A PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH
Why is bullying a frustrating epidemic despite a quarter century of intensive anti-bullying efforts?
According to Izzy Kalman, it’s because society has been taking the wrong approach.
There are two general approaches to bullying.
One is a law enforcement approach.
This is the approach that has become universally adopted and has been embedded –unsurprisingly–in anti-bullying laws. This is the approach that hasn't been working--and can never work.
The law enforcement approach treats bullying as a crime from which we must be protected and perpetrators must be punished and/or rehabilitated. It defines social dynamics as an interplay of guilty perpetrators (bullies), innocent victims, and bystanders that either passively or actively enable the bullying. We are taught that if we are victims, we are powerless to solve the problem and must report bullying to the authorities, who purportedly have the power to make it stop. This is the approach pioneered by Prof. Dan Olweus, and has been the foundation of most other programs and of all anti-bullying laws throughout the world.
Law enforcement is an absolute necessity for society. It is necessary for dealing with crime–acts like theft, rape, murder and arson.
We do not need anti-bullying laws and policies to deal with crimes, as these are already forbidden and a legal system exists for handling them. However, most of what's being called "bullying" today is not criminal behavior. The anti-bullying field emerged to deal with the ordinary kind of social difficulties that all of us encounter on occasion–insults, rumors, social exclusion, nasty messages in cyberspace, and the non-injurious hitting and pushing that often goes on among children. That is not to say that these experiences are not painful. They can destroy a person.
However, treating such acts like crimes that need to be investigated, judged and punished almost always intensifies hostilities between all the parties involved, even leading to physical violence. As the popular saying goes, “Snitches get stitches.”
The second is a psychological approach.
A scientific, psychological approach recognizes that bullying is an inevitable facet of social dynamics, occurring in both the animal and human kingdoms. It involves equipping us use our brains so we can understand the dynamics of bullying and put a stop to it on our own. It is about learning how not to be victims. This is knowledge everyone needs, as every human being is occasionally treated body. When we know how not to be victims, it is very hard for anyone to bully us.
An age-old approach
The psychological approach is championed by Izzy Kalman, and it is not new. Philosophers have understood and taught the solution to bullying for thousands of years. However, we may not be aware of that because the philosophers did not use the term “bullying.”
Early in his career in schools, Kalman discovered how common the problem of bullying is. He looked at the phenomenon with therapeutic eyes, meaning that he was concerned with helping those who come for help. Kalman understood that the role of the therapist is not to play police officer, protecting clients from their perceived tormentors and fighting their battles for them. Doing that makes them helpless and dependent.
The proper role of the therapist is to lead clients to gain insight into their problems so they can overcome them by their own efforts. It is about teaching people how not to be victims; how to make friends rather than enemies; how to turn hostile situations into win/wins. Kalman discovered that role-playing is the most powerful and enjoyable way to promote such goals.
Izzy's Mission
When the horrific Columbine High School shooting of 1999 ignited the national crusade against bullying, Izzy had already accumulated two decades of experience helping individuals and schools deal with bullying. The orthodox, Olweus-based, field of bullying, which had previously been a relatively unknown branch of psychology, stepped up to the plate with the promise that it held the solution the world needed. And the world has embraced it ever since.
Kalman, who only then became aware of the bullying psychology, immediately recognized that it was bound to cause more harm than good, as it actually encourages us to think and act like victims. In 2002, he left his position as a school psychologist with the New York City Department of Education so he could devote himself full-time to disseminating the alternative.
Kalman has since produced books and audio/video materials teaching his approach to bullying, anger control, and relationship problems. His full-day seminars have been attended by fifty thousand mental health professionals and educators. He has presented at professional conferences, and intensively trained individual practitioners in his method. Most prominent of these is Brooks Gibbs, a motivational speaker whose videos presenting Kalman's ideas and techniques have been viewed by hundreds of millions of people. And Kalman is lead author of the Be Strong Resilience Program.
Kalman has also written more than anyone on the problems with the Olweus approach to bullying. Most of his writings can be found on his Psychology Today column, Resilience to Bullying.
FREEDOM OF SPEECH
Freedom of Speech is under assault from the anti-bullying movement, which blames this right for the existence of verbal bullying. Social scientists who want to criminalize offensive speech refer to brain scans showing that pain centers are activated when people hear words that upset them .
Almost all other social scientists see freedom of speech as a necessary evil. Yes, it unfortunately enables bullying, but that is the price we need to pay to live in a society that values progress.
In contrast, Kalman is the most ardent advocate of freedom of speech in the mental health world. He explains–-and demonstrates so convincingly through role-play-–that not only is freedom of speech something to be tolerated, it actually is the solution to verbal bullying, and needs to be cherished. It’s when we have the attitude, "No one has the right to say anything mean to me!" all anyone needs to do to upset us is to say something mean. And when we get easily upset, that's when we end up being relentlessly bullied.
On the other hand, when we have the attitude, "People have a right to say anything they want to me," we don't get easily upset, and we don't become victims of bullying. Kalman has been proclaiming that Freedom of Speech is essentially the Constitutional version of the traditional “sticks-and-stones'' slogan, which is the age-old remedy to verbal bullying.
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