Emmanuelle Piquet: Punishment is not a solution to bullying – 06/25/2023 – World

In January, Lucas, 13, took his own life after months of bullying at his school in eastern France. In April, it was Thibault, 10, in the Loire region. In May, Lindsay, 13, in the North.

These and other tragic deaths of children and adolescents in France were associated with situations of physical, verbal or psychological violence perpetrated by peers in the school environment and on social networks.

In addition to the commotion and alert for parents and teachers, the cases called into question the series of measures already adopted in the European country to combat school bullying and made Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne announce that the issue is an “absolute priority”.

In 2020, the Phare plan – a program to combat harassment in schools – was launched on an experimental basis. Last September, it was extended to all primary education establishments in France. That is: it had already been implemented in the schools of Lucas, Thibault and Lindsay and was not able to avoid the terrible outcome.

The program is based on eight pillars, which include monitoring the school climate, building a supportive community, and involving parents and partners. Schools undertake to organize 10 annual hours of awareness raising for students and to form a team to apply the protocol.

In 2021, the year in which the country recorded at least 18 suicides associated with peer violence in schools, France created two telephone numbers to welcome victims and receive complaints. And, in 2022, it made school bullying an offense punishable by a prison sentence of up to ten years in the case of suicide or attempted suicide by the victim.

In early June, four teenagers identified as Lucas’s tormentors, responsible for repeated homophobic slurs against the boy, were found guilty of school bullying, but not for his suicide. They face up to 18 months in prison.

What was celebrated as a victory in the fight against bullying, however, did not cheer up French psychologist Emmanuelle Piquet, author of more than ten books on the subject. Specialist in school bullying and founder of the Chagrin Scolaire center (school suffering), in Macôn, she believes that punitive strategies are doomed to failure.

“What we are doing is clearly not working, and the punishment is making children and young people create other types of bullying that are not caught by the radars of adults”, she points out to Sheet.

Piquet is the subject of a documentary recently released on the France 2 channel, “Harcèlement scolaire: les indiens contra-attaquent” (school bullying: the Indians counterattack). In it, she appears interacting with patients to whom she applies a therapeutic model centered on developing resistance skills, which she calls “arrows” to counterattack harassment at school.

Why is it so difficult for parents and educators to deal with school bullying? For several reasons, including the fact that parents of today and of the previous generation find it extremely important to have children who are able to relate, to be part of social groups, to communicate effectively. This has become a typical school subject concern, as important as math or English.

Also because bullying came to be extremely analyzed. And that had beneficial effects, as it allowed us to look at the issue more closely and with more respect. There was a time when bullying was treated as something minor. But it also had a perverse effect, which was that bullying became an adult problem, which aggravated the tendency of children and adolescents not to talk to adults about the topic. There is a kind of law of silence.

What to do in the face of this silence? A recent study in France found that 62% of children and adolescents believed that adults could not help them in a bullying situation. That is: only 38% believed that an adult would be of help. Is very little.

Children and teenagers don’t want to talk to adults about it, mainly because they are afraid of what they will do. And since adults often make matters worse, children are right to be afraid.

Many children and young people want to protect their parents, because they know that the parental pain of knowing that the child is not loved, is isolated and mistreated, is an infinite pain. That’s why it’s so hard to deal with bullying: we don’t have the information that it happens.

What usually happens when you get this information? This is a question, from my point of view, with a problem of focus. When there is information that there is a situation of bullying, the school spends time with the children who are harassing them, so that they change, either through accountability or sanctions.

What’s wrong with focusing on the harasser? When bullies bully, they feel a sense of infinite, narcissistic pleasure, of power, which is linked to the perception of the impact they have on a child, who suffers, and on a group of children around them, who laugh.

Harassers also tell themselves, rightly, that if they harass, they won’t get harassed. It’s cynical, it’s immoral, but it’s true. Therefore, they have two reasons for not having an interest in seeing the harassment cease.

Whoever has an interest in ending the harassment is the harassed person and his family. As long as the institution works only with the harassers, nothing will change.

What supports this focus? It is very politically correct to lecture or punish harassers. Everyone says they are bad. We know that sanctions are ineffective, but we continue because it’s easier and because it costs less money. On the other hand, having two key people per school who could help children move away from this harassment costs money. There are ten days of training plus supervision. It’s not something you can improvise.

The harassers of Lucas, who committed suicide after months of suffering homophobic verbal abuse, were convicted. What do you think of this type of measure? When France passed the decree that made harassment in schools a crime, I said to myself: it will be catastrophic. New forms of harassment appear, such as isolating the child, not inviting him to birthday parties, not including him in group work. It’s a good way to make someone suffer without being punished by adults. It is a measure that promotes new harassment that will go unnoticed.

In Lindsay’s case, her main harasser had already been permanently excluded from school, but the harassment continued through other students. And the victim did not have the opportunity to learn how to deal with this type of problematic behavior: resist and know how to move the discomfort.

Lindsay’s family says they looked far and wide for help. How to explain this sequence of failures? The protocol provided by the Ministry of Education was followed: working with the harassers. And this proves in an absolutely dramatic way that the national program not only does not seem to bring results but, in some cases, is aggravating.

And what could work to combat bullying in schools? We took, initially, 20% of the most difficult schools and trained two people per school, seriously, so that they become references for children who are being bullied, support them and take care of them, help them to defend themselves.

Do you think that social networks have aggravated school bullying? This is still an adult construct. Harassment begins on the playground, in the cafeteria, on the bus, and only then will it have repercussions on the networks, sometimes rarely.

The media, which I have immense respect for, got it wrong on this issue. Dala of online violence, which exists. But this is comparable to street harassment, which is different from the kind of violence we see in school, where a child, usually alone, is persistently attacked by the same group.

Social networks are a very convenient culprit for national education agencies, who claim to have a magic solution and when that solution doesn’t work, they can blame them.

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X-RAY | Emmanuelle Piquet, 54

Psychologist and founder of the Chagris Scolaire center in France. Author of more than ten books on school bullying, such as “Te Laisse Pas Faire” (Les Arènes, 2022), an issue on which she adopts the perspective of the so-called Palo Alto School, in California (USA), which focuses on empowering the victim of harassment.