The failure of the anti-bully movement

It’s often said that bullying is a skyrocketing problem in our schools. Why? In the years since the Columbine massacre, schools all over the country have been adopting anti-bully programs. We’ve heard countless anti-bully messages on TV. Why is bullying going up instead of down?

Education has a “dirty little secret”: Whole school anti bullying programs usually don’t work – or even make the problem worse! Psychologist David Smith of the University of Ottawa conducted a meta analysis of all the published research on whole school anti bully programs. Know what he found? 86% of the published studies showed that the program had no benefit at all or even made the problem worse! 14% of the studies found that the anti bully program had a mild benefit. Not one produced a major improvement!

What does this mean for victims of bullying? If victims have to rely on others to protect them from bullies, they may be bullied for the rest of their lives.

There are two basic approaches to dealing with bullying:

• The law enforcement approach: punish bullies.
• The wisdom approach: teach people how not to be victims.

The second way works well. The first doesn’t. And there are many reasons why. Here are a few.

1. Let's say we're kids in school and you bully me. I tell the teacher or principal and you get punished. Is that going to make you like and respect me? Of course not! It will make you hate me and want to get back at me. You are going to want to beat me up after school, or try to get me in trouble with the school for bullying you. So the next act of bullying is set in motion. The school is going to be constantly busy trying to get kids stop bullying each other, and what the school doesn't realize, it's making kids continue bullying each other.

2. If the solution is to punish bullies and make them change, who are they? Very few people see themselves as bullies. If you accuse people of being bullies, they usually deny it and often claim that they are the victim! Does anyone come for counseling or therapy complaining, “Help me! I’m a bully!” Of course not. Everyone who comes for help… everyone who is suffering… feels like a victim! The “bully” is always the other person – “its’ not me.” So if the problem is bullies, who are we supposed to help? We need to become detectives and judges trying to apprehend bullies and prove that they are guilty. If you are a victim and you have to depend on the school to get rid of bullies for you, you are going to be a victim for a very long time!

3.There is far more bullying going on at home than in school. My surveys of thousands of educators and mental health professionals show that their own children are four times more likely to be hit by a sibling at home than by another child in school. If two parents – experts at human behavior – can’t get their own two children to stop bullying each other, how can you expect one teacher to get thirty kids to stop bullying each other? Furthermore, most of these same experts are currently bullying, or being bullied by, someone in their own lives. If the experts don’t know how handle bullying, who is going to teach the rest of us?

What is the Bullies to Buddies™ philosophy?

The only place where everyone is always nice to each other is Heaven, and you first have to die to get in. LIfe is not fair. As long as you are alive, you are going to encounter people being mean to you, and you have to learn to deal with it. This is the goal of wisdom: to give people the tools to handle the difficultes of life. If you know how not to be a victim, no one can bully you, and your problem goes away almost immediately. In order to become happy, you don't have to wait for the world to get rid of bullies for you!

The solution to bullying has actually been know for thousands of years. It is known as The Golden Rule. It means that you have to treat your enemies like friends. Abraham Lincoln understood this. Martin Luther King, Jr., understood this. Jesus understood this. The Buddha understood this. Aristotle understood this. And so do all wise people throughout the world and throughout history.

You can choose the law enforcement approach to bullying, which is the foolish way. Or you can choose the wisdom way. The choice is yours.