Autism Review

Bullying is not just a part of growing up. Just because something happens does not mean that it is normal or should be tolerated. I am aware that many people 'live through' their bullying and think that it is enculturated into childhood - but that opinion only holds up in the mind of someone who was victimized and then grows past the problem.

Not all children are so resilient - particularly those who already have differences from the 'social norm' that are causing them to be targeted.

The need for a different level of bullying intervention is brought to a tragic light for us locally in Western NY because of the apparent suicide of a high school student over this weekend.

Perhaps I don't have much to say, or maybe I just feel like anything I was going to say feels like it rings a little hollow in context of the real story. Please go read about Jamey Rodemeyer. He perceived himself as different and perhaps was victimized because of these differences. Sometimes these differences are in disability status, or in physical appearance, or in sexual orientation, or anything. The differences themselves serve as the catalyst for negative behaviors from others who often are having their own differences or difficulties.

What I was going to present (and now sounds too academic when I read what I wrote) is that bullying is a mental health problem. It is a mental health problem for the person subject to bullying, and it is a mental health problem for the bully.

The details of this particular situation are still unknown so I hope that my comments are not interpreted in the context of anything that parents or schools or professionals or kids themselves in WNY should have done. Rather, I think that if we take the opportunity to frame the problem as a mental health issue we will be in the best position to leverage all possible resources to help prevent these tragedies.

Not everything in the world is preventable, even if we want it to be. Still, we have the opportunity to ask ourselves some questions:

1. What was the culture in the school? What rules or systems were in place to promote respectful social interactions?
2. What was the point of intervention? Was it just the child or was it the bully too?
3. Did the parents have access to all the resources they needed? Could anything have been done to give them access to even more information/resources? Could that have helped?

For the near term, at least locally, we will have many more questions than answers. Still, I hope that we can take this tragedy and change some things.

I suspect that this community is not alone in its need to change some things.

One of the biggest concerns that we hear about from parents relates to how their children are functioning socially in their schools. Most schools have 'anti-bullying' or 'bullying prevention' programs in place. Recently, there is a lot more talk about bullying in school environments but that hasn't seemed to stop the behaviors much in the perspective of many families whose children still struggle with the problem.



It is important for parents to know that there are different kinds of bullying - and just because a program is established or policies are in place in a school that doesn't mean that bullying will cease to occur. Broad programmatic anti-bullying efforts like those listed on the OSEP website tend to speak to the whole school population and attempt to create a culture of respect that works on a very broad level. As a result, most kids understand that peer exclusion, relational aggression, and even direct bullying is not acceptable.



However, these programs seem to work best when the differences between children are least notable. In other words, these bullying programs don't work as well to address problems related to helping children tolerate broader differences - so the more overweight, or the more short, or the more learning disabled, or the more speech-impaired a child is then the more difficult it is for kids to act and react appropriately to those differences.



Some of this is a function of normal social development - children struggle with understanding the complexities of social group norms and at the same time develop tolerance for differences from those norms. We have an opportunity to intervene when children react negatively to their peers because of perceived differences that really should NOT be a threat to the establishment of their social order.



I don't mean to imply that peer on peer bullying between relatively 'equal' kids is not a concern because in fact it is - but that we need to develop different interventions for kids when those differences are more magnified. This is difficult for adults to do, probably because most adults are not particularly adroit with tolerating differences themselves. In that sense, the behavior of children is not terribly different than the behavior of many of the adults in the room - but we need to start intervening somewhere.



Sometimes I think that the reasons why some forms of bullying persist is because it is what I call a 'Low-N' problem. That means that it is generally only impacting a very small number of children -those who are falling most far from the 'acceptable' ranges of the social order.



So, the first thing for parents and OTs to do when they want to understand how to address bullying behavior is to understand bullying in its various forms - and then think about what is driving that bullying behavior. I encourage both parents and OT practitioners to study bullying laws in their states and the programs in their local districts and understand how those programs are most directly effective in tamping down negative social behaviors for the broad population. This is a great place to start and will lay a good foundation for being able to intervene with persistent problems at the individual level.



My next blog post will talk more about what steps to take to address bullying problems on the individual level for those students who are still often subject to bullying despite the presence of school-wide prevention efforts.