Grade Two, and finally, the end to bullying
When I first started posting about my ASD child, it was indirectly in response to discussions on the internet about bullying in its many forms. I had intended to speak about how one Principal at our school had landed firmly in its midst to put a stop to bullying and its culture
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My son differentiated between bullying and bad behaviour. A bully was someone who enjoyed making people suffer. It didn’t matter who.
On the other hand, he realized that people could hate each other’s guts out, and therefore want the person they hated to suffer - but he considered that an entirely different thing from bullying, if that makes sense?
He considers it highly unlikely that any environment will exist in which people do not love - and hate - each other. So...if people were mean to people they hated, that made a kind of social sense to him: you hate someone, you don’t want them to be happy. So, it’s human nature to dislike people. It’s human nature to like them. It’s frequently nature you will see combined in anyone. There were people who hated my son, and people whom my son hated (although in general this was later, not in elementary school), but he didn’t consider either side of that equation to be bullying.
It’s not that there were never any problems at the school, and it’s never going to be that; where there are people there will be problems. Even when you only have siblings under your care, they require supervision, because they do have tempers, they can get carried away.
There’s an active awareness that’s required, and one can’t “set up safeguards” and then somehow expect the safeguards to function in the stead of people who care and who watch.
What makes the difference is knowing that it is wrong and not doing it.
Yes - but in the case of the problem child, how is he to know what is wrong? It seems clear to me in hindsight that the reason he knew there always had to be a victim was because he felt he was one. For whatever reason, his perception was that the world was not fair and that if he did not do everything in his power to make sure someone else suffered, it would be him, again.
You don’t get reflexes like that unless you absolutely cannot believe in justice or fairness. You develop them when you see the world as, well, a jungle.
What helped that child was the fact that there were people who could point out that this was not the case -- at school. That at school he could take the risk of believing that there would be no victims, that things could be fair, that he could be heard and maybe, must maybe someone would come to his rescue. Someone would defend him. That he wouldn’t be the one who was humiliated and hurt - because there didn’t have to be humiliation and hurt.
It’s not the punishment - which never worked. He expected that. He expected to be the butt end of the universal justice system - and if it was going to happen anyway, he was going to make sure he earned it.
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