Little terrors

>> A new children's rights organization is spreading the message that it's bad to be a bully

by JACQUIE CHARLTON

After the shock, grieving and wondering why died down in the aftermath of the shootings at Columbine High, a one-word message emerged, so compelling that the people in the town started wearing it on a badge: respect. If only those two alienated boys had been treated with a little more of it, the thinking went, the killing of 15 people might not have happened.

Max Wallace, the director of a new Montreal children's rights organization called Children's Rights Watch, has talked to kids in Montreal who have been bullied, asking them if, in their darkest moments, they'd ever considered taking a few of their schoolmates' lives. A few, without a moment's hesitation, have told him yes.

Wallace's organization seeks to establish a program of zero tolerance for bullying in Montreal's English schoolboard, based on programs that have been successfully used in the United States. Oddly enough, they began there not as a result of everyday violence, but because of a wave of lawsuits against schools, launched by parents who alleged their children were being sexually harassed by other children.

American schools began rigorous intervention programs that involved distributing questionnaires to reveal the extent of the problem, increasing adult supervision at recess, setting up parental awareness campaigns, encouraging kids to help victims and creating an environment where bullying was not tolerated.

Here in Montreal, Wallace has spoken to school principals as well as kids about the issue, and has been busy enlisting bands and YTV stars as role models to speak out against it.

Ostracized and suicidal

The problem, says Wallace, is the lack of will to eradicate bullying. In schools, teachers intervene when kids fight in the schoolyard, but when one child persistently demeans another or a group ostracizes someone different, teachers often don't give a damn.

"After Littleton, schoolboards started talking about safe schools, and there was all this emphasis on taking away kids' knives and guns," says Wallace. "But they totally ignored the cause."

Indeed, student surveys have shown that a low percentage of students believe adults will help. They feel adult intervention is infrequent and ineffective, and that telling adults about bullying will only bring on more harassment.

"There's a survival of the fittest attitude here," says Wallace. "They'll say, 'boys will be boys,' or 'I was bullied and it didn't do me any harm.' Lots of people remember being bullied by teachers themselves. If you ask a kid who's bullied, 'Doesn't your teacher see?' most will say they do, but do nothing about it."

The consequences of bullying range from an avoidance of school (studies have shown that seven per cent of America's eighth-graders stay home at least once a month because of bullies) to suicide (bullying is the leading cause of suicide among children).

Racial-based bullying--which Wallace says is especially prevalent in Quebec--results in the growth of gangs, which groups of kids create as a defense mechanism.

Pint-sized criminals

As for the bullies, 60 per cent of them, Wallace says, go on to get a criminal record by the time they're 24. "If you stop them from bullying when they're young and teach kids about respect, you stop a lot of problems later on."

It may not always be that simple, though. Bullies, studies show, come from homes where physical punishment is used, where children are taught to strike back physically as a way to handle problems and where parental involvement and warmth are lacking. They've learned to feel accepted through feeling powerful and in control, have little empathy for their victims and often defend their actions by saying their victims provoked them in some way.

"If schools can pinpoint these behaviours, these kids should get help," Wallace says.

Local solutions lacking

Social workers are few and far between, however. Westmount Park Elementary School, for example, has one on site only one day a week. And talk to the English School Board of Montreal about their policies on bullying, and they'll tell you about something called peer mediation training--a successful means of teaching kids how to avoid fights, but not the ticket for a kid who's ostracized by his entire class or a kid with an uncontrollable urge to make a small kid feel even smaller.

George Koutsoulis, social animator and ethno-cultural school worker with the English Montreal School Board, says kids are "encouraged" to report verbal abuse, but when asked to specify how, only said that each school in the board had its own way of dealing with problems. Koutsoulis vaunted the Board's safe-school policy: a weapons identification project.

But for Wallace, real safety for kids is a lot more complex; the rewards, on the other hand, can be huge: "Bullying is not just something that stops in the schoolyard. People bully their spouses, people bully their employees--there are all kinds of bullies in this society. Think of what influence you can have if you start educating people at an early age."