When you understand the ways in which bullying can affect and hurt others there are many anti-bullying strategies you can put into use.

The definition of bullying is to purposely hurt or damage another person over a period of time rendering them incapable of defending themselves. Bullying comes in several forms such as physical and verbal abuse, maliciously gossiping about someone, or isolating a person from a social group.

The most successful anti-bullying strategies involve educational workshops enabling school staff members to understand how this behavior affects children and stops them achieving their educational goals; start a procedure in which the act of bullying is neither accepted nor helpful to learning by setting up policies which deal with each arising situation in an fitting and successful manner; to involve the parents or guardians when developing and putting into practice anti-bullying strategies; to become committed to providing opportunities and equal treatment for all children; and lastly to allow for professional experts from outside of the school to join in the system, enabling them to manage every case in an open, honest way, thereby finding solutions to the problems using a different approach.

Even though there are workshops on an ongoing basis for pedagogues, additional information should be readily available about the affects of bullying within the schools. An anti bullying network to discover new strategies for dealing with bullying in an effective manner should be utilized for teachers, paraprofessionals, guidance counselors, school aides, and any other personnel in the school environment.

Additionally, small groups of children being supervised by teachers should talk about the recurring problems in connection with bullying and decide which approach should be used to put an end to this sort of behavior. All members of the school, be it staff or students need to feel confident and at ease when dealing with incidents which fall under the bullying umbrella.

Such anti-bullying strategies do work in some schools. However, in order for every single school to be capable of handling the many problems which arise from bullying, an anti bullying program needs to be implemented and headed up by guidance counselors, social workers, teachers, school aides, parents, children and representatives from the school-based support team.

Once the program is up and running, every parent and each child in the school should be given a copy of what is involved, demonstrating that the responsibility to make it work and provide safety for the children lies with everyone. Action should be taken straight away when an incident occurs, by way of investigation and the whole affair will need to be recorded on line as well as having incident report forms completed and distributed to the appropriate agencies.

Once an incident is brought to light and reported, steps should be taken to deal with the bullying and the process of anti-bullying procedures should kick in quickly and sensibly.

© By Mandy-Jane Clarke

Stop-Bullies.com