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From: Bill
Date: 13 Oct 2012
Time: 21:15:52 -0500
Remote Name: 98.222.193.43
Hi Randall, Thanks for posting. It's always the hard questions like yours that make Isad a great place to challenge each other. I'm a person who stutters and a speech pathologist...age 65 yrs. When I was growing up there were no organized school personnel dealing with bullies. It was as you suggested fight or flight. I was certainly bullied but not all my bullies were the hard core ones you suggest. These can be addressed using a variety of approaches that we just didn't have the time to describe here. We have a book coming out soon that looks at different kinds of bullies, however much of our book focuses on the elementary school age child where there is a tendency to have less of the hard core bullies. Earlier in this discussion there were a variety of thoughts expressed about fighting violence with violence. If you read them you'll see a concenses among the authors that we do not believe in using violence although I personally believe in some cases children can be trained to defend themselves. I'm thinking of a case such as a gay young amn who just came out of the closet and was beaten to death buy other children. However in most cases I believe that when a child faces physical violence they should leave quickly and seek out an adult. However we, as adults, teachers etc must make schools bully proof. There are indeed schools that have accomplised this but unfortunately they are still rare. In ending let me add we all have much to do in ending this epedemic of bullying with our children. It's just not going to be the school speech pathologist although she can certinly be quite influential in beginning to bully proof the children in her school system. Again thank you Randall for giving us such an interesting question. Bill PS... my spell check is not working so please forgive me for any misspellings.