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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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.

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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.

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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.

Bullying is everywhere and it also hurts anyone.

The same are the mechanisms of persecution; the same the effects on the victim.

And their silence strengthens the abuse.

Vulnerability, fear, shame, unsecurity are what bullying victims feel because of bully’s persistent, neverending abuses and persecutory behaviours.

So, how can you help victims to stand up against bullying?

• First of all, don’t let them alone.
• Then, listen to them even when they aren’t speaking.
• Finally, pay attention to their behaviours.

They may not ask for help, but that doesn’t mean that help isn’t wanted. It is up to you to help them to tell the truth or talk to an adult and ask for help.

Encouraging reporting of bullying means being halfway there.

Bullying victims don’t speak out, don’t stand up against bullying because they are afraid. They are alone. No one supports them, neither their peers for fear of reprisals, nor teacher and parents because both of them often ignore the facts.

New media do not represent a threat, but one of the possible means, just a more formidable place for borderline behaviours to happen, ranging from youth deviance to psychology of groups and bullying.

In a complex and almost unexplored environment, as the internet is, early detection and continuous supervision over kids, tweens and teens are aiming at impeding the worst consequences and unlawful conducts connected to those phenomenons.

But the mechanisms by which youth, expecially teens and tweens, become victims or co-authors of internet-related crimes against someone else, be it stalking, injury, diffamation, cyberbullying or identity theft, have always their origin in the real life, where the youth live, act and move.

So, bullying common places are the schools, the gym, the park or other location where entertainment takes place.

Bullying doesn’t consists in a single act of violence or verbal attack; it’s the repetition of violence against someone else that is bullying.

Bullying happens when the attack from a single offence turns into persecution.

Persecution originates from within the social relationships and the one-to-one interactions, but it also generates severe consequences from the legal side and the psychological one.

Moreover, as persecution persistently goes on, it will cause long-term harmful effects on victims.

Only a few victims ask for help and denounce. The most get blocked by fear.

A very small percentage, as we mentioned in the article “Online Bullying Threats and Facts”:

…. the 2014 survey also found that 24% said that they would not know what to do in the event of cyberbullying (“how about stay away from the bully’s page and block the bully from your page?”).

are aware of such a violence, of its gravity and consequences.

Young victims don’t know how to defend and why it is absolutely necessary.

The fear of reprisals or punishments from their parents or the risk of not receiving from them their beloved promised smartphones foster the silence of young victims, together with the shame and the fear they feel.

 Silence, Shame and Fear Are #Bullying Best Friends. Put an end to them. Put an end to Bullying. — MBevangelist (@Mobbible) 6 Novembre 2014

So we have to convince and help bullying victims to change their  mind, beliefs, attitudes, in order to get it over with shame, fear and silence.

The post Why Bullying Victims Portrait Is Always the Same appeared first on Mobbible.

Families have a central role and a significant weight in preventing bullying or cyberbullying events and victimization.

But to understand that point, it is necessary to re-discover the profound and intrinsic value family has.

Family is the heart of human life, family is the breast, the warmth, it is the most natural and the easiest place where answers and the right path can be found.

Bullying episodes and cyberbullying cases ending with suicides are much more common than ever: even in Italy bullying and cyberbullying have their victims.

While it is not helpful asking to what extent desperation stretches and what kind of mechanism generated abuse, persecution and bullies, nevertheless we cannot accept the absurdity of trunked human lives or broken families, nor can we justify that extreme and dramatic choices. Suspending judgement is due.

However, it is no longer possible to stay indifferent as a spectator.

Being spectator is equal to participate actively to that human life sacrifices. It also means to have neither care nor respect for next generations. While we are working for them and building the foundation of their future we are at the same time contributing to their death. If not physical, emotional and psychological.

So in fighting bullying we must fight the indifference firstly and the fear secondly. Fighting fear and indifference must be perceived as not only an individual commitment but also a collective responsibility.

Bullying is not a personal problem but a pressing and emerging social need.

In coping with such plague everyone can do a great job both in raising awareness and in engaging others to play an active role. Everyone can take part at schools, within sporting clubs, families, peers groups, communities.

Everywhere, everyone can give a personal contribution. Everyone’s commitment is the spark that spreads the necessity to face the emergency.

It is no longer possible to ignore, to let the responsibility pass on others. There are not isolated cases. It is not possible to blame someone else or something else.

No one is guilty. Everyone is guilty. Nor it is even possible to put the blame on how difficult communication is between adults and teens.

Silence is the first problem to fight. The absence of a closer contact, of a sincere and immediate interest and empathy between different generations is always harmful.

Mere surveillance is not enough, nor is it the continuous control over the teens or kids. Such control may be illusory and ineffective, if only relying on inadequate instruments such as inspecting diaries, computers or smartphones. When the awkwardness starts occupying the heart of a child and the perception of being abandoned becomes greater and oppressive, silence reigns and wins.

Monitoring shall not be pursued by means of external tools, but preferably through love and relationship.

But the relationship must be restored or recovered. Once relationship is woken up they have to be reactivated. When the sense of abandoning and the awkwardness become obscure mates of our teens, they follow and overcome them even at home, within the family and become heavier and worse once they enter the social environment.

Group dynamics may be constructive or destructive. Entrance, the acceptance and the permanence into a group are critical components in a critical phase of life as childhood is, they also persist in adulthood and influence the future behavior.

Every group has its rule: there are roles, not written but prescriptive within each group. Once you have a role, you stick to that role. Roles never change. Those who are subjected to them cannot refuse obeying and conforming.

Complacency and fear are the group basic roots and rules. Those rules are unbreakable, the law of the jungle is the law of the strongest. If you don’t respect the rules you will be out of the group. But this golden rule still holds true.

Thus, neither social network nor the web can be incriminated or considered a responsible source of suffering, isolation and a serious menace to our teens or kids.

We cannot demonize the technologies or the virtual places as responsible or root causes of phenomena that occur even in the real places. We should rather invest in someone else’s responsibilities, engagement and commitment.

We should invest in those who can discover, who cannot ignore, who cannot pretend not to know. We should invest in those who are the unique witnesses of their kid’s (or pupils) fears and suffering.

We should invest in those who can stop or prevent the situation from worsening.

We should invest in those who can do a lot but do nothing.

We should invest in families. The youngsters are let alone, more alone than past generations were. More the temptations, more the threats, more the menaces. And the weakest surrender, are excluded, marginalized, discriminated, hated, abused.

Relaunching families means starting from within the problem, but also hitting the bull’s eye.

Relaunching families means investing permanently in families and rebuilding society from the foundation. And then we have to ask ourselves how to restart to be a family how to become parents again, how to be born mother and father, how to recover lost time, how to fill the void, how to break silence and regenerate love feelings and gestures.

We must resume loving. Investing in love means to go on asking for questions each other parent versus kids, kids versus parents.

Restarting from families means restarting from compassion and love. By so doing, we will restart from self confidence, which breaks the fragile bubble of virtual life and illusions of being understood, beloved from people beyond the screen of a PC or the display of a smartphone.

The web is the reign of solitary socialization. Instead of being the place of dialogue, knowledge, connections, it has become the place of solitary people, maybe virtually interconnected but actually disconnected, separate from the real world. There is a viral video - Look Up – which expresses in an effective way such form of isolation, of latent and solitary socialization induced by the social networking.

Being disconnected means to have different languages, different communications styles, different mindsets.

So it’s difficult to intercept the turning point or the breakpoint where something has changed and situation becomes no more tolerable or completely unbearable to youngsters.

When stress created by bullying or cyberbullying translates in pain, suffering, fear, terror, depression, then control is no longer possible and no action can restore the situation.

Only families can intervene early and effectively from within, and can oppose responsible, mature and conscious resistance to bullying, be it real or digital.

The post Why Relaunching Families Means Fighting Bullying From Within 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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