Universidad Nacional Andrs Bello

Facultad de Humanidades y Educacin

Carrera de Pedagoga en Ingls
Ctedra de English Language VI

Essay:

The Importance of Teachers on the Prevention and Identification of

Bullying Situations

Professor: Kate Bradford

Student: Angela Jara Nez.

Total Word count: 1594

Due Date: October 29th, 2013

The Importance of Teachers on the Prevention and Identification of

Bullying Situations
The concept of bulling has become a common topic on the XXI century society. It is not
uncommon to hear the shocking news that a teenage student committed suicide after months of
harassment, or to watch a film where one of the characters is forced to give all his or her money
to another classmate. Even ourselves might have memories of a situation where we were called
by offensive names or being publicly laughed at because of a mistake we did.
In the Chilean reality, there is a significant number of students who declare have been
victims of abusive situations. A 2006 joint study from the Chilean Ministerio del Interior and
the Ministerio de Educacion, which pooled over 14,000 students from 7 to 12 grade, of
public, semi-subsidized and private schools, showed that a 35% of the students perceive highly
frequent episodes of violence inside of their schools. A similar study from 2012, obtained as a
result that a 25% of the surveyed students have experienced fear to attend to school in the recent
year due to a possible episode of school violence against them. (Criteria Reseach, 2012). These
studies show the necessity of strong educational policies to prevent, detect and solve situations
where students perceive a risk over their physical and psychological welfare.
The present essay will try to address some possible school and teachers interventions to
prevent and solve episodes of bulling. In order to achieve this, it will start by giving a general
definition of bullying; next, it will mention the most common characteristics of victims of
bulling, followed by a description of which teachers attitudes and conceptualizations about
bulling might be interfering in the opportune identification of the mentioned behaviors.
The concept of bullying comes from the word bully A commonly accepted definition of a
bully is offered by the Merrian-Webster dictionary. It defines it as: a blustering browbeating

person; especially one habitually cruel to others who are weaker. It was used by the first time at
the end of the XVII century.
The U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, on its website Stopbulling.gov, offers a
more specific definition of bullying. It states that bullying is an unwanted, aggressive behavior
among school aged children that involves a real or perceived power imbalance. It also mentions
the period of time on which the episodes of violence occur, considering as an essential element
the repetition (or potential repetition) over time of the bullying behavior.
It is necessary to clarify that, despise bullying is considered a violent behavior; it does not
include all types of violent situations that might take place inside of a school. There is a
distinction between high-level forms of violence, which include physical assault using weapons
as knives or guns, and low-level, underlying or covert forms of violence, which considers
psychological violence (threatening, gossiping, spreading rumors, calling a student by offensive
names) and less damaging physical violence (making a classmate to stumble, pushing him, etc).
Bullying is considered among the second category. (Whitted and Dupper, 2005)
A recent research conducted in the United Kingdom by Green et al. (2010), which
interviewed and followed 15,500 students over two years, starting when the students were age 14,
identified the most common characteristic of victims of bulling. Females, students with special
educational needs or physical disabilities, teenagers with strong religious believes, young people
who live in a non-traditional family structure (foster families, single parent family) and students
who have recently changed school were identified as the most frequent victims of bullying . But
these indicators are not absolute, in some cases, as females and students with physical
disabilities; victimization tends to decrease with age, while others are sustained in time, as
students with special educational needs. In the case of students who have recently changed
school, the results are diverse: in some cases; previous victims of bullying did not repeat this

situation in a new environment, while others who had not been victims before the transfer, started
suffering from bulling in their new school.
The discourse, (understood as a system of statements which constructs an object
(Parker, 1992, p. 5, in Watkins et al. (2007)) that teachers have, along with the organizational
practices about bulling and violence, are apparently relevant for the prevention of outburst of
violence inside the school, when this is inserted in neighborhoods where rates of violence are
particularly high. Watkins et al. (2007), compare schools that have effective practices (named by
the authors as resilient schools) to keep school violence under control against others which
have been deeply influenced by the violence of their neighborhoods. The researchers discovered
that resilient schools play a proactive role in the prevention of violence, they have well
integrated, regular procedures that are known by all members of the school community and have
strong links with other social organizations on the area. Teachers who belong to these resilient
schools were characterized for having a sense of control over the situations: they did not restrain
themselves to blame students, parents or the environment for the occurrence of violence; on the
contrary, they concentrated on what they could effectively do to prevent and combat violence. On
the contrary, the researchers found that, in schools which succumbed to the surrounding violence,
they usually responded in a reactive way, teachers did not perceive a sense of control over the
episodes of violence, and they located the causes of violence outside the school.
Teachers knowledge (or believes) and attitudes toward bullying might play a decisive role
on the accurate detection of bulling situations. Mishna et al. (2005), after conducting a series of
interviews with Canadian teachers, described a series of factors that may interfere or contribute
on the teachers understanding and response to bulling situations. Among these factors are: the
teachers own experience about bullying during his or her childhood, degree of empathy toward
victims, whether they consider the episodes as serious or a normal childrens behavior, if they

considered the victim as responsible of the situation (his or her personality, how the childs
responded to the episodes) and the school environment and policies towards bulling. These
authors concluded that, in many cases, teachers only consider as bullying the episodes of physical
violence, while episodes of psychological bullying are usually not defined as violence by them.
The interviewed teachers justified their lack of intervention by arguing ignorance about how to
respond or not having observed the situation.
According to Whitted and Dupper (2005) a bullying prevention/intervention plan should
considered an active participation of teachers and other adults. Some of the possible interventions
should include: carrying out regular meetings for discussing bullying situations, encouraging
students for developing their own, consensual rules against bulling, integrating the concept of
bulling into the curriculum and promoting the inclusion of all students on both academic and
recreational activities.
The previously mentioned authors also highlight the importance of adults as role models.
According to them, all school personnel (should) model positive interpersonal skills and
cooperative learning, restraining themselves for showing a dominating or authoritarian
behavior with students. Another recommendation given by the authors is that teachers should
promote the reporting of bulling situations, and follow the institutions regulations when they
receive such information. Very related with the previous point, school personnel should present a
clear attitude that bulling is not tolerated under any circumstances, intervening immediately when
an episode is observed and offering a supportive, sympathetic response to the victims. To
conclude, when a bulling episode (or episodes) has been clearly established, the perpetrators
should receive nonpunitive, graduated consequences for their actions; avoiding the use of any
type of physical punishment in the process.

According to Whitted and Dupper (2005), an individual level of intervention is also

relevant. Despite the fact that this type of interventions are mostly in the hands of other
professionals, as psychologist, counselors or social workers, which can provide psychological
support or treatment (if necessary) to victims, bullies and bystanders; teachers can play a relevant
role at this level by promoting the development of social and problem-solving skills during
classroom activities, by encouraging bystanders to provide assistance to the victims, acting as
mediators. Teachers should also meet with parents of both bullies and victims in order to agree on
how to stop the episodes of violence (or informing the parents if their ignore it). Finally, from a
behavioristic perspective of intervention, teachers should reinforce immediately pro-social
behaviors (as it would be congratulating students for including in their workgroup a previously
ostracized classmate) as well as providing immediate consequences for bulling behavior. An
example of the later would be stopping a lesson right after hearing a student laughing at
classmate who is asking a question, in order to make the bully reflect over the effects of his
actions and making him offer an apology to the offended classmate.
To conclude, in a school system as the Chilean one, where only a few schools count with
the support of other types of professional, like Psychologist or Social Workers, the role of
teachers in the detection, prevention, mediation of bulling situations is fundamental. In most of
cases, they will be the only adults inside of the school community who could intervene when a
bullying situation takes place. As it was seen on the mentioned researches, teachers conceptions,
attitudes and discourses about bulling and school violence are largely influential on the opportune
intervention. If teachers understanding about bulling is based on common conceptions and
prejudice, most probably the more subtle, veiled types of bullying would remain undetected and
probably causing profound effects on the psyche and social development of both victims and
bullies.

References

Criteria Research, Centro de Estudios EvolutivosIntervencin del Nio de la Universidad del

Desarrollo and Ministerio de Educacin. Estudio sobre Bullying, Ciberbullying y Violencia
Escolar. Web.
<http://ww2.educarchile.cl/UserFiles/P0037/File/Inspector/7%20Mineduc%20estudio_vtr
%20bullying%20ciberb.pdf>

Definition of bully. Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. 2013. Web.

Green, Rosie, Aleks Collingwood and Andy Ross. Characteristics of bullying victims in schools.
National Centre for Social Research (2010). Web.
<https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/182409/DFERR001.pdf>

Ministerio de Educacin, Ministerio del Interior. Principales resultados del estudio nacional de
violencia en el mbito escolar. 2006. Web.
<http://ww2.educarchile.cl/UserFiles/P0001/File/CR_Articulos/Presentacion%20Estudio
%20Nacional%20de%20Violencia%20Escolar_2006.pdf>

Mishna, Faye et al. Teachers' Understanding of Bullying. Canadian Journal of Education / Revue
canadienne de l'ducation, Vol. 28, No. 4, pp. 718-738. Canadian Society for the Study of
Education. 2005. Stable. Web. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/4126452> . Accessed: 20/10/2013
14:10

U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. Bullying Definition. Web. <
http://www.stopbullying.gov/what-is-bullying/definition/index.html>

Watkins, Chris et al. School Violence, School Differences and School Discourses. British
Educational Research Journal, Vol. 33, No. 1, pp. 61-74. 2007. Web. <
http://www.jstor.org/stable/30032724> .Accessed: 27/10/2013 07:15

Whitted, Kathryn S. and David R. Dupper Best Practices for Preventing or Reducing Bullying in
Schools. Children & Schools (2005) 27 (3): 167-175. Web.
<http://cs.oxfordjournals.org/content/27/3/167.full.pdf+html>