That day I walked along the country all the afternoon long for about six miles until I reached a gorgeous green park.

Then I sat down in a park bench. I wasn’t forced to stay there but I found it an extremely comfortable place while checking my Twitter stats and tweeting something interesting about the day before.

I felt the air through my hair and the scents of nature had on me a tonic effect.

That long lasting perfume brought a memory of some beautiful moments I had when I was teen, as an olfactory-evoked recall from the past.

I saw the sun smiling to my face and I could hear something through my ears in that rarefied atmosphere, I thought I heard an amazing music, a series of chords from a distant place.

I gained such a peaceful relax after a long busy week and a travel to Milan to attend an important marketing forum with Philip Kotler.

Thus, the weekend was the perfect private moment to relax and recall the lesson learnt and capitalize such knowledge and its takeaways.

Milan gave me another great opportunity to reconnect with extraordinary minds and the greatness of their presence had strengthened my willingness to do more and engage more in marketing.

But suddenly something disturbed the peaceful atmosphere of the edenic afternoon.

I could hear from distance aggressive voices, gibes and jeers arriving at me as a seamless echo.

“We don’t want to play with you” “You are not a friend of us” “You can’t play with us” “Stay apart, get lost”.

I thought I saw someone in difficulties, because there were about five young boys with a ball all together close to one another, and one guy alone, separate from the others.

But the green trees hided some details of the scene.

I couldn’t notice their gestures nor their bodies because of the blossoming cherry-tree but the five ones seemed to threaten and menace the poor boy.

“You are a loser” “We don’t want a loser to play with us, so get out of our sight”.

I was tempeted to react against them even if they were not visible to my eyes but the boy went away running towards my direction.

I stood up and began to walk toward him. I didn’t know well why I had had such immediate reaction but I knew I was right to have it.

“Can I help you? What’s the matter with you? Do you need something I can do for you? “

“ I was born to suffer. That’s my life. I was born to have no voice. Benches were built for me in order I could see the others play and live as a spectator to the others’ life. I have no more life. Well, I hadn’t even had it.”

“Nobody gave me chances. All the people use to say I’m not good enough in almost anything. Even in my family nobody trusts me.”

“Only my guitar loves me. And I love my guitar”.

“That doesn’t mean anything if you don’t like those people” – I exclaimed vigorously.

“You need the courage to overcome such problem. You have to conquer what you really need. You have to struggle stubbornly for what you want”. “Do you want to play with such people?”.

And then I said to him “Do you really need any acknowledgement from them? What merit do they have to be honoured and respected by you?

Don’t be afraid of them!  You don’t deserve them! Can you do something else than staying apart in silence?”

“What do you love and are ready to struggle for? Embrace it. It’s your life.”

“Go and speak to them. Have no fear, no sense of guilt.”

“Nobody can name you “loser”. No one can put you in a corner or in a park bench.”

“You are valuable and irreplaceable. If you are ever told otherwise, do not believe it. It’s your choice to sit and see the others play and offend you. Just do it if you like it. But all you need is to be sure of yourself.”

And then: “You have to develop yourself into a person you feel proud to present to the world. Forget that it’s somehow your fault for being treated the way you currently are. If the world or the life didn’t give you any possibilities or chances, then build them by yourself.”

“Stop hanging around with people that you don’t deserve because you don’t need them in your life. Being alone is infinitely better than being with people who don’t accept you.”

“You are different. Look for something that can make yourself independent of other people’s validation.”

“Catch your dreams, follow your heart, find a purpose within yourself.”

My last words were: “Don’t suffer. There is no place for suffering in your life. You are yourself. You deserve a better life than the one you are currently forced to live.”

No question followed. I knew he was suffering but I knew that he would have been ready to be a protagonist a day in the future with his guitar and hopefully to get a multitude of fans despite the past.

I realized that, because I had heard his special guitar playing Taylor Swift’s “I Knew You Were Trouble”, while having a rest in that unforgettable spring afternoon.

That day I discovered the auditory acuity of my ears and the power of my words.

And I envisioned a great future for the bullied boy I met and his guitar.

The post I Knew You Were Trouble Because of Bullying appeared first on Mobbible.

Schools and families have a precise responsibility in teaching the new generations how to build and maintain a positive socialization.

Positive socialization is neither an innate attitude nor a natural behaviour, given for granted that the governing rule of the world is the homo homini lupus principle.

Positive socialization is always the result of both education and respectful behaviour. Every human relationship built on education and respect fosters a positive socialization that is based on trust and mutual respect.

The term socialization means how humans interact one another; it’s a continuous process whereby an individual acquires a personal identity and learns the norms, values, behavior, and social skills appropriate to his or her social position.

Thus, socialization happens every day, everywhere, anywhere and it also happens seamlessy, ranging from a simple contact or a particular request, to the specific way of belonging to and participating in small teams with the other teammates, or within the family where few people interact each other, to more and more complex and continuous interactions within the same school or in the same context or community where one lives.

The larger the number of those who interact, the more difficult the mechanisms of socialization and extremely challenging to make it positive.

Socialization takes also several forms with increasing level of difficulty from plain one-to-one interactions to specific conducts and behaviours within a small tribe and it becomes harder to build in larger communities where a person is forced to stay and cohexist with others.

Nobody prevails, nobody wants to win, nobody dictates where all the people build positive socialization, but everyone gets respect and motivation to cooperate and interact with one another.

Thus, where there’s positive socialization nobody has necessarily to impose, but if anything, expose in order to get respect, trust, and reach the common goals.

Building and maintaining positive socialization is like promoting assertiveness along with respect for one another, value for empathy and a shared sense of responsibility.

But all these commandments make sense only when they are built up upon the supreme principle of respect for others and human dignity in the first place.

Where there’s respect for human dignity, there are also friendship and peaceful interactions built on trust.

Trust is the most powerful conflict detonator. What fosters trust is respect. There is no trust without respect. Conflict not necessarily has to be banned but rather managed through conciliation, convergence and tolerance.

Positive socialization must have tolerance, respect and trust as its natural foundations.

Only by means of tolerance, every difference, either in opinions or in behaviours, can be accepted and overcome.

On the other side, there are disrespect, arrogance, discriminations, bullying.

Bullying is exactly the opposite of tolerance and respect. Bullying is the negation of any positive socialization.

Harassment, injuries, menaces, beatings and kicks threat and trample on every attempts of socialization.

And the dark side of bullying is the strength of its virality and contagion.

Moreover, in dealing with bullying, the real challenge is to overcome the risk of any emotional contagion both towards the victims and towards the bullies.

In other words, it has to be minimized both the risk of tolerance towards the bullies and the risk of losing respect for the victims.

In such circumstances, what is needed is that we reconvert our judgements and suppress our prejudices, both those aiming at condemning and punishing the bullies and those aiming at excluding et marginalizing the victims.

That means to put in practice all that is needed to create a positive socialization.

It takes responsibility and wisdom to deal with bullying and it is up to parents, families, teachers and schools.

They can decide wisely, they must act wisely against all forms of bullying and violence in behalf of everyone, for the everyone’s health and safety. In the name of positive socialization.

The primary goal of schools and families must be building identities.

Building identities means to intercept and canalize energies into learning paths built up on ethics, respect and continuous dialogue with others.

Schools and families have to address children’s issues by giving them credible examples, by showing interest for them and for the relationship with one another.

Schools and families must teach how to manage problems and solve conflicts; they cannot hide them or pretend their children stay silent.

Silence is the worst enemy for socialization.

Schools and families have to teach their children how to gain control of their emotions without canceling or stopping them.

Children are tomorrow’s people, they are infinite possibilities waiting to become reality.

That is means that schools, teachers, families and parents must enhance such possibilites, by forging all their emotional, psychological and relational attitudes and traits.

Schools and families are the cornerstone of the socialization and the fulcrum of child’s psychological development and psychosocial well-being, not only as an individual but also as tomorrow’s person.

Only by doing so it will be possible to build the foundations for their empowerment as tomorrow’s citizens of a more human society.

The post Building Positive Socialization for Tomorrow’s People appeared first on Mobbible.

Those who are victims of bullying stop living. Not only those who die tragically by committing suicide because of bullying or those who lose life by being bashed, punched or beaten up.

Other people stop living too. They are those who are forced by fear to not speak, to not react, to hide in a corner, to stay apart from the others.

Those people stop living as well.

Being a social outcast is the result of progressive isolation, marginalization and self-exclusion from any human contact, relationship, group.

Because of bullying a victim becomes a social outcast without any social engagement with anyone else.

Being a social outcast means living in a profound unbearable suffering condition.

And those who are forced to be a social pariah, they really stop living.

Bullying is a persecutory violence.

It’s the repetition of intentionally persisting aggressive behaviors that makes bullying a persecution.

By suffering persisting aggressive menaces, continuous prevarications and violent conducts the victims experience a progressive psychological upset and a lasting sense of stress and fear.

By the time stress and fear make victims feel a profound insecurity for their own safety so that they are forced to change habits and even living styles or conditions.

But extreme consequences are also possible, although never expected.

Victims of bullying don’t know longer live their life.

They stop living their usual, ordinary life made of daily gestures and ordinary normality.

So bullying makes them change places, hobbies, pastime, even look, friends.

Bullying make them change everything until they lose themselves trying to be likeable, to be accepted by others or to cater to others’ desires.

The others matter more than themselves. Victims stay totally subdued under their tormentors’ will.

The acceptance from others becomes progressively the only worth living condition to them, the only reason of well-being so that its negation compromises the very meaning of living.

But rapidly bullying converts a human need into a subtle conformity, dangerous homogenization, and consequently, it also becomes self annihilation, destruction of personality, loss of autonomy until it turns conversely into fear, anxiety, terror.

In such a perverse cycle, the point of no return is when the more the others demand the more the victims give away until they get deprived by any self-determination, autonomy and freedom.

And as their freedom diminishes, the victims perceive a more profound weakness, until they lose any self-esteem.

So victims become more fragile, and fragility becomes a persisting state of mind jointly with a constant sense of fear.

But by that time fragility and fear begin to change the ontological condition of human existence, from within and permanently.

The victim experiences and lives in a continuous state of exasperation and frustration. And the measure of that emotional and psychic state is anxiety.

Fragility and fear damage self-confidence and also safety. They are the antithesis of independence and freedom.

And when something threatens independence and freedom, it also threatens the entire human life.

Bullying threatens human life. It also tramples human rights.

Bullying kills life. And those who bully also kill.

The post Why Bullying Makes You Stop Living appeared first on Mobbible.

A positive socialization means promoting a social interaction inspired by positive values such as trust and respect through education instead of punishment. A positive socialization also means letting the problems come out themselves instead of inculpating and incriminating someone elses.
But that doesn’t imply that bullying, harassment and violence are justified as a “game” or as a “caper“.
Violence is always something to condemn and eradicate by anyone, anytime, anywhere.
That is is the only approach possible and worth teaching, both in schools and in families. Bullying is not a normal part of life; nothing can be tolerated that nobody should tolerate. No possibility, no room for bullying should be allowed.
Both schools and families must raise such awareness against bullying in order to shape and reshape tomorrow’s citizens.
The seeds to strengthen the new generations require a favorable ground that must be fueled by trust and self-esteem together with social competencies.
The more bullying is known the less the fear to speak out the greater the courage to stand up to it.

Fighting bullying is more than a moral imperative or a “teens’ issue”.

Fighting bullying and raising awareness about the necessity of “no more bullying” mean setting measurable targets and checking on them regularly.

Without targets nothing gests measured and nothing changes.

And it’s also necessary to go one step further by convincing the young that violence is never the right path.

Anti-bullying initiatives and campaigns can only deliver results if they are systematically delivered throughout the school and the online communities where teens and tweens live their sparetime.
“No more bullying” means creating a sense of justice and guard against discriminations, unconscious or not, in order to help the victims up both those who speak out and those who remain silent and almost invisible.
And then a cultural change must be fueled.
The rewards – a more ethical society and a bully-free world – are worth it.
The power to change and to keep moving forward lies in our hands.

No more bullying is up to us.

The post No More Bullying appeared first on Mobbible.

How to stop bullying through dialogue?

When it comes to bullying, it’s crucial for parents and teachers to know what to ask their children, how to talk with them, which words to use.

As for what to ask, teachers must gather all the elements needed to get the big picture and immediately make an overall evaluation of the situation at a glance.

In order to do that, they have to listen carefully to their children’s stories without showing anger or anxiety. They have to suggest, whisper, not impose in order to restore the relationship.

They must be coaches, not masters nor judges. They must rather be like strategists.

Indeed they have to look after their children and, at the same time, envision consequences of any action. They have to set up a real and accurate strategy in order to put in place the needed actions to block or remove their children’s accounts from a blog or a social network, to cancel their photo taken online, to stop provocative messages or cyberattacks.

On the other side, parents and teachers must contact or go on involving other parents in order to engage the entire community so that the problem gets shared and all the possible solutions are openly discussed and translated in actionable tips.

Every viable option must be assessed in order to stop the violence and any attempt to make disclosure about it must be encouraged.

Thus silence strengthens the abuse and those who stay silent collude with the abusers.

So, before denouncing the bullying cases to the police, bullying events would rather be shared across the communities in order to raise awareness among people and also point out the correct behaviours.

It’s also important not to blame anyone for being victim or doing nothing to defend himself or herself and stop the violence.

As for how to talk, in every situation it’s always necessary to create an atmosphere of security, calm, understanding, comprehension and fear restraint.

Then, words follow.

Dialogue cannot be one way. It’d rather be a continuous process that should be promoted early from within the family and never interrupted.

Parents must listen to their children more than once and must know perfectly when it’s time to ask for someone else’s help because of the seriousness of the events.

Expecially in cyberbullying, the risk is the loss of control due to the exasperation of violence through repeated online attacks which make the evil chain have an exponential virality and ferocity.

Cyberbullying is always an out of control phenomenon whose boundaries are difficult to define and circumscribe. So it’s extremely crucial to intervene immediately. Indeed, its perverse cycle is much heavier than bullying.

Anonymity, pervasivity and difficulty of traceability make cyberbullying more threatful than traditional bullying.

as explained in our latest post. The main characteristic is the climax of violence that becomes progressively but rapidly persecution by means of intentional and systematic online attacks once the victim is connected.

The persecution is also strengthened by a supposed online anonymity, by the absence of every physical contact and by the larger visibility and resonance towards an enormous number of potential visitors, viewers and bystanders.

So, what happens online finds less obstacles, smaller resistances and hesitations and fewer brakes than in the offline.

The violence runs through the digital devices and rises up until no perception and no awareness of the consequences of such bad behaviours remain.

The loss of the awareness of evil is the worst side of violence. As persecutors gain momentum in violence, they progressively loose control until they loose every sense of guilt.

Thus the more the physical distance between persecutor and victim, the weaker the perception of the relationship between action and consequences, the less the perceived responsibility for causing suffering to the victims.

And that is always the tragic epilogue of the violence.

The post How To Stop Bullying Through Dialogue appeared first on Mobbible.

Don’t Stay Oblivious to Cyberbullying!

That should be a moral imperative for each of us in order to raise awareness and start a dialogue with those who are silent victims of cyberbullying.

There are neither rules nor best practices to learn and follow when it comes to cyberbullying. Only those who directly or indirectly experience it, know what it means.

Anyone, anywhere, anytime may become victim of online bullying.

Information sharing over the internet is so effortlessly interwoven with daily life that connectivity is anywhere and anytime, and so online bullying is.

According to a new survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, fully 73% of adult internet users have seen someone to be harassed online and 40% have personally experienced it.

Thus, four-in-ten internet users are victims of online harassment as target of at least one of the following behaviours:

• 27% have been called offensive names
• 22% have had someone try to purposefully embarrass them
• 8% have been physically threatened
• 7% have been harassed for a long period
• 6% have been sexually harassed.

Cyberbullying as well as bullying remains a social plague that cannot be estinguish, ingrained as it is in our human nature.

The internet in only a place where evil of human nature can spread its contagion and go viral.

No boundaries apply to human nature, no rules can restrict it, no one has the power to prevent the spiral of evil from within but everyone should be called to do something as main stakeholder of societal wellbeing.

All humans may become victims, and everyone may witness as a bystander as in the picture below.

Young people are particularly likely to witness all types of online harassment.

Somewhere, there are some of our brothers and sisters who precisely now need our help.

In all circumstances, knowing how to react to bullying and how to stop the abuse can help someone else or reduce someone else’s pain.

Don’t Stay Oblivious to Cyberbullying!

But nobody should conceive online bullying simply as a generic “homo homini lupus” principle because when it comes to bullying, differently from any other fight, there is always only one wolf or there are some wolves attacking someone who is not a wolf being by far the least helpless and vulnerable creature with an enormous power imbalance compared with the wolves harassing him.

Of those who have been harassed online, 55% (22% of all internet users) have experienced the less severe forms while the rest (18% of all internet users) have fallen victim to any of the more severe kinds of harassment.

Half the times the identity of perpetrators is unknown. That fact enhances the difficulty of any help to victims.

And the victim has often no idea about how he or she can stop the violence.

A large proportion (60%) of those who have experienced it ignored the violence whereas 40% took actions to contrast it by changing username, deleting their own profile, unfriending or blocking the bully, reporting to the website, discussing the incident online or withdrawn from an online forum. Only 5% reported law enforcement while a larger part (47%) confronted the person online.

Online incidents have always an emotional impact, no matter the severity, the kind of harassment and the type of response or action needed to face them.

Any harassment can be very or extremely upsetting and it is side effects may be long lasting and may severely impact reputation.

Institutions, organizations, schools and parents, all together, can do a lot to raise awareness and help victims to overcome the worst consequences.

Institutions, organizations, businesses and any other social partner have an indirect responsibility to promote lawful conducts and reinforce the dissemination of positive values, not only in the offline but also in the online.

Parents, families and teachers have the immediate and direct responsibility towards their children which is enabled only by an ongoing dialogue expecially when children are teens or tweens.

Dialogue doesn’t mean to find a certain solution or the right key to a problem. And it also doesn’t mean the absence of conflict in every case. The real meaning of dialogue is to have an immediate interest and to pay immediate attention to something that cannot be faced alone, even if it would mean dealing with an eventual conflict in order to help someone in difficulty.

Dialogue means not to stay oblivious to cyberbullying.

Dialogue doesn’t really exclude any conflict but it’s a necessary condition to unleash empathy and show promptness to address problems at their first appearance.

Dialogue also means supervision, listening, care, attention, love. It means to have a great sensibility and acumen to perceive, to notice and to realize even alarm bells which are only early signals when something is heavy going down.

Dialogue always begins with listening and goes on with sharing. By listening and sharing it also progressively enables the relationship.

No relationship is possible without dialogue. And that is extremely true within the family and at school.

Refuse staying oblivious to cyberbullying, start a dialogue now with those in need.

The post Don’t Stay Oblivious To Cyberbullying appeared first on Mobbible.

Even if anonymity is true only in appearance, since digital footprints cannot be removed, all the above mentioned characteristics are the reasons why bullies persist on their bullying behaviours and don’t stop.

Basically they ignore both risks and consequences of their bullying behaviours and the fact that their conducts could be prosecutable.

By the way, the only certainty of cyberbullying is to have no certainty. On the contrary, traditional bullying happens predictably. Bullying has a specific bully; bullying is caused by a person or a group in the flesh.

Bullying exists in specific delimited spaces and it also happens in limited moments, as during lessons at schools or during sport training or in a public space every time the victim faces the bully.

Space as well as time is a certainty in bullying.

Bullying is an absolutely temporary event in the ordinary life, while its effects, expecially the psychological ones, are painfully permanent, as the bullying experience becomes crushing and devasting.

Due to its intrinsic predictability, every bullying event should be anticipated, foreseeable and preventable if only victims could stop silence.

Conversely, cyberbullying is totally permanent. It may happen at any time, in every single instant, whatever the moment of the online life.

Whatever the web access, as soon as the online connection works, cyberbullying enlivens its ghost.

Cyberbullying is never a temporary event of the online life: cyberbullying is an absolutely permanent event of the online life.

Being a victim of cyberbullying represents a continuous and lasting stigma in the online life.

Moreover, victimisation gets unstoppable as persistingn online bullying behaviors amplify the harassment itself through the web, thus resulting in a never ending online persecution.

And the stronger the bully, the weaker the victim, the heavier the victimisation.

Thus, the absence of any viable exit makes cyberbullying worse than bullying.

Whatever the means, either flaming or instant messaging, either impersonation or trickery, either exposure or cyberstalking, such permanent harassment provokes the same feelings and the same consequences over the victims, which are power imbalance, fear, isolation, and loss of esteem. Thus, silence prevails and wins.

Whatever the country, whatever the legislation, no matter the number of occurrences, it has become necessary to do something to stop such cycle of violence.

Several campaigns, protocols and agreements, shared among web platforms and social networks, have been disseminated through the web, resulting in a more raised awareness. They’ve also ruled behaviors and conducts both online and offline in order to possibly prevent and sanction bullies’ actions.

Nevertheless, there’s plenty of work still to come in order to help and assist victims in overcoming the lasting effects that the devastating tsunami of bullying is having on themselves from within.

Since bullying and cyberbullying let a stigma that cannot be ever completely removed.

To the loving memory of my father

The post Cyberbullying and Bullying: Why They Make Life Unliveable appeared first on Mobbible.

No specific law has been issued in Italy at the moment but the already existing laws (Constitution of The Italian Republic, part one Rights and Duties of the Citizens, The Civil Code, The Penal Code) represent an almost complete regulatory mechanism able to prevent and punish the most severe behaviours.

Enter Mobbible’s Convivio to see more about legislation in Italy.

Bullying in Italy has become increasingly frequent: bullying events have become ordinary and the number of victims becomes greater and greater. Sometimes bullying is captured in videos downloaded in Youtube by the same people that bystand and do nothing instead of stopping violence.

Bystanders stay silent or incite the bully during the aggression without intervening.

Several studies refer a close correlation between bullying and depression, bullying and suicidal rate. Bullying-related suicides have soared last year since the number of bad stories and bad behaviours increased, altough institutions, schools and the Police raised awareness through several anti-bullying campaigns.

Victims are always those who can’t defend themselves or who don’t want to collude with bullies as depicted in our latest post “Why Bullying Victims Portrait Is Always the Same“.

Morever, 80% of bullying in Italy happens at schools. Threats, physical violence, name-calling, embarrassment, thefts, mockeries, all these behaviours happen at schools and have as victims people who are the weakiest or the most defenceless of the group.

The ghost of bullying haunts every school and every community.

The shadow of bullying lengthens through the web, by means of cyberbullying, online harassment, compromising photos or false data sharing and other psychological tortures as explained in this post about bullying and cyberbullying in Italy by Metron Antropos NPO.

The tweens and the young tend to escape parental control and monitoring, they go away and take dangerous shortcuts, with less and less brakes, and no positive role models to imitate.

Sport can do a lot in order to make any negative energy turn in healthier ways, in some positive experience, or hopefully in a safe way out.

Other forms of intervention tend to build, enhance and strenghten learning, training or education at schools in order to change culture and habits.

In a recent survey,  Skuola.net found that 4-in-5 consider bullying and cyberbullying an ordinary and severe occurrence, while up to 40% of them has witnessed to at least one severe physical or psychological bullying event.

As for cyberbullying, 90% believe that the web is exactly the mirror of what happens offline, in the real life, and sometimes the second is the origin of the first.

The most controversial social network is Ask.fm, taken for granted the resonance of recent severe cyberbullying facts and stories, strictly connected to this networking platform mentioned by 3-in-4 students because of its anonymity and ease to use.

One-in-four admit having been themselves guilty of cyberbully, threatening or victimising one or more friends, while 6% refer having been a systematic cyberbully.

Up to 31% is always connected to social networks, by means of smartphones, tablets, PCs, and 27% has met offline at least someone known online.

Of those, 23% did it by themselves, without informing anyone else, whereas 35% informed their parents or friends.

The web is also used by tweens in order to make new friends: 13% posted photos, video, in a provocative gesture while 17% admitted having done it for money, phone top-ups or other presents.

These are the findings of a survey over 2000 voters aged 11-20 managed by Skuola.net together with Postal Office Policy before launching “Una Vita da Social” campaign.

Time spent over social networks is basically due to their obsession in controlling their own social profiles, or in making new friends or gaining money.

Of those who are always connected online, 45% use social networks because they can save money for phone calls, while 42% repeteadly use them to make new friends.

Only 14% stay online to gain more popularity.

53% of interviewed use Facebook to communicate with their parents. 1-in-5 consider Facebook their main social network and media and 56% believe it’s very useful even if it’s not used to replace phone calls and sparetime with friends.

What is worrying is that 13% of young used at least one social network to send their photo or video for sexting.

The reason is that 17% received the promise of a phone recharge or other presents.

They are totally unware of risks, one-in-four admits having met someone online and of those 23% did it without informing others.

As for cyberbullying, 52,5% declared an excessive attention to it, able to make them feel guilty and overexposed to judgement instead of understanding and dialogue.

And the problem is that they don’t speak with their parents because they are afraid and don’t want to be judged or think they can’t help them and do nothing.

Relaunching families would be an answer to that problem.

Relaunching families means investing permanently in family and resuming love and dialogue.

.

The post Focus: Bullying in Italy appeared first on Mobbible.

Bullying is the mirror of the bad health of our society, communities and definitely schools.

The growing isolation and egoism of humans has led to a total lack of interest in one another and ever-greater alienation. Indeed, alienation is the consequence of insecurity, vulnerability, fear, mistrust and suspicion toward the others.

Alienation, along with the persisting financial crisis and its serious consequences in terms of job insecurity, has increased uncertainty and caused the fall of every positive role model, thus contributing to the decline of families, the annihilation of every human possibility of redemption or simply of every change needed to improve living conditions.

Together with inequality and social unjustice, alienation has also built a shared perception of an ever-greater impoverishment of social capital.

Everyone lives apart from the others, alone, close in a predominant particularism, walking in a solitary landscape, in a defensive individualistic closeness, far from any contact and relationship with the collectivity whatever it is.

We are living in times of exponentially widespread solitary socialization where there is no space to recovery time or attention for another human in trouble or in needs. In such a world there is neither space for solidarity nor space for do-able responsibility to overcome indifference.

And the consequence is that the stronger prevails over the weaker while the majority just bystand.

This is true everywhere, in the larger as well as in the smaller communities, in the workplaces as well as schools. Things are always the same, things aren’t different in the smaller level as if we stay at the mirror: they reflect exactly what happens at a larger or bigger level.

There is no space for empathy. Every group, and thus every collectivity reflects the same dynamics.

But Jeremy Rifkin foreshadows about the rise of the Age of Empathy, where he imagines the race to global consciousness in a world in crisis, under the sign of an empathy-altruism able to move it towards an empathic civilization.

What is empathy? Empathy is the opposite of bullying.

Empathy is about altruism, generosity, gratitude and compassion.

Empathy is about being humans, which means building and maintaining human relationships. This is empathy.

No empathy is possible without human relationships. All humans must be emphatic to each others.

There is empathy when everyone rediscovers the sense of his/her existence in a dialectic relationship with the entire group and the others’ lives and perceives his/her own inclusion as a dialectic mechanism intrinsically necessary and vital to the total entity existence as the group itself is.

It’s the superior interest of the combination and integration of single elements that is worth striving for, since it also enables that every single element’s individuality coexists and takes part to the collectivity entity without destroying the single elements, but by strengthening and empowering them.

In bullying it’s evident that human relationship doesn’t exist. What is common in all events of bullying it’s the absence of every relationship.

There is no perception of the severity of commitment to violence or to indifference, no conscience of offence, sin, guilt, and once such conscience emerges, it’s always too late and after a long way run.

The evil is everywhere, even masked as normality.

So bullying is everywhere even masked as ordinary behaviour.

Bullying is ordinary evil. Bystanding is the same.

All those who stay silent are guilty, no exceptions. None of them really cares about human relationship.

The internal code of every bullying event is the fact that the other doesn’t exist and there is always for everyone a turning point with a very hard juncture: to accept the group’s rule and become a group’s member as gregary or on the contrary to refuse, to dissent, to diverge from the group and become the group’s target as the enemy to be ostracized from the group itself.

Empathy and its relationship-related focus is a lifelong lesson that should be taught in all schools in order to prevent or fight bullying.

It’s always more effective to intervene within the group internal dynamics in order to promote a collective answer by valuing, teaching and instilling the value of relationship and empathy rather than stigmatising the single role, responsibility or psychology involved in order to find a psychological reason to bad behaviours as well as bullying.

The post The Opposite of Bullying is Empathy appeared first on Mobbible.

High social acceptance is common among leaders and doers as well as in followers.

High social acceptance is the key to enter a group, to live in a group, to be accepted as a leader or as a whatever member.

Outside the group there are only those who have a low social acceptance.

Thus, having a low social acceptance means being nobody to the group itself.

Those who have a low social acceptance usually haven’t roles even within other groups as well as friends.

That is why a low social acceptance always associates with a low self-esteem. Nobody wants someone who has a low self-esteem as a friend.

No trust can he/she has from anyone, they stay excluded from leadership positions and also kept away from other roles in the group.

People who have a low social acceptance stay alone, apart, avoided, out of every social connection and social life. Moreover, they feel invisible and unwanted and also tend to feel like they are constantly under a spotlight, being watched and criticized by others.

Hostile interactions create an hostile and unhealthy context, thus leading to social exclusion.

Thus, marginalized people fall more often than others in depression and

become victims without doing anything

as explained in a previous article: “School Bullying: Victims at The Centre of A Persecution”.

Victimisation begins as a subtle but ferocious persecutory mechanism jointly performed by bullies and their gregaries.

The context and the environment reinforce the already existing psychological characteristic, which in turn produces more isolation and a chance for more persecution.

Thus, prevention, as well as intervention against bullying, should focus on both a child-centred approach and the wider context where bullying happens by combining personal, social and health education.

Since psychology influences behaviours, the same psychology can result in a powerful leverage to change behaviours and help tweens and teens become more sociable.

Well-developed social interaction skills are critical for developing positive mindset since childhood. And as they get older, they should be learning more advanced social skills

Social skills must be developed together with emotional coping strategies, since the last are most effective if they are taught together with the first ones.

The earlier they can learn to deal with conflicts, the healthier and safer they will live.

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