Sir, – Your headline; “37% of children aged nine ‘bullied’” (Home News, September 11th), is disingenuous and dangerous. If it were true it would mean nine children in a class of 25 (11 in a class of 30) were to be regarded as bullied. That number of children may tend to be teased, taunted, shunned, pushed or kicked but not in a way that ought to be defined as bullied.
The risk is that “true” victims remain under the radar. I spent five years as part of a research group commissioned by the Swedish government to investigate effective measures against bullying. Part of the strategy required developing a new assessment procedure where 10,000 children (aged nine to 16), in three waves, were asked if certain things (pushed, picked, shoved, teased, excluded, cyber-taunts) had happened to them, with certain degrees of frequency. They were never asked if they were bullied. The word was never mentioned in the questionnaire. Instead, a follow-up question asked if they thought the thing(s) had happened “for a laugh”, “because they were fighting” or because they understood the perpetrator(s) was “trying to hurt them/make them feel bad”. We deemed a child bullied if intentional harm was perceived and that the harm had occurred with a frequency of more than once “in the last couple of months”.
This strategy (see Flygare, Gill & Johansson, American Journal of Evaluation, 2013) yielded an estimate of about seven to eight per cent of children (equal for boys and girls) being bullied at any one time, that is, about one or two children in any school class – a long way from nine to 11. Uniquely, for a study of this size, we sought and were given permission to use the participating children's personal identification numbers. This meant that we were able to follow their bullied status over an 18-month period. We were able to show that schools intervened successfully (using various strategies) for about four to six per cent (ie, in about 70 per cent of cases). New victims were recruited at about the same rate (less in the most successful schools). The crucial finding was that about 1.5 per cent of the 10,000 children were to be regarded as victims of persistent bullying – this corresponds to about one child in every second class. It is within this cohort (15 children in a school of 200) that life-long trauma occurs and school-shooters may nourish their hatred.
Here “the system” may be deemed to have failed these children utterly and will continue to fail them if teachers and parents think that 74 children of 200 are being bullied. Of course schools should have strategies against teasing and taunting but conceptualisations of the problem should see it as the horror of the few rather than the shared experience of many. – Yours, etc,
PETER GILL,
Professor Emeritus,
Clare Island,
Co Mayo.