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.

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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.

What adults seem to tolerate as a childhood rite of passage it’s a harmful persecution which reveals itself within an environment – the school – whose safety is taken for granted, through different types of aggression.

Bullying hurts everyone, everywhere. Nevertheless the pattern of bullying is persecution.

Someone who is bullied is aware to be at the centre of a persecution. It doesn’t matter what the context is, who the persecutors are, what the root cause is, which the means and the forms are.
The persecution is ever the same.
The same are the mechanisms of generation, the same are the violence escalation, the same are the effect on the victims.

No boundaries apply to bullying, neither cultural, nor geographical or socio-economic.

Everyone becomes a victim without doing anything. There are no exceptions.

There is no way to escape, no way to be sure of not being the next target.
You could be perfectly in the average, undistinguishing from the others, not standing out from the rest but this might not protect you from being bullied.
School bullying hits kids and teens numbing them emotionally, causing nightmares and sleep problems, impairing school performance and leading to aggressive behavior.

School bullying may also generates bullying: bullied teens may turn into bullies.

Every school is at risk, every kid, every teen.

Bullying can be subtle, both psychological (such as spreading rumors or excluding someone) and verbal (making threats or demeaning).

Prevention should be the golden rule. Everywhere it is necessary to take steps to stop it from happening. Prevention should be every school’ s responsibility.

Bullying endangers everyone’s safety in school and is also detrimental for the whole learning cycle. Indeed the violence spiral is always perverse.
Fright, vulnerability and stress  at school are a powerful magnet for bullies’ systematic and continuous persecuting attitudes.

A hostile environment generates hostile interactions among pupils.

Fear feeling are more harmful in pupils than in adults. Rates of bullying in primary and in secondary are worrying.
But only a very few percentage of them  tell a teacher or own parents being bullied.

And that circumstance has relevant implications, among the worst and more perverse consequences of bullying.
Firstly because keeping the silence with teachers and parents make them more and more weakened because they lack the support from those who could help them. Secondly because for that reason they remain isolated, excluded, alone and fall easily prey to bullies.

Where are the peers?

Peers neither see nor listen. Neither help nor bully.
The peers abstein intervening, bystand apart and separate.
Unless they are made to feel they have an obligation to act, they will stay silent. Perhaps they are bullies’ accomplices.
But so by doing, they engage themselves in the persecutory mechanism as the bullies do and the bully’s gregaries.
Their silence strengthens the abuse. Those who deliberately tolerate the bullying-related abuse, silently collude with it.
What are the most common forms that bullying takes?
Bullying is often emotional, through exclusion, emargination, social outcast.
Physical bullying isn’t heavier than verbal or emotional one.
Emotional bullying is as heavy as the other form of bullying because the victim feel a deep and dark sense of insecurity and perceives themselves as being in a net, with no exit, crushed by the incapacity to face such enormous problem.
Bullied pupils can’t defend themselves;  they don’t know how to face the perverse power a bully has over them.
Parents and school can’t let them alone. They have to listen to them even when they aren’t speaking.
They must pay attention to their behaviours, trying distinguishing changes, insecurity or early fear signals.
To raise awareness about school bullying is a precise school responsibility and is up to school to intervene.

Who are the bully’s target ?

Anyone is the bully’s target.
But the ones more vulnerable and the weaker stay much more unsecure, defenceless and easily fall prey to persistent and neverending abuses and persecutory behaviours.
Bullied pupils are forced by fear being passive and silent. They don’t oppose, don’t refuse violence, don’t defend themselves because they are alone and feel alone. No one supports them, neither peers for fear of reprisals nor teachers who ignore the facts.
Encouraging the reporting of bullying along with a strong school policy and commitment to respect each other might be an immediate intervention.
Victims of bullying are more likely to develop mental health problems than other children, and bullies are also more likely to have problems as they get older. In an effort to reduce violence and aggression in schools due to bullying, a large percentage of schools now offer programs that teach anger management, discourage bullying, teach tolerance or raise bullying awareness about psychosocial risks related to bullying.
Depression is supposed to be often a problem for bullied children in adolescence due to social rejection and social outcast.
Parents need to be aware of such risk and be willing to talk about it with their kids and teens.

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