The role of Heart to Heart Child Advocacy Center staff is to be ongoing advocates for all children who are suffering from abuse, neglect or exploitation.
Some of the children who come to us are or have been the targets of bullying by other children and less frequently by adults.
Some children report being teased and harassed about circumstances over which they had no control or are, in some cases, untrue vicious lies that have been made up to harass a child.
Many of these target children suffer in silence because they begin to feel a sense of shame that rightfully belongs on the bully.
By definition, harassment is when hurtful or upsetting things are repeatedly said or done to a person.
Teasing and name-calling are forms of harassment.
Another form of harassment by a bully is to exclude someone by encouraging others not to have anything to do with them, spreading stories, ignoring and not speaking to them.
Harassment also can be in the form of SMS messages on phones and in e-mails.
Bullying can get started when a bully wants to feel socially powerful and takes pleasure in watching the target’s distress. They may tease, laugh insanely, block and push the target child and in other ways try to get the child to cry and show distress.
Psychologically and developmentally, the bully needs counseling in order to gain social skills and learn empathy.
The target child often needs counseling to overcome the abuse by other children.
Sometimes bullying gets started when parents are in conflict. The parents’ hostility filters down to the children.
The kids then round-up some friends and proceed to harass and verbally abuse their target who is the child of the people with whom their parents are in conflict.
The children’s conflict broadens and escalates the original conflict until multiple families are involved in a war of words and mutual harassment.
This is a plea to parents, if you find this is true for you, stop and gather the children. Explain that the disagreement is between adults and assure the children you will work it out. Then do so! Call a mediator if needed and appropriate to the situation.
Research shows young people who bully others are much more likely to end up in prison as adults.
Most likely, those young people did not learn positive ways of dealing with anger and conflict as children.
Thus, they carried in to adulthood bullying behaviors that are unlawful and, as adults, they finally are held accountable for those behaviors by the courts.
Heart to Heart staff takes reports of bullying and harassment very serious because they are forms of abuse of a child and are serious obstacles to the wellness of a child and that child’s family.
When a report of bullying comes to Heart to Heart, we give the following advice:
1. Stand your ground and tell the bully to stop. (Hey you, stop being a bully!) Parents may have to do this for young children but even children 7 to 8 years old can learn to do this when the bullying is by a peer. If the bully does not stop,
2. Ask publicly in front of others and politely for the harassment to stop.
3. If the harassment continues, go to the nearest phone, call 911 and ask for a police officer to come and investigate.
4. If the harassment continues after law enforcement is involved, engage a lawyer to be a legal advocate for the child because your lawyer can file a petition with the court for a restraining order.
Please do not consider bullying to be a normal part of growing up. It is not!
Friendships may not last and there may be conflict between children, but conflict can be resolved. If you are a parent or related to a child who is bullying and harassing another child, please take action now to get your child the help he/she needs to learn compassion for others.
At Heart to Heart and as a community, we do not want our children suffering in silence.
We do not want any child to suffer the long-term consequences of having been bullied.
Marlene Lemmer Beeson, J.D., is executive director at Heart to Heart Child Advocacy Center in Newton.
