Could Anti-Bullying Push Put Trainer Out Of Work? She Hopes So.

ACROSS AMERICA — Melissa Schulz is excited by the prospect that she could put herself out of business.

Schulz is an anti-discrimination and harassment trainer who works primarily with corporate clients. But she spends about one-fifth of her time as a trainer for No Bully, a leading bullying prevention organization that works with schools to end the cycle of torment that can have lifelong physical and emotional consequences.

“If we do this well in schools, hopefully, I’ll be put out of business in my corporate work in the future,” Schulz says of No Bully’s training, which emphasizes “social-emotional life skills kids will carry with them for the rest of their lives.”

Bullying is an age-old problem affecting about 1 in 3 U.S. schoolchildren. But today’s kids are navigating it against a backdrop of an angry national conversation surrounding racial inequality, the 2020 presidential election, and a pandemic that has disrupted both their school and social lives. Experts say the pandemic has increased cyberbullying, the online form of bullying some use to relentlessly torment their targets.

COMING SATURDAY, Oct. 24: Do reality television shows affect how we treat each other? Patch national writer Megan VerHelst will have some answers.

Patch's "Menace Of Bullies" series, now in its third year, is a national reporting and advocacy project aimed at raising awareness around bullying, a confounding national problem with life-changing — and, in some of the most tragic of bullying cases, life-ending — consequences. Patch journalists across America have been telling stories about what's being done to protect children from unwanted and repeated aggressive behavior.

Promise In Student-Led Approach

No Bully’s educational programs include Solution Teams that are deployed when incidents of bullying are reported. It’s a departure from traditional approaches in which school authorities mete out punishments for the bully but focus little on empathy-building, the harm to the victim, and improvements in the school culture and climate to reduce bullying.

Related: No Bully ‘Upstanders’ Talk Candidly To Adults: Stop Being Bullies | “The Menace Of Bullies”: A Patch Series

Students are the agents of change in the Solution Team approach. The student-led teams include bystanders to the incident, the bully and “prosocial” peers who have shown by example to act on behalf of others. Adults trained in the approach are involved, but only peripherally as facilitators.

The target of the bullying isn’t involved in the student-led sessions to resolve the situation, and the bully is as involved as the other team members in developing a non-punitive, empathy-building response that makes the targeted student feel safer in school.

School safety and the long-term effects of persistent bullying are among the damaging consequences identified by researchers Moira DeNike and Holly Gordon in a study published last year by the California Association of School Psychologists.

They reviewed 284 instances in which Solution Teams met to resolve incidences of bullying. More research is needed to broaden the study, DeNike says, but the results suggest Solution Teams are a promising anti-bullying strategy. The sample size was “a nice enough number for us to feel confident something positive is happening,” she says.

“The vast majority report in future check-ins that bullying frequency and intensity have gone down, and they feel safe in school,” DeNike said.

Normalizing Oppression

Bullying is a problem that is as old as the ages, but it wasn’t until the Columbine school massacre in 1999 that politicians began addressing it with anti-bullying laws — the first of which was in Colorado and which are now on the books in all 50 states.

Nicholas Carlisle, the founder of No Bully and its former chief executive, told Patch last year that while they are well-intentioned, laws criminalizing bullying and cyberbullying aren’t an effective solution. He called them “an aggressive approach to solve a problem that is essentially one of aggression.”

DeNike and Gordon’s findings underscore that.

Punishing the bully, rather than helping that individual develop empathy for the victim, can “further alienate the students who were involved, widen equity disparity, and fail to repair harm or reintegrate students,” they write, citing previously published research.

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Those zero-tolerance policies “have not been shown to reduce negative behavior” and also “can promote intolerance and discrimination, as they marginalize students with emotional and behavioral difficulties and promote blame and shaming.”

“Such approaches can widen inequity, worsen school climate, and generally fail to address the underlying issues that fuel bullying and other disruptive behaviors,” they write.

The researchers didn’t attempt to measure the degree to which bullies became more empathetic as a result of the Solution Team experience, but DeNike says she’s encouraged by “some anecdotal evidence” to suggest that is occurring.

“Kids have been doing it for eons, and there are lots of social problems that have happened for eons,” she says. “When we did nothing, the long-term psychological harm went on for eons. When we did nothing about domestic violence, the long-term psychological harm went on for eons. When we do nothing, it normalizes interpersonal brutality.”

Schulz sees that in her work as an anti-discrimination and harassment trainer for corporations. Some of the problems she helps her clients wrestle with are the result of oppressive, bullying behavior that was never properly addressed.

“Nothing,” she says, “is more important than teaching children about bullying early on.”

One way is to avoid introducing the concept of oppression, through thoughtful communication with kids. Schulz says it’s as simple as explaining that a cup of coffee or a glass of wine are adult drinks, rather than just saying “no, no, no”; consulting kids about big moves; and giving them body autonomy — that is, the choice of whether they hug a relative.

“Our society does not treat young people as human beings,” Schulz says. “We treat them as these little creatures who need to do what we say. And we wonder why they have tantrums and lash out. Oppression is oppression, and young people’s oppression is something parents should look at.”

She and her husband “stick to the facts” when discussing the events going on in the world with their 7-year-old daughter, Cyan.

Schulz says her daughter “literally cried” over the separation of migrant children from their parents at the southern U.S. border, asking, “Mom, what about the baby that needs to drink her mom’s milk?”

“We helped her verbalize her anger,” Schulz said. “We don’t name-call each other, and we don’t name-call others.”

Cyan is one of the students Patch interviewed for Unity Day, observed during National Bullying Prevention Month. An “upstander” who comes to the defense of bullied students, she recognizes the need for more kindness — toward her peers but also all people.

“She got that from her school in New York City, which has a strong social-emotional learning curriculum,” Schulz says. “You can’t take words back. You need to think about what you’re going to say. My husband and I live by those practices, even with each other.”

A Generation Of Kind Kids

They still speak out against what they see as injustices and policies they disagree with but frame their conversations around issues rather than personalities — something Schulz says she and her husband didn’t learn at Cyan’s age.

“Our wonderful, well-intentioned parents did not teach us the skills because they didn’t have them,” she says. “It does give me hope that children are learning social-emotional skills, compassion and so forth.”

Her optimism is tempered by the incremental nature of change.

“Yes, it will take four generations, probably,” Schulz says, “but look at young people today and their capacity to engage with other children to understand racism, to see equity and desire for things to be fair.”

Politicians currently in office didn’t create the problem, Schulz says, but she expects history to reflect that protests against the systemic unfairness uncovered in the “me too” and racial justice movements were amplified in the 2000s.

“Cyan’s generation is the first where we’re actively teaching kids these skills; and her children, if she ever chooses to have them, will learn even better than their parents,” Schulz says. “Four generations out, I hope we look back at this moment in history and see how appalling it was.”

If that happens, Schulz says, there will be no job market for folks like her.

She’s OK with that.

It means her daughter’s plea — that people just treat each other with kindness and respect — will have been heard.

“We’re getting better as a people and as a society, even during this time that is so challenging,” says DeNike, the researcher who looked at the success of the Solution Team approach. “A lot of people say we’re doomed, but there are so many signs that society is moving in the right direction. We’re trying to become more empathetic and see that as a value we want the next generation to embrace and embody.

“The arc of history is long,” she says, paraphrasing civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr., “ ‘but it bends toward justice.’ ”

The Menace Of Bullies: A Patch Series

For more than three years, Patch has been looking at society’s roles and responsibilities in bullying in hopes we might offer solutions that improve and save children’s lives. Do you have a story about bullying? Are you concerned about how your local schools handle bullies and their victims? Email bullies@patch.com

Read “The Menace Of Bullies”