Understanding School Bullying Policies

I know in my last post I assured everyone that I had a Takeaway Technique for you, but I'm putting that off yet again.  It is coming, I promise, but today I'm taking a quick detour to talk about bullying policies.

Oh, high school, how I don't miss you.  Photo Credit.

In the United States where I live, schools' policies about bullying vary between school districts and individual schools.  Private schools especially are likely to have their own school-specific policy, but even in public schools there is no guarantee of consistency from one school to the next.  Most anti-bullying policies sound good on paper, but in practice some are better than others.

Imagine, for a moment, that you are working for a school and have been tasked with writing a school's bullying policy.  Obviously, you don't want bullying to happen at all, but you recognize that it will happen, and what you write determines how it will be handled.  So, how should it be handled?

Ideally, if you are in that position of power, your primary goal will be to minimize bullying and protect the victims.  However, this is very hard to do with a policy.  How do you create a blanket statement for how bullying will be punished fairly?  How do you handle cases that are not clear-cut as far as who the instigator is and who the victim is?  What do you do if the school misjudges who is the aggressor and instead punishes the kid who was only trying to defend himself?  What do you do if the parents of the students involved don't agree with how the school has handled the problem?  And, what happens if your policy seems fair on paper, but eventually an edge case comes up where everyone can see that a bully is behaving egregiously, but according to "the letter of the law," he has done nothing wrong?

Creating a fair and effective bullying policy can get especially murky when the bullying is not physical and occurs in digital spaces that are less visible to teachers and parents.

Violence is incredibly complex (and bullying even more so because it is not always physical), so creating a policy to handle bullying can be daunting.  One solution is to make it vague, giving educators and administrators more leeway in handling specific cases.  This comes at a price, though, because educators and administrators are often already stretched very thin.  This gives them an extra workload, and a high-pressure one at that.  What happens if they make a mistake and mishandle a case?  What happens if the case is handled fairly, but the bully's parents disagree and threaten to sue?  Can the school afford to pay damages?  What will happen to the quality of education if the school has to pay out a massive settlement?

One way to protect against this is to minimize transparency.  The school probably already has a policy to protect the privacy of students' personal information including grades and disciplinary record.  By expanding the confidentiality policy, you can ensure that the victim and the victim's family don't learn of how the situation was addressed at all.  All you have to say is "We are conducting an investigation and will respond appropriately."  The parents will have to take your word that the situation is being addressed sufficiently.

With this kind of policy, the school is protected and the students' well-being is entrusted to the adults who can address the situation on a case-by-case basis.  So, is this policy effective?

Hopefully.  'Cause this is awful.  Photo Credit.

Hopefully, under a policy like this, the teachers and parents will handle any situations well.  Usually the school and its employees have the best of intentions, but when it comes to resolving issues, the policy will protect them but not help them.

If you are the victim, the parent of a victim, or the instructor of the victim, it can seem like the bully has more rights than those who actually need protection.

Suppose a larger boy corners one of your students in a bathroom stall and physically attacks him.  What should your student do?  If he physically defends himself in a school with a zero tolerance policy, he'll face the same punishment as the bully.  The school doesn't have to determine which kid was in the wrong and just suspends both of them for fighting.  Telling students to never fight under any circumstances puts a tremendous amount of pressure on the victim who must choose between enduring the abuse until an adult arrives, or physically defend himself against school rules.  In order to physically defend himself, he not only has to stand up to a bully but also the school itself.

So in this case, should your student put up with physical abuse until an adult intervenes?  The worst bullying tends to happen when adults are not around, so he might endure a lot if he doesn't fight back.  If he goes this route and trusts the system, what if the system doesn't stop the bullying, or even makes it worse?  That can happen if a bully is punished and wants to retaliate against the victim for reporting them.

In this case, the victim and the victim's family most likely won't be allowed to know anything about how the situation was addressed.  They might ask for the bully to be removed from the classroom or otherwise denied access to the victim.  This is extremely unlikely to be allowed.  A far more common solution is to offer to remove the victim from the classroom.

Understandably, this option is not popular with victims.  A kid who has been bullied extensively probably has very poor self esteem and is at least somewhat socially ostracized.  Having that kid sit at their own separate lunch table or stay in the classroom at recess is not going to be good for that student's social or mental well-being.  And if the victim turns down this kind of "help," well then gosh, I guess the bullying wasn't that serious after all!

Adults enforcing the social isolation that the bullies intend to cause is not exactly a solution.  Photo Credit.

Not every school is like this, and not every situation plays out like this.  In fact, this is more of a hypothetical worst-case-scenario.  (Not really, it certainly does get worse.)  But if you encounter a school's bullying policy that seems ineffective, frustrating, or just makes no sense, try thinking of the policy as a tool to protect the school rather than a tool to protect the students.  If it suddenly starts making sense in that light, at least you will have an understanding that will help you in future interactions with the school.

How to Vet Someone

We have to trust people in our lives.  There's no getting around it.  You trust the other drivers to stay in their lanes.  You trust your doctor to prescribe you the correct medication.  You trust your spouse to behave responsibly with the kids.  And the good news is, this trust is usually reasonable and soundly placed.  But sometimes we can end up in bad situations because of misplaced trust.

Never trust anthropomorphized punctuation marks.  photo credit

The answer is not to be perpetually suspicious of everyone.  That is no way to live.  But there are some things you can do to be safer.

Trust Your Gut

Your first line of defense is your initial interaction with the person.

Your brain can hold on to seven details (give or take) at once.  That means at any given moment, you are ignoring the vast majority of the details around you.  It's called Miller's Law, and if you'd like to read more about it as it pertains to self protection, I can highly recommend Blink by Malcolm Gladwell and The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker.  But for now just understand that you have a biological limitation of considering only a few details at once.  In order for you to function as a person, your brain has to efficiently choose and filter those most important details quickly and accurately, discarding the rest.

A side effect of this phenomenon is that you can have a visceral reaction to a person or situation and not understand why.  If you feel a gut-wrenching fear when meeting a stranger in a public place, you might not know why.  Some people will tell themselves that because they don't know why they feel that way, they're being foolish, that there is nothing to worry about.  We all have social conditioning toward being polite, which is usually a good thing, but it can sometimes make us less safe.  That fear was caused by something--maybe the person was dressed far too warmly for the weather in a way that could easily conceal a weapon, or maybe the person was standing too close, or maybe the person parked right next to you in an otherwise empty parking lot, or maybe someone is just too determined to give you help you didn't ask for.

What if they just pose for creepy-looking stock photos?

Your brain won't necessarily remember those details.  You probably also won't remember the air temperature, what color his shoes were, or what the floor was made of.  Those details weren't important, so your brain filtered them away.  The important detail was that you were facing a threat.

If a coworker "creeps you out," or the guy you've hired to mow your lawn inexplicably makes you uncomfortable every time you see him, you want to take those warning signs seriously.  Trusting your gut will do a lot toward making sure the people you let into your life are worthy of being there.

Look Them Up

This section will probably be less useful to those who live outside of the United States, but there may be similar resources in your country.

So, they didn't creep you out or raise any red flags when you met them, and now you're considering bringing this person into your life.  The idea is to do a little due diligence before giving someone access to you or your family.  If you need a pet sitter, if you have a new boyfriend, if you're signing your kids up at a local martial arts school, etc., you will need to trust a person who you don't know very well.  But if the person has a criminal history, you can probably find out.

A history of domestic violence is a solid predictor of future violence.  photo credit

A quick note before using any of these tools--If you are looking up this kind of information for employment purposes, the laws are different and more restrictive.  Check your state laws before doing a background check for employment purposes.  You can still do it, you just have to do a little extra work.

1.  Federal Searches

First there are the federal tools, which you can use in any state.  The first is the National Sex Offender Registry.  This is a free resource that lets you type in a name.  Alternatively you can search by location, which is handy if you are moving to a new neighborhood.  The other federal tool is PACER, which allows you to access public court records such as criminal convictions.  Some of its features are not free, but you can search for names without paying a fee.

2.  State and Local Searches

The next thing to do is to check their local public records.  This is another one that requires some caution as the laws are different from state to state regarding which records are public.  In general, you can look at your own records, or you can look at someone else's records if they consent to it.  Some states make the records public regardless.  My home state of Wisconsin does this, and you can type any name into this website to look for criminal convictions.  Many states have similar tools, and a quick internet search should tell you whether your state or territory is one of them.  Barring that, you can visit the local police station and court house.

If the person has lived in more than one state, you'll have to check multiple states to get a complete picture.  There are some commercial services that will do this for you, but their accuracy varies.  You are better off doing the search yourself, if you can.  But if you don't know all of the states a person has lived in and you want to check the entire country, it may be worthwhile to use such a service.

3.  Internet Searches

The easiest but least reliable method of looking someone up is to just do an internet search.  But it's dubious... if you type my name into Google, for example, you are likely to find a whole lot about the much more famous television personality of the same name.  You could find me by adding "Martial Journeys" to my name, but you would only see my professional life.  It would be very hard for you to use Google to find my Star Trek Dresden Files crossover fan fiction.  Mostly because I never wrote any.

Or did I?  I didn't.  photo credit

But if I did, you probably wouldn't find it unless you knew to look for it.  So it's hard to know whether your new babysitter runs a dog-fighting business on the side, or is prominently involved in a hate group, or whatever, unless you specifically thought to check for those things.  And you can't check for everything.

However, there are a few things you can do to make the process a little less useless.  First, search for their name and any aliases you know of.  Try a search for their name and add either their profession or the state or city they live in.  See if you can find their social media accounts.  Do a Google Image search and click the "visit website" option to see what the related content is.

Taking a few minutes with a search engine to try to vet someone before you let them too deeply into your life can save you a lot of pain down the road.

One Last Note:  Find a Balance

One thing that we as martial artists (especially instructors!) have to remember is that balance is important.  Training in martial arts should make your life better.  If you make yourself so nervous and so cautious of everyone around you that you are unable to relax and enjoy your life, you might live longer, but it won't be much of a life.  If you are so carefree that you obliviously walk right up to a threat and end up in some trouble, that is obviously not right either.  You need to find a balance.  There's no need to vet every single person you encounter.  But for the big, high stakes question marks in your life and your family's life, it's often worth doing.