Beating the Bullies

By Jennie James

For Jokin Ceberio, the torture began in September 2003. He was 13 at the time, one of the new kids at Talaia High School in Hondarribia, a town in the Basque region of northern Spain. A gastrointestinal infection led to an embarrassing bout of diarrhea in class, and several students began taunting and harassing him for sport. Then, last August, Ceberio and three friends were caught smoking hashish at a summer camp. When Ceberio’s mother and father alerted the parents of the other children involved, the teenager’s friends labeled him a snitch and allegedly began roughing him up. In September, classmates marked the “anniversary” of Ceberio’s bowel trouble by festooning his desk with toilet paper. “He was the school punching bag, ” says Ceberio’s father, José Ignacio Ceberio.

Ceberio refused to name his tormenters. When his mother insisted, he pleaded with her: “What do you want? Do you want them to beat my brains out? ” On Sept. 17, he finally relented and his parents met with the parents of the alleged bullies two days later. On Sept. 21, Ceberio was supposed to return to school, equipped with a cell phone in case he ran into trouble, Instead, he climbed to be the top of the medieval stone wall that surrounds Hondarribia’s old quarter and threw himself off. He died instantly.

Variations an Ceberio’s story are playing themselves out with depressing regularity across Europe, though only rarely with fatal results. While the relentless teasing, harassment and violence that constitute bullying are not new, the behavior is growing both more pervasive and more emotionally and physically aggressive – and it is affecting increasingly younger children. In Spain around 7% of kids between 9 and 16 are victims of extreme bullying.

Classrooms, school playgrounds, hallways and bathrooms often become regular sites for violent episodes. In France, almost 13% of students say they’ve been the target of multiple bullying incidents including verbal attacks, fighting and theft. In Germany, the percentage of pupils who say they’ve been involved in physical violence has doubled within a generation, from 5% in the 1970s to 10% today. “The age threshold has been lowered substantially, ” says Werner Ebner, a former teacher in the town of Riederich in southern Germany. “Kids resort to physical violence much more readily.” In late November in South Wales, cancer surviver Biance Powell, 12, suffered minor burns when a bully set fire to her hair, which had just grown back after four years of chemotherapy.

Bullies are increasingly resorting to technology, too, such as sending offensive text messages or recording incidents on video. Between September 2003 and February 2004, 11 students at a school in Hildesheim in northern Germany regularly beat and humiliated a classmate, forcing him to kiss their shoes, eat chalk and masturbate. They filmed some of the incidents and circulated the footage via e-mail. “It’s an increase in the level of perfidy, ” says Klaus Hurrelmann, professor of sociology at Bielefeld University. “The victims can no longer save face through silence.”

As the number and seriousness of incidents increases, many parents worry that the problem is spiraling out of control. They are demanding that schools and policymakers do something – and in response, governments and educational authorities are devising new ways to tackle the problem: giving children strategies to avoid being picked on, and giving teachers more training to deal with the perpetrators.

To make a difference, though, authorities must first understand why bullying is burgeoning now. That’s not easy, since its worst forms happen during the early teen years, just when most youths stop talking to their elders. “Young people can be very secretive, ” says Gererd McAleavy, an education professor at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland. “It’s part of their struggle to construct their own identity.” Peter Niebling, headmaster of a high school in Hanover, suggests the trend toward smaller families may play a role. “Many children have no siblings and thus don’t know to interact and coexist with their peers in school, ” he says.

The adolescent need for identity sometimes expresses itself in persecution of those who stand out. Consider the case of Kathi Hü rter, 14, a top student at Bonn’s Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-Gymnasium. About two years ago, Hü rter says, many of her schoolmates started looking askance at her short hairstyle and nondescript outfits. But last winter, the situation escalated. Two girls in her calss began to ridicule and badmouth her, saying she looked like a boy and calling her a nerd.

It took a lot for Hü rter to summon the courage to tell her mom what was going on. “It’s very hard to talk about these things, ” she says quietly, “even to your own mother.” Together they decided it was time for Hü rter to speak to her teacher. The school’s reaction was swift. Hü rter’s head teacher first gave the class a dressing-down, and then told them he would resign if the problem didn’t stop. That brought the more severe bullying to a halt, but most of Hü rter’s classmates still don’t interact with her.

Even when there are official policies to tackle bullying, many teachers feel unprepared to deal with the problem. In France, Germany and Britain, students can be expelled for bullying, although that tends only to move the problem to another school. Teachers need help – because they don’t always know the best strategies.

Parents should look out for warning signs. Signals that a child is being bullied may include creating excuses not to go to school, or suddenly getting bad grades. Such a child should be asked directly if he or she is being bullied; if the answer is yes, a school official must be notified. Schools are best placed to interview both sets of parents, and can also take steps to break up bullying groups or keep bullies after school. If the bullying is about a specific issue (such as divorce, disfigurement or illness), teachers can launch an education program on the issue.

But many experts believe governments must ultimately get involved. Says ex-teacher Ebner: “The question [for politicians] is: Are you going to sit back and breed the future generation of head cases? ” (Abridged)

From The Times, January 2005