Bullying: Why Does It Happen &

2014-04-24-Bulllying

Seminars@Hadley

Bullying: Why Does It Happen &

What Can We Do to Minimize the Impact?

Presented by

Lauri Dishman

Moderated by

Larry Muffett

April 24, 2014

Larry Muffett

Welcome to Seminars@Hadley. My name is Larry Muffett. I’m a member of Hadley’s Seminars team and I also work in Curricular Affairs. Today’s seminar topic is Bullying: Why Does it Happen & What Can We Do to Minimize the Impact? Our presenter today is a familiar one to those of you who are regular participants. Lauri Dishman is a licensed clinical professional counselor, and the owner of InnerFocus, a private mental health practice helping those adjusting with vision loss. Lauri served for over a decade as the manager of counseling services at Second Sense Chicago. Today Lauri will be sharing some insights with you on bullying, both of the perspective of those who are bullied, and those who do the bullying. So without any further adieu, let me welcome Lauri and begin our seminar. Lauri, good morning and welcome.

Lauri Dishman

Thank you Larry. I definitely appreciate the introduction and once again I always appreciate being a part of Seminars@Hadley. I want to begin with an article that was sent to me, I think from a Seminars@Hadley fan. He noticed the posting for this particular podcast and he notified me about an article from the Times Union that was dated from September of last year about a relative named Glenna Santeramo. The article was entitled “Ruling Sides with Sight Impaired Student at School” and it outlines a situation concerning a young student with a visual impairment who was harassed by a teacher at her public school in Cambridge, New York.

In the report that was filed to the US Department of Education it states that for the student tools such as Braille books that were needed to do her work were slow to arrive and with that this student fell behind in her schoolwork and teachers started to bar her from doing any kind of classroom activities or encouraging her to catch up or provide any type of accommodations and hence instead of wanting to help they started to outright start calling her things like lazy and falling behind and there was actually a specific incident where one teacher began to yell at her to get out of the classroom, the teacher took her backpack and her cane and essentially just threw everything into the hallway. You can imagine how this student must have felt. She admits, and in the article it states, that her self-confidence was shot down and since had to leave the school in Cambridge and instead attended the New York Institute for Special Education in the Bronx. She is doing well there but obviously she says she preferred to have stayed in her school in Cambridge.

I think this is not an uncommon situation that we run across when it comes to bullying, whether you’re someone with a disability. I was reading another article about a student who was coming out and was doing so in a way that made students uncomfortable, and it’s this discomfort I think that sort of started these acts of people acting aggressively against the person who was being bullied. We’re hearing more and more about these cases and obviously the media is informing us about situations where those who have been bullied are responding back with school shootings or stabbings or other types of violent behavior, and it’s obviously raising some red flags and it’s getting the attention of organizations such as the US Department of Education.

In the report that was filed about this student in Cambridge, New York, the US Department of Education did eventually step in and ruled in the student’s favor and basically imposing conditions on the school such as providing counseling to students who have felt that they have been bullied, removing the teacher from the school, and basically saying that this person needs to understand and be sensitive to people with disabilities, not just this teacher but also imposing training to the employees of the school; sensitivity training, disability training, and if the school doesn’t apply then further sanctions and further investigation might be done. It’s sort of good news and bad news. It’s still happening and people are insensitive, but yet the good news is that there are folks that are starting to recognize there is a little bit of movement being made but it also sounds like we sort of have a long way to go.

My goal today in our presentation is to look at bullying and to really have an understanding of what bullying really is and what sort of characterizes it, and also how it manifests itself, and I’m sure many of you can relate to it, being blind or visually impaired, some of the direct implications of where it might show up in that case, and then also maybe some tips in terms of what can we do to be better prepared or to better arm ourselves if we feel like we are in a situation where we are being bullied. That’s hopefully my goal today, and of course I’m going to pause for moments for questions and things of that nature, so if you have any don’t hesitate to ask.

The first thing I want to do is to look at the definition of bullying and to really understand what bullying really is. This comes from a website, which is obviously a government organization that is doing its best to try to manage bullying, and they describe it as an unwanted aggressive behavior that involves a real or perceived power imbalance. The behavior is repeated or has the potential to be repeated over time. I also read about a psychologist, Dan Olweus, who studied bullying in schools and I read this great book in preparation for this seminar called Sticks and Stones, by Emily Bazelon, and if I can be multi-dextrous I’m going to write it in the comment section. There was a quote in here from this psychologist and he states that bullying is defined as a behavior that constitutes real abuse in the eyes of the person being bullied, a serious rupture in their lives with potentially devastating consequences.

So let’s kind of take a look at these definitions and sort of break them apart a little bit. Again, there is a power imbalance where there’s somebody who’s in a submissive position and someone who is in a dominant position, someone who’s a bully wanting to control or to dominate or to feel superior to another person in a given situation. There are situations where this happens where it may not necessarily constitute bullying. I’m sure there are brothers and sisters who sort of pick on each other or you get razzed or you joke around or you horse around and maybe throw insults at each other and it may be in play or in some cases someone might say something to you and you just sort of can scoff it off and be on your way, but it’s when the person who is receiving or being bullied feels as if that other person is trying to defame their character in some way or make them feel like they are less than and they internalize that and they start to believe that that’s true, then that’s when we can say it constitutes bullying.

Believe me, if you’re in a situation in a school and you have many students who are picking on you and in the case of this case that we read at the beginning of the teacher and the teachers and administrators who are not coming to your defense, I can easily imagine how someone might start to believe “Is there something wrong with me? Are they right? Am I lazy? Am I not doing the most that I can?” And you start to doubt yourself. That’s where we can really say that bullying is really starting to take place. Bullying comes in various forms. For example, there is physical bullying and this may just as it sounds be pushing, shoving, kicking, or burning. It may be that a bully might take someone’s personal belongings or destroy personal belonging such as throwing a cane out in the hallway, disrespecting the belongings of someone and disrespecting someone’s physical being is where physical bullying might come into effect.

This also obviously can impact somebody on an emotional level. Obviously when emotional bullying is happening it happens when malicious or defamatory statements are made about a person or a group and the intent is to hurt the feelings and the emotional stability of the target, and that’s the whole point of bullying. It can occur in various forms. It can be face to face. It can be rumors behind somebody’s back. The more and more that we’re starting to see it too is on the internet and cyberbullying is actually becoming a third classification of bullying, using social networking sites such as Facebook, blogs, posting a picture that as we know once something goes out on cyberspace it’s in cyberspace and it’s very hard to take it back. We’re hearing more and more cases of this happening. Bullying is out there. It’s real, and it hurts. I’m sure that many of you may have experienced it as well, whether you are working with clients who are blind or visually impaired, you yourself might be blind or visually impaired, but in my work with clients this has come out in the forms of people telling me that they’ve heard others just outright make fun of them, or tease them because they’re blind or harass them and take their cane away in some regard.

It also comes in line during job interviews. Somebody walks in with a white cane or guide dog and they sit down and automatically the interviewer pulls their power and almost sort of scorns at the person being interviewed, saying how dare you even think you have a right to be in here, so it manifests itself in many, many ways. It could be a family member telling the person who is blind or visually impaired how much they’re taking away their freedom: “Now I’ve got to drive you around and I’ve got to cook your meals and I have to do all of this.”, making the person feel flawed for having a disability and not being able to do for themselves until they can get the proper rehabilitation and learn how to do things independently.

In many cases it also comes along the lines of family members or others making decisions on the person’s who is blind or visually impaired behalf without their input, without their right to express something, so again it’s people taking advantage, or another word for this is sort of discriminating against someone else and putting themselves in more of a dominant position. I’m not sure if anybody has any other examples where they have felt that they have been discriminated against or bullied due to the fact of their blindness and vision loss and you are more than welcome to put your examples in the public chat. Larry, if it’s okay, I can also turn the microphone on and if anybody out there is willing to share I would be more than happy to hear it. I think it’s important that we express what might have happened and how it made us feel, so I’m going to turn the mic over and if anybody has a comment please feel free to share.

Ellen

I’ve got a definite vivid memory of when I was a little girl first going to the state school for the deaf and blind here in Great Falls, and there was this one little girl, she was two years older than I was, and she was a Native American, and she bullied the H out of me. It had me to the point that I was scared to death to go to school. What made it worse is we lived in the dorm, it was a residential setting of course, because she lived somewhat far away and I lived in eastern Montana. Her background of course being Native American was pretty inferior to mine in the sense that her folks drank quite a bit and I think that made her feel inferior and she hated that and so that’s why she had to dominate with me and she took advantage because I was very shy and wouldn’t come forward to stand up for myself because I didn’t know how and I was afraid to.

Lauri Dishman

Ellen that is a very valid point and we’re actually going to be talking about why people bully and what you described with that young lady who was Native American and herself feeling inferior is definitely a quality that sort of motivates a bullying. I’m glad you brought that up because that’s going to lead us directly into our next section, but before we get there I just wanted to see if there was anybody else who had something that they wanted to say or had a comment.

Alright, so I guess we’ll just move forward. Again, if you have any comments or you have any questions please don’t hesitate to raise your hand or put it in the comments in the public chat section. So, obviously, we want to know why do people bully? I think Ellen really started to touch on this very, very well in terms of her experience that she had. There’s a website called and they state very simply that the goal of the bully is to gain power over another person and make himself or herself the dominant person. I’m going to explain this from the perspective from psychology and maybe to help us understand how it comes from the nature of human behavior.

There was a psychologist, Alfred Adler, who was one of the pioneers. He was around during Freud and Carl Jung’s period of time and in fact they all interacted at some point and also obviously disagreed in some cases as well, but many of us have heard of something called the Inferiority Complex. Alfred Adler was actually he psychologist who came up with that term. Before we talk about the Inferiority Complex he talked about inferiority feelings, and these are the feelings that we have when we are put in these situations where someone might be better than us at something or might be trying to dominate us or control us in some way where we feel like we are less than in the situation and somebody else is greater than in the situation. There’s no sense of feeling equal. When we start to feel inferior we obviously begin to feel uncomfortable and we may try to do whatever we can to try to bring us back to a feeling of being equal and many of us have the capacity to rationalize or to rethink the situation and try not to internalize it so much, but when those situations become plenty or when we are put in many of those situations where they take place for long periods of time, then those inferiority feelings can actually turn into more of a long-term chronic feeling, which is the Inferiority Complex, and that’s where it just is almost impossible for somebody to feel like they’re equal or better than in any way and so just feel very depressed.

Dan Olweus, who I quoted earlier, found that victims of bullying tend to show higher levels of insecurity, anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem. When we look at this and we look at this Inferiority Complex we can see how that applies to the person being bullied, but the bully also has an Inferiority Complex, that when they are in a situation or they are challenged by someone, or for example we take the job interviewer who is suddenly faced with someone who is visually impaired across the desk from them and they’re not really sure what to make of it, early stereotypes might come up in thinking why is this person even here, this person can’t see, why would they even think that they could even do this job? So they might not know what to do or how to handle the situation and may become aggressive. Sometimes it might appear as being patronizing and being overly nice, but the point is that that person is using their power to say “I don’t want this person here and I’m going to do whatever I can to try to get this person out of this room.” When somebody is in that situation and they bully they’re actually overcompensating. They’re using tactics that are aggressive in nature rather than diplomatic or egalitarian in nature to try to get their point across.

Alfred Adler was very much a part of people empathizing and empathy is a very big piece of Adlerian psychology and empathy meaning that you’re able to walk in someone else’s shoes and to understand differences and appreciate differences in humanity and humanistic and being what he calls socially interested in others. For people who have a healthy sense of self they are able to recognize those differences and to help bring the situation to an equality rather than trying to dominate or submit in the situation, and for those who are bullies what they want to do is be overly aggressive and to what he calls have a Superiority Complex and be superior in the situation. Kristen Hooks, who has a Masters in Education, and also who has studied bullying extensively, wrote an article in This was in March of last year and she talks about the behaviors that can come out for those who choose to take a bullying or more aggressive approach when dealing with these situations. This can come in the form of abuse such as name calling, sarcasm, teasing, threatening, mocking, insulting, ignoring, discrediting the person, or spreading rumors. There are just so many ways that somebody chooses to hurt in a way to try to help themselves feel like they are in the superior situation rather than trying to equalize or normalize the situation and figure out well what can we do to make this a win-win for both of us sitting here in the room.