School Bullying – A Child’s Worst Nightmare

Schools should be a haven of safety for children; not a hunting ground for school bullies. But sadly no school can guarantee safety from bullying.

Every year when schools start, you see mothers taking on strain. Some of them rather tearfully but they try to hide it from their youngsters.

Anyone looking on would try to reassure these mothers.  “Don’t worry.  School is the best part of your life!”  How often we heard this as children!  But is it really true?  Is school really the best time of  your life?  Ask any child and you will probably get a grimace and an out and out denial.

School is not the haven it should be. There are school bullies out there and they can make a child’s worst nightmare come true. I know.  I’ve been a child, a teacher and a parent so I can tell you from all vantage points.  It can be hell out there.

Bullying isn’t exactly a new phenomenon. Children have always had the potential to behave in this way. Just think of Tom Brown’s Schooldays by Thomas Hughes written in 1857. Or Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby written as a series in 1838. In both these books bullying is a strong theme.

Bullies have always lurked around the schoolgrounds. But what has changed is the scale and the brutality of bullying.  In the not too distant past there have been killings at schools and colleges and there is that horrible new word “bullicide” which means suicide as a result of bullying.

You will have gathered by now that one of my pet interests is handwriting analysis and so my focus on bullying is related to the handwritings of bullies and their victims.

And believe me, you can tell a lot about the personalities of bullies as well as the personalities of their victims simply from their handwriting.

This is a subject that gets me very wound up. I even wrote an online book about it: “School Bullying – Is your child a silent victim?” The illustrations show quite clearly the differences in handwriting between bullies and their victims.

Just about every day we read about one or two cases of school bullying in the papers and we know it has reached epidemic proportions.  I believe it is a reflection of the society we live in.

Theories about it are all very well.  But when it affects your child or the child of someone you know, it really hits home. One of the worst aspects is that it makes you feel so helpless. In fact, many children tend to suffer in silence and keep their suffering to themselves.

There are all sorts of reasons for this. But sadly, because children are so reticent to talk about it, the people who really need to know about it are usually the last to know.