OR MAYBE WE COULD SAVE SOME MONEY AND JUST SMACK THEM:

Treat bullying like a disease, doctor says (Anne Marie Owens, National Post, 12/01/04)

Pediatricians need to start going into schools to protect children from bullying in the same way they take responsibility for immunizing them from communicable diseases, says an internationally renowned pediatrician and chancellor of Dalhousie University in Halifax.

In an article in The Journal of Pediatrics, Dr. Richard Goldbloom envisions "a new kind of school physician," who instead of conducting quick physical checkups on students, would work with school staff to curb problems associated with bullying and increase awareness of the telltale signs of bullying.

His article, entitled "Children's Inhumanity to Children," builds on a study that also appears in this month's issue of the journal.[...]

The study, which said about 45% of the children reported being bullied at least once or twice, found the victims had significantly higher chances for depression and psychosomatic complaints.

The victims' complaints included headaches, sleeping problems, abdominal pain, bedwetting and fatigue.[...]

"It's time for pediatricians, individually and collectively, to assume a larger interventional and preventive role," he says in the article. "To do so, we must spend more time where the action is, i.e., in the schools, where we have a captive audience. Pediatricians can play a major role in preventing and managing a wide variety of child health problems through their physical presence at the sites where such problems exist. There is no better locale for individual and group therapy involving students, parents and teachers."

Perhaps the earliest introduction most children have to the painful side of life is the school bully. Here they learn the hard truth that not everyone will behave nobly or treat them well. It is also here that many have a social formative lesson in what is right and wrong, and the consequences of failing to understand the difference.

Now, predictably, we are learning that it is not about right and wrong, but about health and treatment. Today’s teachers can attest to the current faddishness of bullying. They are forced to attend interminable workshops where caring professionals spend hours telling them patronizingly what bullying is (!), demean them in silly role-playing and discuss counseling and “strategies”. Anyone who was a bully’s victim knows that there is only one way to cope–find a way to stand up to it when adults are absent.

Bullying, like spousal abuse, is usually a failure of fatherhood, at least with boys. It is prevented when loving fathers look their children in the eye coldly and tell them all hell will break loose if they engage in such behaviour. Maternal love is often too unconditional and too emotionally empathetic to see the forest for the trees. Although abusive patriarchs of the past sired many bullies, the modern, feckless male “co-parent” who declines to impose his values, frets about his kids’ self-esteem, abjures serious punishment and defers his responsibilities to trendy professionals is equally to blame, assuming he is present at all.

Meanwhile, the professionals keep holding their workshops and the bullies keep laughing.