What Julius Taught Me About Preventing Bullying

By Laura Panetta

Bullying is a complex issue and devastating for everyone affected by it. Victims often feel alone and unsupported. Their parents frequently feel helpless.

I have a younger brother, Julius. He has Down syndrome and an intellectual disability. I have always felt very protective towards Julius. Until I recently graduated, I went to the same local mainstream high school as him.

I long feared Julius would be bullied. I feared the noisy high school corridors congested with energetic hormone-heavy students pushing and shoving and worried about how Julius would navigate them safely.  In my mind, my short self-confronted imagined tormentors, saving the day for him. But as it turned out, while Julius has experienced conflict with peers every now and then, he hasn’t been bullied. So, I want to share what I think is an important realisation about why Julius hasn’t been bullied – even though as a student with intellectual disability, statistically, he is at high risk of bullying.

First, what is ‘bullying’? There is a lot of material on the internet about bullying.  Everyone agrees that bullying is deliberate and repetitive aggressive behaviour (physical, verbal or written/online) by a person (or persons) against another person. The bullying behaviour is usually based on some ‘difference’ between the person who does the bullying and the victim. There is also usually an imbalance of power between them (in other words, the victim does not feel that they have the power to prevent the bullying behaviour).

Why bully? I think most bullying is aimed at increasing the status of the person doing the bullying (whose status is often low) in the eyes of their group or community at the expense of the victim, or at decreasing (often eliminating) the victim’s sense of belonging within the group or community – often it seeks to do both. So, I think bullying is mostly about social standing or ‘pecking order’.

The key thing is that the propensity for bullying depends on the person who does the bullying believing that his or her behaviour against the victim will be ‘endorsed’ (actively or passively) by his or her social group. If they think that they will lose ‘respect’ or status by engaging in the behaviour, they will not do it. This means that the degree of morality or ‘culture’, and judgement, of the social group is very important.

We hear a lot of talk about ‘bystanders’ in the context of bullying – the people who are exposed to the bullying behaviour but who are not the intended victim. They are the audience.

There are different types of ‘bystanders’:

• Some bystanders can themselves be drawn into the bullying behaviour – fearing that if they don’t, they may be singled out and become victims themselves. They are usually morally disengaged and more susceptible to peer pressure and conformity.
• Most bystanders are passive, they ‘watch and walk away’, sometimes feeling guilty or uncomfortable because they didn’t defend the victim, knowing what happened was morally wrong. But in walking away quietly, they effectively reinforce the bullying behaviour and the exclusion of the victim.
• Some bystanders will try to belatedly ‘help’ the victim when the bullying behaviour is finished – they also do not pose any real downside for the social standing of that person and their after-the-event assistance to the victim does not usually undo the social damage.
• Then we have the ‘upstander’ – the bystander that actively confronts or resists the person doing the bullying and endeavours to protect or defend the intended victim. This type of person usually has sufficient ‘social capital’ (standing within the group) to resist peer pressure to conform and strong moral engagement to act. Underneath it all, the upstander usually has respect for, and understanding of, the ‘difference’ seized on by the person who does the bullying.

The reality is that while most bystanders know the bullying behaviour is ‘wrong’, usually they do not, by themselves, have the courage and social capital to defend or ‘upstand’. That is why stopping and defending against bullying frequently requires multiple bystanders with sufficient social capital and moral sense between them to ‘upstand’.

Preventing bullying, stopping it before it starts, must be the real goal for transformative change in our schooling system. A school responding after the bullying event, while critical to reducing the risk of further bullying, is never as good as preventing the bullying behaviour in the first place. Prevention of bullying in school environments will depend on creating strong inclusive school cultures that respect and understand difference. It is about consciously creating genuinely inclusive school cultures that devalue bullying behaviour and foster enough ‘upstanders’ with both social capital and strong morality to support and defend students with difference, disabled or not.

So how do we do that?

As the Australian Government’s Final Report from the Anti-Bullying Rapid Review says, bullying is a complex problem and preventing bullying takes strong school leadership and a whole-of-school approach to developing inclusive school cultures. But the Report does not, in my view, emphasise enough how critical the deliberate development of genuinely inclusive school cultures is to the prevention of bullying. If it did, the Report should have acknowledged that the most natural and organic way of mainstream schools fostering genuine inclusive school cultures is for them to proactively include and support students like Julius, students with disability and difference.

At the moment, our broader schooling system struggles with two relevant systemic issues:

• the segregation and exclusion of students with disability and learning difficulties in separate ‘special’ schools, units and classes – denying their human right to an inclusive education in mainstream schools and classes alongside their non-disabled peers; and
• bullying – which disproportionately affects students with disability and learning differences and is actually more prevalent in segregated ‘special’ schools and classes (because of the lack of non-disabled peers to protect and defend against bullying in segregated environments).

Improving genuinely inclusive education for students with difference means all students, and in particular non-disabled students, being exposed to and engaged with greater levels of student difference in their schools. This means more students developing empathy and understanding of difference, and of course appreciation of the challenges that result from difference. This exposure and understanding will no doubt increase the general levels of student moral engagement in relation to ‘difference’.

But a genuinely inclusive school culture is not achieved by simply ‘inserting’ students with disability or other difference within the student population.  A genuinely inclusive school culture must be actively and deliberately nurtured, grown and maintained. ‘Inclusion’, the valued participation and belonging of each student, cannot be just a ‘hoped for’ outcome. Rather, ‘inclusion’, like in my high school, must be a core value of the school itself – as important as any core value of the school and central to all school decision-making at every level.

But the most important thing to achieving a genuinely inclusive school culture and developing students with both social capital and strong inclusive morality, is to provide all students, from the beginning of their school experience and through their entire education, with the capacity and opportunity to support the inclusion of their student peers with difference. This also means giving students the authority and responsibility, through the exercise of their own ‘student voice’, to advocate for and realise the better inclusion of other students. This will all go a long way to developing greater moral engagement and student leadership – high value social capital.

A student facilitating the participation (both academically and, perhaps more importantly, socially) of students with difference, develops not only their own commitment to students with difference as valued members of the school community but deeper insights into the challenges that students face ‘below the surface’. It is inevitable that these insights over time will also hone their own skills to support friends and other students, as well as, importantly, themselves.

While inclusive measures may often be relatively informal and practical, some schools (including my high school) establish formal student structures, like ‘student circles of support’, student clubs and safe student spaces to better support the inclusion of students at risk of exclusion. For example, ‘student circles’, based on regular student-led discussions focussed on supporting at risk students, foster not only student inclusion through collective problem-solving but also student leadership and ‘student voice’.

The genuine inclusion of students with disability and difference, significantly, has ‘universal design’ benefits for preventing the bullying of non-disabled students. The concept of ‘universal design’ is often equated with design to enhance the participation of people with disabilities. Designing for the ‘outlier’ results in a design that assists everyone. The usual examples given are architectural – that a ramp or wide doorway intended to facilitate entry by a disabled person in a wheelchair also helps many others, like a mother with a pram, an elderly person with a walker or a person on crutches nursing a temporary injury.

Developing a school culture to include and support students with disability and difference clearly has universal design benefits for bullying prevention. Inclusive education, in developing more students with strong morality and social capital – more ‘upstanders’ – also creates a school culture that is more sensitive to fairness and more likely to be preventative of bullying students more generally.

The idea that including more disabled and at-risk students in mainstream schools may actually reduce general levels of bullying may seem counter-intuitive, as bullying of students with disability is not only a stereotype but also very real, serious and pervasive in many schools. The key point is that genuinely including and supporting students with disability and difference in mainstream schools by building genuinely inclusive school cultures rich in student morality, student voice and student leadership will help starve bullying behaviour – as the student community will be much less likely to passively endorse unfairness and more likely to judge and ‘upstand’.

This is what Julius’s experience in my inclusive mainstream high school has shown me – that true inclusion creates a natural ‘big sister’ effect through organically increasing moral engagement, social capital and leadership amongst the student population – each of which helps starve the likelihood of social ‘endorsement’ that could otherwise fuel or sustain bullying behaviour. In the last few years there have been a number of academic studies showing the positive link between student moral engagement and ‘upstanding’ resistance of bullying – so I think recognition of the importance of genuine inclusive education, the genuine inclusion of students with disability and difference, to bullying prevention isn’t far away.