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.

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.

It’s an Heraclitus’ quote and one of the strongest belief I have.

I got really inspired by Heraclitus’ thought to the point that I strongly believe that Heraclitus was certainly engaged as I am in raising awareness and fighting bullying throughout all his thought-provoking sayings.
I’ll demonstrate why right away: firstly, I will clarify the intrinsec meaning of his teaching about change (Panta rhei,  ”everything flows”) and secondly his strong anti-bullying commitment.
No man ever steps in the same river twice. On those entering the same river, more water flows over and over again. This is the famous Heraclitus’ saying on ever-present change in the universe.

“Ever-newer waters flow on those who step into the same rivers“.

Everything changes and nothing remains still … and … you cannot step twice into the same stream.
All has been continously changing. What we experience changes us.
We are the same while changing and are still changing while being the same.
What makes us ever-different is awareness.
By assuming that every experience , either good and bad, makes sense in raising awareness, perhaps bad experiences are more effective in building awareness because of the suffering, the pain and the tormet they let on you.

The more the suffering the bigger and faster the awareness.

In such cases, awareness starts as soon as you take off the mask and abandon silence.
Awareness begins once you earn self-confidence.
Awareness makes you speak loud to be heard. Awareness makes you ready to draw  your sword and fight it out, once you have overcome fear, which is the worst enemy.
And your words become alike swords. So as in fighting bullying.
Only then can bullying be openly denounced, tackled and managed both as a personal problem and as collective emergency and social stigma.
Denounce it to make it known and censure such a bad behaviour. Whatever form bullying has, however many appearances it may have, it’s vital to find adequate answers and real solutions.
Victims are first of all human beings, who are exposed to continuous aggression, humiliation, persecution, violation, and in case of workplace bullying, professional step down.

They don’t react because the don’t know exactly what they’re experiencing. They think it depends on something they have or don’t have done.

That’s wrong, this is exactly what bullies would victims think about themselves.
For that reason those who experience bullying or engage themselves in fighting bullying can’t step in the same river twice.

No one is any longer the same he was before.
Back to the thesis of Heraclitus’ commitment in fighting bullying, the reason is hidden in the following fragment.

“The Ephesians deserve, man for man, to be hung, and the youth to leave the city, inasmuch as they have banished Hermodorus, the worthiest man among them, saying: “Let no one of us excel, and if there be any such, let him go elsewhere and among other people.”

Instead of “We will have none who is best among us” Heraclitus declares ” One man is ten thousand, if he is the best“.
In most of cases bullying occurs on victims distinguishing themselves from the others, for beauty, knowledge, influence, thought, ethics, beliefs, energy or simply noticeable for being different and thinking differently from the mass.
The bullies strive to  stalk and chase away people that are independent, different, influent, and unwilling to follow them and being prone.
Hermodorus was one of those who stand out. So he would have been elsewhere and among others.
As Hermodorus is ten thousand to Heraclitus so one is ten thousand to me.

Saving one life from bullying is worthier more than being followed by ten thousand who don’t really need to be saved from bullying.

The post Bullying Awareness: One is ten thousand appeared first on Mobbible.

They don’t ask for help. They don’t know why it happens. They are silent, insecure, defenceless, vulnerable.

They are victims of workplace bullying violence twice. Firstly, when workplace bullying practices hit them and forced them to resign or lose job, then when they lost their health.

Workplace bullying nature is non-transitory and the worst downsides are the following three:

1. the psychosocial risks
2. the radical changes in workers’ lives
3. the irreversible and often dramatic consequences of victimization.

The results of a recent study about workplace bullying, violence and harassment at the behest of the European Agency for Safety and Health Administration (EU-OSHA) on a population of bullied workers with the support of a team of psychologists, sociologists and trade unionists are quite self explaining and dramatically shocking:

• 39% of the interviewees changed their job,
• 28% separated/divorced from their spouse,
• 54% isolated themselves from friends,
• 33% faced economic problems,
• 49% suffered from various psycho-physical pathologies,
• 75% were demoted,
• 40% stopped working,
• 53%  turned to the courts
• one interviewee committed suicide.

Not only does work satisfy economic needs, it also gives a social status that allows individuals to express themselves. But if you’re a victim of workplace bullying, work can become the root cause of great suffering and bad life changes.

Building and raising awareness is a moral obligation and a social need in order to make business and workplaces healthier and human-centered.

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