Blog

Keeping Anti-Bullying Week on the national agenda

Thursday 19th November 2009

Anti-Bullying Week is so important in keeping this topic on the national agenda and that’s why Leap supports and promotes it each year.

For some young people the everyday journey to school or the break or lunchtime sessions are a constant misery.

Leap’s work is to reduce fear and violence by training young people to resolve their own everyday differences and thus prevent escalation to violence.

Everyone in the Leap community is passionate about the power of peer leadership in creating a legacy of prevention of violence on our streets and in our schools.

Our own schools work is testament to this – the thousands of young people who give up lunchtimes and breaks to mediate for their peers with excellent results are our unsung heroes at Leap.

Our own trustees and supporters are tireless champions for this work and all share a huge commitment to ending the culture of violence and intimidation that can prevail in parts of our communities.

Leap’s work deals with the 13 to 25 age group but we all have a wide ranging and embracing interest in all progress in this field.

Here is Patrick Dunne our Chairman writing about this subject in the primary school field:

Bullying – a game?
Providing opportunities for young people to talk and think about spotting and dealing with conflict is at the core of Leap’s work.

As a Warwick University council member I receive alerts on all sorts of fascinating research going on at the University. A recent paper in the Journal of child psychology and psychiatry caught my attention.

Despite its classically academic title “Virtual learning intervention to reduce bullying victimisation in primary school in a controlled trial” the paper has generated considerable interest in the mainstream press.

In a nutshell it suggests that there is evidence that computer games designed to teach young people effective strategies for dealing with bullying can have positive short term effects. It’s too early yet to tell whether the benefits are sustained.

The sample of over a thousand English and German children, whose average age was nine, was drawn from 27 different schools. They were assessed before, one week after and four weeks after they had performed three 30 minute sessions with a game called Fear Not!

Most parents won’t be surprised by the passion young people have for gaming. They may have seen their kid’s maths or other skills increase through the use of games.

It seems to me that this is a topic well worth pursuing by specialists in conflict resolution. However a lot depends on the quality of the tool used and how it is introduced. The academics make a point of emphasising that such tools could be another useful component of an anti bullying strategy. They don’t suggest that such a tool is sufficient on its own.

We’d be keen to have a conversation on this topic.