“Sticks and Stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me”. We are all familiar with this phrase. It is a common retort that parents and guardians would teach to children to prepare them for the school yard, where they may experience verbal bullying. The phrase means that while physical injury could have a lasting impact; insults, name-calling and saying unpleasant things would not affect the child’s emotions, confidence or sense of self-worth. Today, we know that this is no longer true. While children are still threatened and victimized by the ‘sticks and stones’ style of physical bullying; these ‘names’ that they are called do indeed cause hurt and have a lasting impact on their emotional and mental well-being and development. Name-calling is particularly damaging to young children, because it attempts to ‘define’ them, creating a negative self-image in their own minds, especially during these formative years of childhood when they are emotionally vulnerable. Repeatedly being called derogatory names can chip away at your self-esteem and sense of self-worth. Anyone who has ever been bullied in school can recall the symptoms – the anxiety, the sick-feeling in your stomach, the desperate need to find a reason not to go to school today; the emotional strain of feeling confused and ashamed of being the one who was picked on; and the over-whelming sense of relief when the school day ended, or the summer holidays beckoned, and you got a reprieve. These days however, home is not the safe haven that it once was for victims of bullying. With the penetration of social media into every facet of our lives came the dawn of a new day for school bullies, and the invention of cyberbullying. Through instant messaging and social networking, cyberbullies now have 24-hour access to their victims; only cyberbullies can be anonymous and relentless. Cyberbullying is no longer an emerging threat to school pupils; it is a reality for many school children across the world. The anonymity that the perpetrators of cyberbullying can enjoy online is what makes this a ‘faceless evil’, and difficult for children and parents to tackle without the support of the school community. While parents and teachers tell children not to talk to strangers online and make them aware of ‘stranger-danger’, the real threats posed to them by cyberbullies could be far closer to home. A study published by the American Sociological Association in 2016, found that youth cyberbullying is dramatically more likely to occur between current or former friends than between students who were never friends; and that girls are twice as likely as boys to victims of cyberbullying. Bullying among children is a significant public health concern that affects school communities globally. According to the last Ipsos International Study, 44.7% of parents with children aged 6-10; and 56.4% of parents with children aged 11-13 reported that their children were victims of some form of bullying; 82.8% of these bullying events occurred in school; with 19.2% also occurring online through social media. This study found that one-fifth of all bullying occurs through social media; with a further 11% occurring through online game platforms. Research also shows that bullying can start among children as young as 3, when they begin to interact with other children their age in pre-school. Indirect bullying – where children pair off and exclude others – is common at this age, and most common in young girls; with boys engaging in more physical bullying activities from the age of 7 or 8 (Haber, 2015). However, most bullying interventions only occur when children enter primary school. It is therefore necessary to educate parents about bullying, so that they can intervene from an early age and support their children to overcome these behaviours. Parents also have a key role to play in developing the resilience of their children, to be able to cope with instances of bullying. Today, most anti-bullying interventions are predominantly school-based, however research tells us that for an anti-bullying strategy to be effective, a ‘whole-school approach’ is required. It is for this reason that Sticks’n’Stones will develop a ‘whole-school’ programme for primary schools to empower pupils, teachers, school leaders and parents to tackle bullying and create healthy and safe school communities. This ‘whole-school’ model will include interactive pedagogic resources to be used in the classroom with children aged 8-12 years; CPD modules for primary teachers and leaders to complete and targeted digital resources and workshops for parents. With this approach, the project team believes that the Sticks’n’Stones project can have an impact on reducing the incidence of bullying in the primary schools where the project will be piloted.
Bullying is a global public health problem; it is also an issue that affects school children in our own communities. Most anti-bullying interventions take place predominantly in schools and an effective anti-bullying strategy requires a whole-school approach. We believe that the Sticks and Stones project aimed to develop such an approach to create a positive school environment for all primary school pupils. We considered the thorough piloting of the project's outputs to be very important in achieving this goal, which eventually took place in 14 schools across Europe. The overall aim of the Sticks and Stones project was to increase the capacity and awareness of anti-bullying among primary school communities, so the project consortium developed a range of educational interventions targeting local primary school communities as well as a primary school teacher training (CPD) project to improve their pedagogical practice on the integration of digital technologies and challenge-based learning methodology. At the same time, by implementing the project, we wanted to achieve an increase in awareness in the fight against cyberbullying across elementary school communities.
In all organizations of project´s consortium we focus on preventive education for young people and adults, teachers and parents in the issue of unsafe use of the internet and communication technologies. The main needs of the Sticks and Stones project were to increase capacity and raise awareness in combating bullying among primary school communities by providing them with multi-functional and multi -dimensional tool and practises which were based on the 2007 EU Guidelines on the Protection and Promotion of the Rights of the Child that focus on combating all forms of violence against children, the EU agenda for the rights of the child and the 2012/29/EU Directives on the rights of victims. Most anti-bullying interventions are predominantly school-based, however for an anti-bullying strategy to be effective, a whole school approach was reburied, therefore Sticks and Stones developed such an approach that was piloted in 14 primary school across Europe and we are convinced that it helped create positive school environment for all primary school pupils. By creating our partner consortium, we have been able to join forces and create digital resources that are an effective resource in educating teachers, pupils and parents in the fight against cyberbullying.