Bully Prevention Week...November 19 - 22

Bullying Prevention Week

November 19 - 22, 2012

Below you will read the announcements that are happening each day this week in an effort to better help our children understand what bullying is and how they can help prevent it.  Take some time this week to talk to your children about what they are learning.

Monday...
Bullying is behaviour that makes the person being bullied feel afraid or uncomfortable.  There are many ways that young people bully each other, even if they don't realize it at the time.  Some of these include:

• Punching, shoving and other acts that hurt people physically.
• Spreading bad rumours about people.
• Keeping certain people out of a group.
• Teasing people in a mean way.
• Getting certain people to "gang up" on others.

The four most common types of bullying are:

1. Verbal bullying - name-calling, sarcasm, teasing, spreading rumours, threatening, making negative references to one's culture, ethnicity, race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation, unwanted sexual comments.
2. Social Bullying - mobbing, scapegoating, excluding others from a group, humiliating others with public gestures or graffiti intended to put others down.
3. Physical Bullying - hitting, poking, pinching, chasing, shoving, coercing, destroying or stealing belongings, unwanted sexual touching.
4. Cyber Bullying - using the internet or text messaging to intimidate, put-down, spread rumours or make fun of someone.

Tuesday...
How common is bullying?
Approximately 1 in 10 children have bullied others and as many as 25% of children in grades 4 to six have been bullied.  Studies have found bullying occurs once every seven minutes on the playground and once every 25 minutes in the classroom.

In the majority of cases, bullying stops within 10 seconds when peers intervene, or do not support the bullying behaviour.

Wednesday...
A bullied child is often powerless to stop the bullying without outside help.  Enlisting the help of a trusted adult is one of the best ways for a child to put a stop to the bullying behaviour.

Research shows that bullying can be effectively reduced when victimized children tell an adult, and persist in telling until their request for help is heard.