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Fighting school intimidation

Teachers counseled to take bullying seriously as nationwide threat

By Hilda Hoy
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
January 31st, 2007 issue

RENÉ JAKL/THE PRAGUE POST
Jirka Stehlík, right, talks about his experience with bullying, while his schoolmate Petr Zima listens.
At first glance, the Hanspaulka Primary School in Prague 6 looks much like any other school: Colorful art projects decorate the walls, lockers line the hallways and jabbering pupils clog the stairways.
These kids don’t know that their school is one of a select 17 nationwide taking part in a groundbreaking project targeting school bullies.
The Minimize Bullying (MIŠ) project, a joint effort of the O2 Foundation and AISIS, a nonprofit organization specializing in issues of education, was launched in late 2005 in schools such as Hanspaulka.
“Our aim is to find a base strategy for fighting bullying that can be used in all countries,” said O2 Foundation Project Manager Ivana Šatrová, speaking at a Jan. 25 press conference on the progress of MIŠ. “Bullying is a national problem … and teachers aren’t trained to tackle it.”
Now, organizers are preparing to wrap up the project. By this fall, they hope to cooperate with the Education Ministry and individual districts in order to implement their findings in even more schools.
Experts say bullying, as in many countries, is a widespread problem in Czech schools: In its annual report released last month, the Czech School Inspection surveyed more than 6,000 students in eighth and ninth grade and found that 55 percent had experienced bullying. The report went on to single out school bullying as a chronic problem.
Other recent surveys, using a standardized questionnaire developed by Dan Olweus, a Swedish psychologist with extensive background in bullying research, have placed the figure of bullying victims in the Czech Republic at around 40 percent. Under the Olweus criteria, bullying can include everything from name-calling and spreading false rumors to physical aggression. In each case, the bullying is hurtful and the aggressor is in a position of power over his or her victim.
KURT VINION/THE PRAGUE POST
Psychologist Michal Kolář says bullying is getting more brutal.
An ongoing problem
Hanspaulka pupil Petr Zima, 15, remembers being bullied and called names when he first transferred to the school in fourth grade.
“I felt like an outsider. It made me feel insecure,” he recalls. “It used to bother me a lot when I was younger, and it still sometimes bothers me.”
These days, he’s in ninth grade and has settled into Hanspaulka, but on several occasions he’s been targeted by older boys outside of school. Once they threatened to pick a knife fight.
“It’s better to be humiliated verbally than get beaten up,” he says stoically. “You can’t stop it. Bullying will be here forever.”
Behind the scenes, his school’s teachers have been undergoing training to fight that grim future.
“We knew bullying was going on, but we were afraid to react because we didn’t know the right way to do it,” says Petra Bucci, a teacher of first through fifth grade at Hanspaulka who participated in the MIŠ program.
The project, developed by Prague-based psychologist Michal Kolář, is designed to train teachers to detect the early warning signs of bullying and how to deal with it. The teachers attend a series of weekend seminars, involving extensive role-playing that puts them in the position of aggressor, victim and teacher. Later, they take those lessons back to the classroom, and a therapist from MIŠ comes to the class to observe the plan in action.
It’s hard to say whether bullying has been getting worse, Kolář says. Most cases of bullying are never reported, and, as the problem becomes more widely acknowledged and more victims speak out, there could appear to be a spike in cases.
But, “from my personal experience [as a psychologist], the brutality of bullying is increasing,” he says.
Though it’s often hard to prove the link, he says bullying has even driven some youths to suicide. Several years ago, a boy in Ostrava, north Moravia, was so tormented by bullies that he leapt from an eighth-floor balcony. He survived but is now permanently disabled, Kolář says.
Though the results will be impossible to quantify, Hanspaulka Principal Marie Pojerová says MIŠ has brought positive changes to the school.
The training was especially helpful in aiding teachers to identify verbal or psychological bullying, she says.
“We think mental bullying is much more dangerous,” and also far more common, she says. “The way we identify and diagnose it is better now.”
“I think the [Education] Ministry should … implement the program in other schools.”
Currently, the ministry “can only provide guidelines” on bullying and recommend, not require, schools to follow them, spokeswoman Karolína Svobodová says.
Naďa Černá contributed to this report.

Hilda Hoy can be reached at hhoy@praguepost.com


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