The Surviving Bullies Project

Tuesday, April 11, 2006

What’s the Deal with the Surviving Bullies Charity

p until January of 2006, we, the Surviving Bullies Project, worked to “help the individual.” We compassionately and lovingly created the Surviving Bullies Workbook, designed to provide the targets of bullying with practical strategies to regain control of the situation. After two years of research and a year of writing, layout and design, we were finally done.

As much as we hold this workbook close to our hearts, we cringe at the reality that the workbook is designed to help someone who’ve already gone through the emotional turmoil caused by being bullied. Being former targets of bullying, we know how much that sucks, and we wouldn’t wish it upon anybody. We need to do something that prevents people from being bullied, in addition to helping someone in the aftermath of bullying.

That’s when we started to explore the idea of tackling the bullying issue through “empowering the community.”

Here’s our line of thinking: bullying gives people social power. Social power comes from the bystanders. When people bully, they boost their social power while making the targets look weak and embarrassingly uncool.

So if the incentive for someone to bully is social power, and the bystanders are the source of social power, then we figured that our preventative endeavor lies with the bystanders.

In the beginning, we equated “bystanders” with “the student who stood by and watched.” How obvious, right? Wrong. We soon realized that bystanders embody much more than just the students. Bystanders include, teachers, administrators, cafeteria staff, bus drivers, and parents – all members of a school community.

Our dream is to educate all bystanders about the potentially devastating impact of bullying on a target. For the kids, we want to teach them low-risk but effective measures that they can take if they ever find themselves on the sidelines of a bullying incident. If they see someone purposely knock someone else’s stuff onto the floor, for example, standing by and laughing only magnifies the bullies’ power. Directly confronting the bully is risky as it may provoke hostility onto you. A low-risk but effective action that bystanders can take would be helping the target pick up his or her stuff and walking off. This fully takes away the reward bullying usually offers for the perpetrator.

For the teachers and parents, we want to educate them about the sophisticated social subculture of any space that kids gather (e.g. unattended classrooms, playground, cafeteria, hallways, school busses, etc). We also want to enlist them to become coaches who transform their kids from bystanders to allies.

From the cost point of view, this dream of “empowering the community” is expensive. In order to create this program optimally and effectively, we need professionals from a number of arenas such as professional curriculum developers, writers, and multimedia experts.

In March, we sat down as a team and did some number crunching…the final figure: 5 million dollars for a four-year pilot program in four Connecticut schools (which spans across the full racial and socio-economic spectrum).

We are in the process of fund-raising for our dream program through the Surviving Bullies Charity, Inc., and we need your help! Each dollar you donate brings us that much closer to our goal. We are also appealing to educational foundations to join us in our campaign to fund and develop our program.

-Shan Shan

Posted by Dickon on 04/11/06 at 03:50 PM

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