group or clique means proving your leadership by being cruel to outsiders. It all starts in secondary schools, she thinks, where cliques abound and it’s rarely discussed and nothing is done about it.
KEELIN BROWN (18), who is volunteering at the Dún Laoghaire Festival of World Cultures, says protecting yourself means crossing the road to avoid gangs, who will try to pick an argument if you walk too near. Threatening behaviour takes the form of "gestures and talking and stuff".
Keelin has never been physically injured, though she knows a girl whose nose was broken on the main street in Dún Laoghaire. You have to know who to avoid and who not to and whether you should cross the street or not,” says Elaine Brown (16), who is hanging out this summer in Dalkey.
IN THE WESTERNsuburbs of Dublin, the story is similar, with gangs of youths – male and female – prowling with cans in their hands, congregating in parks and looking for trouble.
“There’s a lot of it going around this summer. People are getting bored and starting fights for no reason,” says Seanagh (16) who, with friend Emma (17), volunteers with Foróige, Ireland’s largest youth organisation, involving 50,000 young people.
Some of the bullies are as young as 11. “They think they’re hard men,” says Seanagh. “People might be walking home for their dinner and if they are on their own, they’re targeted. You don’t even have to be on your own. I know one group of three friends and a gang ‘killed’ them.” By killed, she means they were beaten up and terrified.
Most teens she knows don’t report incidents to the Garda because they fear repercussions from the gangs, and “there’s only so much the gardaí can do”. When aggressive young people, despite Garda intervention, get away with it, it only makes them do worse things, she says.
Even telling your friends you’ve been harassed or assaulted by a gang can lead to “ongoing war”. When word gets around, hostilities build between the gang and the victim’s neighbours and friends.
"It's not right," says Emma. "It can sometimes be scary when you're on your own." Kate Holmquist
