Project Description

Bullying is not a recent phenomenon but one that has existed for generations in various forms. As late as1999, Tim Fields, a prominent British anti-bullying activist, described bullying as  "....a compulsive need to displace aggression and is achieved by the expression of inadequacy (social, personal, interpersonal, behavioural, professional) by projection of that inadequacy onto others through control and subjugation (criticism, exclusion, isolation etc). Bullying is sustained by abdication of responsibility (denial, counter-accusation, pretence of victim hood) and perpetuated by a climate of fear, ignorance, indifference, silence, denial, disbelief, deception, evasion of accountability, tolerance and reward (eg promotion) for the bully."

In recent years experts in the field of child protection and children's rights have come to recognize the emotional, psychological and physical harm that can occur because of bullying.  While much work has been done around bullying in many member states the public still perceives bullying as something that occurs in the schoolyard and that has no real long-term repercussions on the victim or the offender. In fact, some of the worst forms of bullying occur from teachers, parents and siblings, demonstrating that bullying is not simply a rite of passage to growing up but a serious issue of violence towards and amongst youth.

There have been projects on bullying however most have focused on one situation and have not provided a uniformed European solution to address bullying in its various forms which include but are not limited to peer to peer bullying, teacher to student and student to teacher, sibling bullying, parental bullying and even child bullying on parents.

The aim of the project is to determine whether there are commonalities amongst the various member states in the situations that bullying occurs and common traits amongst victims and amongst offenders. Through work in the field of bullying, the applicant and partners want to assess the knowledge base of bullying in various situations amongst students and raise awareness in the target groups: children, young people, parents and educators. By including a public campaign the last phase of the project will raise general public awareness on the emotional, psychological and physical toll of bullying and encourage a zero tolerance policy towards bullying in any form.

While many member states have various forums that deal with bullying, the aim of this project is to create a national focal point in each partner state- a one-stop site for bullying for the public, for parents, for teachers and most importantly for children. In this way the project will give children a safe forum in which to learn more about bullying, speak confidentially to professionals on the issue of bullying, where it occurs, how to deal with it and through online applications learn how to protect themselves from bullying. 

While the applicant and partner countries have legislation that can deal with bullying because of common misconceptions about bullying, the legislation is not systematically enforced.  Through a coordinated effort, the project's aim is to create an environment where bullying is identified, the victim is protected and assisted and the behaviour of the bully is reformed.  Ultimately, the goal is to create an environment of zero-tolerance of bullying in communities across Europe. Through a harmonized project in seven countries the national message will be that bullying is not tolerated in Europe and enforcement of national legislation will ultimately be encouraged.

Overall goal

The goal of this project is to create a unified response in identifying and dealing with bullying in all its situational forms and by providing a European platform for children, parents, teachers and the general public to learn about the issue. Ultimately, the public in the 6 participant countries will know where to go for information on bullying and that credible and reliable help is available in their native language by both telephone and internet.

Objectives

Bullying has traditionally been viewed as behaviour that occurs between children and usually at school.  More recently, cyber bullying has become more widely recognised. Through the National Helpline for Children in Greece, SOS 1056, and the helplines in the other 6 partner countries it has become apparent that bullying occurs in a number of situations.  It occurs between peers outside of school, it occurs from teachers towards students and vice versa, it occurs between siblings and parents to children and children to parents! In order to address the different contexts in which bullying occurs, the aim of this project is to gather information and assess the various situational contexts in which bullying can occur and how each is best addressed. Through a questionnaire the project will identify common traits amongst victims and amongst offenders in the various situational contexts and whether there are commonalities of the two groups in the partner countries. The questionnaire will seek to identify potential victims and potential bullies. Significantly, unlike the Olweus questionnaire where questions regarding teachers as bullies and as victims of bullying were deliberately omitted, this project's questionnaire will focus on non-traditional situational bullying, including but not limited to the examples provided above. This will enable us to focus and identify the victims and the offenders of bullying.

Once the information is collected and analyzed, professionals with experience in counselling on bullying from the applicant and partner countries will work together and will provide their experiences and expertise in creating different awareness raising tools to be used to reach different target groups, taking into account the age appropriateness of the material.

The first tool will be a site that will include online applications and information to children, parents and teachers.  The site will be available in the languages of the applicant and partners and there will be links from each partners' website to the Antibullying site and from the Antibullying site to each partners' website.

The second tool will be a video with various scenarios and outcomes that will be used as a teaching tool in schools and to encourage discussions with children on the issue.

The third tool will be a public awareness raising campaign that will include television, radio and print advertisements to raise public awareness and to promote the number to call for bullying and the site that will already be running. Public announcement advertisements are broadcast free of charge by many television stations in the applicant and partner countries.  The campaign will let people know that there are professionals in their country that can help them with the issue and that help is only a phone call or click away.  Cultural disparities and cultural norms will be taken into account when creating each tool.

The target group of the questionnaire will be students from junior and senior high school.  The target groups of the bullying site and the public campaign will be children, parents, teachers and the general public.  The direct beneficiaries of the project will be youth who may already be affected by bullying in their daily life. Younger children will benefit because with the success of the project the incidents of bullying in various forms will decrease and children growing up will know if they do face a bullying situation there is help available for them.  While parents and teachers who may be either victims or bullies themselves will benefit from the project, the focus of Europe's ABC will be young people involved in bullying either as victims or as offenders themselves.

The project is within the Daphne call's priority on street and peer violence and with the awareness raising tools that will be utilized, will use technology to address bullying in a consistent and unified method. Bullying is often based on the victims' feelings of isolation and helplessness.  By having an interactive site that young people can visit and that is designed to capture and hold their interest and a helpline that they can call, the project will use modern communication tools to help victims understand that they are not alone, that their problem is not unique and that there are ways to deal with their problem.