Intervention
Posted by Eric Olsen, Marial Williams, Anna Burns, Katrena Gillis at Friday, May 22, 2015 4:39:07 PM CDT
Intervention is defined as the act of coming between as to prevent or alter a future course of events. Throughout the movie Bullying, both child and parents try their best at intervening in some shape or form, usually with little changing. Even involving the administrators of the children, the people specifically set in charge of dealing with bullying situations were not able to prevent or change the circumstances that plagued these bullied children. The degree to which intervention is implemented in schools, of any age where bullying exists, is to create programs that foster anti-bullying and reason with their students on how their actions impact their fellow classmates. This is especially vital in cases of sexual orientation or disabilities where bullying runs rampant and rarely gets prevented. The culture of these institutions needs to be reformatted to include anti-bullying programs to best ensure their students a safe and loving educational environment.
At its core, social justice is the view that everyone deserves equal economic, political and social rights and opportunities. In regards to bullying, this creates a much more holistic approach that is unfortunately very difficult to maintain and implement. Social justice requires people, in this case adolescents, to see the differences in the people around them and treat all people with the same level of respect and dignity. Currently, children perceive the differences in their peers around them and act on them, resulting in bullying. Children want to feel important and special over the people around them and are willing to achieve this standard, even if it means ridiculing their classmates. If social justice was implemented and accepted, children would understand the effect their words/actions have and would improve virtually every aspect of bullying. With this approach not only would current bullying cease, it would prevent future bullying from happening due to everyone involved understanding the consequences for their actions.
An approach like this would also require a major shift in the views of society. Masculinity has been so ingrained into our society that bullying, to some extent, has been encouraged. It is considered masculine to be dominant and aggressive over those around you. Changing the landscape of bullying would require younger boys to realize that bullying is not the outlet to channel these masculine tendencies, but rather through other outlets like sports or hobbies. Exerting your ability in a hobby is far less harmful than showing your power in degrading another human being. While this will not be easy, through the right programs and determination boys can be changed and can learn that bullying is not a healthy path for anyone.
Social justice directly affects intervention because it teaches all parties involved to be active in confronting the bullying around them. Everyone ‘buys-in’ and takes responsibility for their actions in creating an equal environment for all, refusing to let injustices prevail. A social justice system would also likely be effective, if all accepted, due to its easy conversion to a broad range of factors that involve bullying like sexuality, race, or class. In essence, intervention would no longer be needed because bullying would be eliminated, after the system was in place. However, in the developing stages of a social justice system, intervention would be encouraged from a variety of sources, empowering those to act on the differences they observe.
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I thought some of your intervention techniques were interesting such as suggesting a hobby instead of bullying. Angela Giannetto
I really liked this post and I share the sentiment that putting such a system in place isn’t easy as tearing down the old system and norms is so difficult. I also really like the hobby idea. It provides an outlet for the naturally competitive state of boys and even fosters teamwork and brings people together
Torina Gedler: This entry, though considerably shorter, is very concise and well-written. I think, though, that more examples could have been included and would’ve enhanced the argument considerably.
Reed Timmer: I like and agree with how the concept of intervention needs to be taken with great care and the degree with which people do intervene is important. Too little or too much intervention could completely cause the bullying situation to go astray and to get out of hand from the people that are trying to stop it from happening. I also like the idea that anyone who has the chance or opportunity to intervene with any type of bullying system, they need to in order to go along with the social justice approach.
Hannah Hennessey: I like the portion about refusing to let injustice prevail. Bullying interventions need to happen everywhere. This would help engrave that when you do something wrong you get punished. Just like in the legal system. In both areas there are flaws, but people need to do whatever they can to minimize those flaws.
Ally Calvert: Your groups statements about “The culture of these institutions needs to be reformatted to include anti-bullying programs to best ensure their students a safe and loving educational environment.” Was something that stuck out to me. My question to your group would be do you believe that this is something that is happening in schools all around, or do you feel that schools everywhere need to do a better job or showing students that this happening and how to stop bullying? I feel that a lot of schools are trying to show this, yet it is not always helping when it gets said and done. I feel that trying to get groups together is a great way of helping students to be against bullying, but at the same time we may need more push in schools. Great Post!
Zachary Berman: Getting everyone to “buy in” to an equal environment is ideal in nature. However, many relationships at young ages seems to made by identifying something in common with each other. We just need to teach that these differences don’t make anyone superior or inferior.
Lea Kozulic: A lot of people think that sometimes it’s better to leave things as they are but unfortunately, some things in life will just stay the same if there isn’t someone who’s going to intervene. It is important to know how to “intervene”, how to approach someone. You would have to be smart about it. It wouldn’t work to just point out at the children who were bullies, tell them to stop and expect them to stop. That’s not how it works with children. You have to make them know that there really is something they would lose and that is so much more important than what they would gain if they would continue with teasing other kids.
Pamela Mulhern: I feel the problem with stating that this approach would cease current, and prevent future
bullying by teaching people the consequences, is that some kids/people just don’t care about the consequences, even if they know what they are. Certain people are simply apathetic to these types of things, or apathetic to anything really. Some kids may not
respond to learning of their consequences, like in Bully, when we hear a parent explain how after Ty took his own life, kids came to school wearing nooses. So to suggest that this approach could stop bullying altogether could be slightly off, I feel that it
would be better to state that it would drastically improve bullying.
Tasha Alexander: They talked about how when people do intervene the problem is still not taken care of and I agree there are many cases when parents get involved and talk to the principal or even the cops and nothing is done and all they say is kids will be kids or that they were asking for it. They did a good job at explaining the process and everything that goes on and what needs to be done.
Susan Smith: I think a key part of transforming bystanders into interventionist relies on being empathetic and friendly. If the bystanders didn’t extend empathy for the child being bullied, why would they even intervene? I understand that the post is stating that if there was social justice people would intervene because they would want to ensure everyone was treated equal, I think that empathy has to come first because I am not sure if anyone cares about equality of all individuals without empathizing in the first place. For example we saw that black children were being paralleled to animals which is why the white society laughingly made post cards/books/etc. where these little black children died brutally, no social justice was extended because these children were unequal. However if empathy was extended white society would have felt bad about this and ensure equality was extended.
Emily Tyler: I think this post is realistic in stating that changing the current systems and reducing bullying and the reasons behind it will not be an easy or one dimensional solution. I also like the idea of everyong having to “buy-in” to a new system and take responsibility for their actions and the way they influence others’ actions. One question I did have though was about channeling masculine qualities through things such as sports: I feel like that is something that is already done through gender divided sports like football and cheerleading, and as was the case with William, he played sports because they were male attributes, but his father still thought that he could only play sports to be masculine and it was enough to balance out having a doll. Do you have any ideas on how kids can be competitive in a healthy positive way then through sports but that don’t encounter these above problems?
Marial Williams: You discuss the Lifetime movie, “Ran.” What are the specific relational bullying examples within that movie? Is there something that makes relational bullying different from other types of bullying in a way that we should try to combat it differently? Also, I think that saying violence is the answer in any form is ridiculous. The kids that tend to get bullied the most tend to be the ones who can not defend themselves. Bullying the bully makes you the bully.
Good post and good comments. Intervention is a specific term used in the world of education, child behavior, and bullying, in addition to the more general definition you cite here. Do some research on what they mean when they use that term. How might a social justice approach change the ways that teachers are taught to intervene?
“At its core, social justice is the view that everyone deserves equal economic, political and social rights and opportunities. In regards to bullying, this creates a much more holistic approach that is unfortunately very difficult to maintain and implement. Social justice requires people, in this case adolescents, to see the differences in the people around them and treat all people with the same level of respect and dignity. Currently, children perceive the differences in their peers around them and act on them, resulting in bullying. Children want to feel important and special over the people around them and are willing to achieve this standard, even if it means ridiculing their classmates. If social justice was implemented and accepted, children would understand the effect their words/actions have and would improve virtually every aspect of bullying.”
That is a strong paragraph. Use this a springboard for thinking about what needs to change in order for kids to learn to treat all human with respect and dignity? How can teachers model this kind of respect? How can we, as a society, rethink the ways we teach kids to feel good about themselves and others? Why does “difference” have to be perceived as negative?
Another issue raised in the education literature about intervention is that teachers need to learn to SEE bullying that isn’t physical. How would you go about doing that? How do you think people can learn to approach difference in a respectful way and teach that to kids?