Seeking a Doraemon for Our Schools

"An eighth-grade dropout suspected by her peers of stealing was forced into a park by eight adolescents, both male and female, where she was stripped and beaten. The abuse was filmed and posted on the Internet."

"A middle-school student in Tai-chung was surrounded and beaten on five separate occasions. His outraged parents sued 18 student onlookers."

For months now, we've been seeing report after report on incidents of school bullying, and the cruelty of some of the methods employed have sorely alarmed parents of schoolchildren.

Late last year, the Ministry of Education convened a meeting of Taiwan's 25 cities and counties to promote a plan to prevent bullying at school. In January 2011, the Legislative Yuan amended Article 10 of the National Education Act, which requires elementary schools with 24 or more classes to have a dedicated guidance counselor, all middle schools to have at least one counselor and those with 21 or more classes to add an additional one, and elementary and middle schools with 55 or more classes to keep a social worker and a psychologist on staff.

Following the revised law's implementation, Taiwan is expected to hire an additional 1,754 guidance counselors and 467 social workers and psychologists for its schools. As a result, our educational system is expected to have one counselor for every 950 students by 2017.

This burst of activity is intended to "put out the fire." But will it really do anything to reduce school bullying?

Bullying hotline

One of the best ways to dealing with bullying is to seek out the help of a teacher. But the majority of children fail to do so out of concern that their teachers won't help.

"There's nothing unusual about the existence of bullying, either in Taiwan or the West," says Wu Chyi-in, a research fellow with the Academia Sinica's Institute of Sociology. "It would be much stranger to have a place with kids and no bullying." Wu says that people aren't clear about the definition of bullying and use the term every time one child strikes another. He suggests that this distorts the word's meaning: "Some of these incidents are clearly instances of criminal behavior and should be dealt with separately." He argues that lumping them all together makes it hard to tell what's really going on.

Ba-ling, as bullying has come to be known in Taiwan, is a new term for an old problem.

In April 2002, the Child Welfare League Foundation established a hotline to take calls from suffering children. The hotline's average of 47 calls per day have shown the CWLF that rejection and bullying are children's most vexing problems, and that they drive some kids to cease attending school. The CWLF then began reviewing research on the topic from abroad. The group coined the term ba-ling from the English word "bullying," and the phenomenon began receiving a great deal of attention.

Bullying isn't occasional, spontaneous behavior. It is defined as: "one or more students repeatedly tormenting or harassing a student over an extended period of time." That is, its main characteristics are premeditation, harm, repetition, and power imbalances.

Bullying isn't always the violent behavior depicted in the media. In fact, it varies in both degree and kind. In addition to physical bullying that involves hitting, there are also verbal bullying involving mockery; relational bullying, which involves rejection and isolation; and sexual bullying, which involves sexual harassment and sexual violence.

The rise of the Internet has also led to an increase in a new kind of bullying: cyberbullying. A study by the CWLF's Xiao Hui-lin has shown that one in four children engages in cyberbullying, such as posting pictures online without permission, publicizing confidential information, making anonymous threats, and sending mails of a sexual nature.

Moreover, a number of studies have indicated that the most common form of bullying on school campuses is not physical but relational.

Cheng Ying-yao, a professor with the Institute of Education at National Sun Yat-sen University, in 2009 published an article entitled "Bullying on Taiwan's Middle School Campuses" that showed that teachers widely believe physical bullying to be more serious than other types of bullying. But the fact is that bullied children are more injured by "broken friendships" than they are by beatings.

For kids who aren't academically inclined, school can feel like prison.

An October 2010 survey by the CWLF showed that 16.1% of elementary- and middle-school students were experiencing frequent bullying.

Of those bullied, 51.4% just take it, 40% complain to fellow students, and 33% take revenge without telling parents or teachers. Why do so many keep it to themselves? 54.2% do so for fear of bringing revenge on themselves, while 28.7% feel that speaking out would do no good.

Cheng's research shows that the majority of bullied children are physically smaller, more sensitive, suspicious, anxious, and withdrawn.

Wu Chyi-in, who has been studying adolescents for years, says that the bullied are almost always described by their peers as "weirdos." The military has its own expression about "weirdos" who just don't get it: "the lazy don't get beaten up; the freaks do."

Hope Chiu, chief deputy coordinator of the CWLF's research and development office, says their research shows that bullied children are more likely to experience low self-esteem, depression, loneliness, anxiety, and feelings of insecurity. Bullying gives them a negative impression of school, and leads to a dislike of school, cutting classes, and dropping out.

Jasmine Chen, a psychologist who consults with the CWLF, says that bullied children are likely to respond in a number of ways, such as rationalization (e.g. believing that they are bullied because they are stupid), regression (becoming temperamental, crying, and throwing tantrums), projection (attacking others), or conversion (e.g. suffering a somatoform disorder such as feeling stomach pain when attending school).

For some, the shadow of bullying is difficult to expunge. Well known author Liao Yu-hui says that when her daughter was in the seventh grade, she had a way with words and was well liked by her teacher. As a result, other children beat her up four times in 10 days, once triggering an asthma attack. She called each of the bullies and asked them to leave her daughter alone, but her daughter still hasn't gotten over the experience. Even today, -Liao's daughter sometimes imagines that her former tormentors are shadowing her as she walks. The situation saddens Liao, who laments that such memories don't easily fade.

Relational bullying, which involves rejection and isolation, is the most common form of school bullying.

We can't help but feel sympathy for the suffering of the bullied, but what about the bullies? Do they have no redeeming qualities?

The parents of bullied children may, like the mother of the murdered child in the Japanese film Confessions, wonder why it had to be their child.

But Liao has sympathy for her child's bullies as well. She wrote a letter-to-the-editor reminding people: "Bullies are always children who have lost the love of others. They have no one who cares for them at home and do poorly at school. They have never received any kind of affirmation, and consequently turn to bullying those weaker or better loved than themselves." Liao suggests that the real solution to the problem is having teachers and schools pay more attention to students from disadvantaged families and encourage children with poor grades to develop themselves in other ways.

A social worker surnamed Xu recently wrote a letter entitled "Confessions of Someone Bullied" to Apple Daily protesting the unjust treatment of bullies. "These are children who have been 'bullied' and cast aside by society," wrote Xu, who asked what kind of help schools were offering to so-called "bad students."

If bullying is a kind of appeal, then what emotions lie beneath the bluff and bluster?

Chen, who has dealt with many cases involving bullying, says that children who bully other children don't usually have just one issue.

Take the case of a fourth-grade boy accused of stealing a second grader's chicken fillet and pastry every day. When Chen began digging into the boy's family background, she learned that he came from a single-parent family and that his father's long-term lack of care and discipline had resulted in the child resorting to this means of fending for himself.

What's worrying is that there is a high level of correlation between childhood bullying and adult criminality. A long-term tracking study conducted overseas found that 60% of men who had been bullies in school had criminal records by the age of 24 and that 40% had been convicted of at least three crimes.

If schools exist only to foster academic attainment and advancement within the educational system, how are adults to persuade poor students that they have worth as human beings?

Generally speaking, the bullying problem is most severe in middle school, when children undergo radical physical and psychological changes and a period of emotional volatility.

"Adolescents find throwing their weight around out of sight of their teachers appealing," says Li Jian, a 30-something who's been there. Li says that even though times have changed, certain power structures persist on school campuses.

Cheng Ying-yao's research shows that school bullying tends to take place at specific times and locations. The most common times are after class (74% of victims), after school (58%), and during clean-up periods (44%). The most common locations are bathrooms (70%), classrooms (66.6%), and on the way to and from school (55.8%).

In 1993, Li, who had just come to Taipei from Hualien to start middle school, was stopped in a stairwell and viciously beaten by a classmate. "I knew I'd rubbed the guy the wrong way. He took the first chance he got to give me a beat down."

Li says that other classmates kept their relations with him nebulous to protect themselves. "Everyone learned to be social hypocrites as a kind of survival technique." It was only after one classmate extended a helping hand that he was finally accepted by the group.

When his younger brother entered the same school two or three years after, he too was bullied.

Li says that his brother looked soft and was often pushed around on the basketball court by a boy a year older. Telling a teacher wasn't much help; the boy kept bullying his brother. Li, who was by then a freshman in high school, therefore made a trip back to his alma mater to help "resolve" the problem. He didn't say a word, just laid into the bully. "It was the most effective way to deal with the problem. The guy didn't dare bug my brother after that."

Becoming part of a group and a friend network is an effective means of avoiding bullying.

Many people have been frightened by the recent spate of media reports on school bullying because they find the methods exceptionally savage and cruel.

Chiu says that the modern media and the Internet expose children to the violence of the adult world at an earlier age, coloring Taiwanese children's thoughts and behaviors with violent and heroic acts.

Other scholars attribute the cruel, strategic, and systematic nature of the "upgraded" bullying of recent years to video games and media reporting of violent incidents.

Lee Ming-shinn, a professor with the Graduate Institute of Compulsory Education at National Dong Hwa University, believes that children who spend long periods of time in virtual worlds become accustomed to the images of spattered blood and death present in games, and don't distinguish it from injuries and bloodshed in the real world. As a result, they don't feel much of anything when they harm classmates in the real world.

A teacher at a Kaohsiung middle school says that kids today don't hesitate to slap others and don't think much of it. The teacher doesn't know whether this is a consequence of exposure to too many overwrought TV dramas, or something else.

Wu, on the other hand, thinks that kids aren't yet fully socialized. They don't really know how to express their anger appropriately and therefore react too aggressively. He argues that bullying is not an isolated event. Children have no outlet for their emotions and hold things in until some event becomes the straw that breaks the camel's back. In that moment, their anger transforms into aggressive behavior.

Cellphones and the Internet make school bullying even more harmful than it used to be. In the photo, a still from the Japanese movie Confessions, a group of classmates take revenge on the leading character, herself a former bully.

"Bullying is a symptom," says Chang Te-chung, chairman of the Teacher Chang Foundation. "You have to look at the underlying problems." Chang says that bullying has never been reduced and that increasing the number of reporting mechanisms will not resolve the problem.

What then is its root cause?

Research from abroad identifies schools, families, and individual character as crucial factors in bullying.

On the family front, children from "high-conflict families" in which violent behavior is common, or families in which a parent frequently uses violence, authority, and emotional threats to discipline children are at greater risk of becoming bullies.

School risk factors center on how homeroom teachers run their classes and resolve conflicts.

The key individual factors involve the child's character and relationships. Children who are impulsive, impatient, easily angered, slow to adapt, or unable to derive a sense of achievement from school are more likely to become bullies.

Cheng conducted a 2009 survey on bullying in secondary schools which showed that bullies were likely to have experienced violence at home and bullying by siblings, and wanted to demonstrate their own strength and acquire influence.

Sometimes only a thin line separates bullying from fighting. The former is distinguished by premeditation and an extended time frame.

But since bullying takes place at school, the public naturally turns to teachers for the solution.

Chiu, who has conducted campus experiments, says that many teachers don't know how to manage classes and are incapable of reducing bullying. She mentions the poor handling of transfer students, who are frequent targets of bullying, as an example. Since classes have already established groups by the time these students enter, they come in as outsiders and make easy targets for bullying. Teachers can avoid the problem with an "added responsibility" approach to the situation, i.e. assigning a classmate (including even likely bullies) to look out for the new student.

In some cases, teachers may trigger bullying by giving the impression of having given up on students.

When the CWLF's Chen counseled one bully, she went to the classroom only to discover that the teacher had given everyone but that child a test to take because, "He can't do it anyway." "How could a kid being dealt with in such a fashion not feel that he had been given up on?" asks Chen.

"There's no student that can't be taught," says Ceng Yuzhen. "There's only teachers unwilling to understand children." Ceng, a teacher who came to fame as the subject of the TV show Twinkle, Twinkle Little Stars, often tells other teachers that being a great teacher is far better than being a famous teacher.

But that's easier said than done. Since the Ministry of Education banned corporal punishment in 1995, many teachers have completely given up trying to discipline students, causing the bullying problem to steadily worsen.

"The policies banning corporal punishment and dropouts have tied teachers' hands," admits a middle-school teacher with 15 years experience. "They've encouraged the bullying."

The teacher, surnamed Cao, says that people used to be dedicated to administrative work, whereas they now regard it as a springboard. "Over the last few years, schools have had to rely on substitute teachers to serve as student affairs officers because nobody else wants to do it," says Cao.

The results of a December 2010 survey by CommonWealth Parenting magazine hint at this situation. The survey of 100 heads of student affairs at Taiwanese middle schools found that 73% had been frightened by what parents had said to them, 43% had been frightened by what students had said, and that 8% had been physically struck by either a student or someone from outside the school.

In recent months, the ferment over the bullying problem has led to calls for the reinstatement of corporal punishment.

"When teachers have no power, they have no choice but to rely on outside forces," argues another middle-school teacher. Nowadays, schools and society at large are linked tightly together; there's no boundary between them. In the event of bullying or conflict between students, some parents request that their political representatives or other persons with power become involved. "Schools often find themselves dealing not with parents, but 'bigger fish' with no direct relationship to the school."

"I'd love to change students, but many parents simply don't parent their children at all," says a Kaohsiung middle-school teacher. "Even if you manage to get in touch with them, you can't get them into the school. Teachers don't have any leverage at all."

"No dropouts" is another school myth.

As Japanese writer Kanae Minato put it in her novel Confessions (on which the film is based), some children find the compulsory educational system incredibly trying simply because they're stuck in it. For kids who don't want to continue their educations or who derive no sense of achievement from their schoolwork, going to school is much like being in prison.

By rule, once a student has cut a total of 49 hours of classes, the school must file a dropout notice and track the child down. But when counseling offices bring such students back to school, they fail to offer them any guidance. The students are on campus in a physical sense, but their minds remain far away.

"School entrances are like 7-Elevens," says a middle-school teacher, "There are always people coming in and out." The teacher says that even closing the gates doesn't keep the kids in. He recalls one student who went over the fence right in front of one of the school's student affairs officers, who was unable to do anything about it.

Making matters worse is that schools have always been oriented towards advancing students to the next tier of the educational system. In fact, teachers are punished or rewarded based entirely upon their promotion rate. With Taiwan's birthrate falling, schools have faced pressure to eliminate classes, causing teacher and principals to become even more fixated on promotion rates.

A homeroom teacher for an eighth-grade class at a Taipei middle school says that everyone talks about the lower birthrate, but no one mentions that even as his school's enrollment is declining, the rolls are growing at another school in the same district with a higher promotion rate. "It's a very real problem," he laments.

"If academic performance is the only standard by which schools are judged," says Wu, "then the bullying situation will never improve." Wu argues that the school environment is a virtual hell for non-academically--inclined students. Every day they come on campus where they are constantly reminded that those who fail to excel at their studies are worthless.

"This system creates too many victims," says Wu. He argues that it badly injures many children and that many "bullies" are simply lashing out after having been pushed too far.

A bully's wounds must be dealt with; they can't simply be swept under the rug and ignored.

Modern society is all about speed and rapid results, but education doesn't work that way.

Right now, schools are fighting bullying with lectures and posters, but teachers know that such measures have only limited effect. "The kids who really need to hear the lectures won't attend," says one. "And some even spit betel-nut juice on the posters."

"Families, schools, and society form a tripartite whole," says Wu. "All three have to work together to address the bullying problem." Wu says that the issue isn't that there's no solution; it's an unwillingness to recognize and tackle the root of the problem.

"Adults are unwilling to look at the heart of the matter," says Wu. "They don't want to admit that the problem isn't the kids; it's the adults." Wu argues that bullying stems directly from the way adults treat kids.

Chiu too says: "Adults can't hit kids while simultaneously telling them that it's wrong to hit other kids."

It seems that the first step in resolving the school bullying problem is getting adults to face the issue and their part in it head on.