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The repetition issue in defining bullying behaviour

In Australia and in many other parts of the world a key part of the definition of bullying behaviour is that the behaviour is repeated. This creates the weird situation where it might be okay to use a behaviour once, but if you use it again it then becomes buying behaviour and is then unacceptable. Surely for justice is to be served, we would not want that behaviour to occur at all. Read More...

The affects of bullying behaviour on children

The affects of being the target of bullying and mobbing behaviour are many and varied. We often only hear of the extreme cases where people resort to extreme physical violence, either to themselves or others. This can stop us thinking about either the more milder effects or those that are hidden and not recognised. Below is a summary of some of the effects that have been reported in studies of children targeted by bullying behaviour. Read More...

When anger becomes a problem

Anger is not always a problem. This might seem strange to some but this is because of the confusion between the emotion anger and the behaviour that can occur with it. Anger is a natural emotion and helps to tell us that something is wrong. But how we go about trying to deal and fix what's wrong can lead to problems. Michael Currie’s book Doing Anger Differently: Helping Adolescent Boys gives a great list of indicators for thinking about is this feeling becoming a problem. Read More...

Flirting verse sexual harassment

What is the difference between flirting and sexual harassment? It is important to know because our sexuality is a core part of our personal identity. Bullying behaviour can include sexually based content and overtones. This creates an overlap between sexual harassment, sexual discrimination and bullying behaviour. Bullying behaviour users will sometimes argue that no harm was intended and they where just joking. When it involves being sexist or sexually based content they might argue they where just flirting. So here is the difference. Read More...

Fun and jokes verses bullying behaviour

One of the most used excuses for explaining or justifying bullying behaviour is that it was just some harmless fun. "It was just a joke" or "we were all just having a bit of fun". So where is the line? How can you tell when behaviour crosses over and becomes bullying behaviour. This is difficult question to answer but here is some tips. Read More...

The 4 keys to a proactive response to mobbing behaviours

How to deal with mobbing behaviours is a challenge. It is likely that some outside help might be needed. Sheehan (2004) suggests using 4 types of response: problem solving, skill development, understanding and solution focus. Read More...

How to promote decency in any organisation

It takes more than good intentions to have a pleasant and successful workplace, school or organisation. You need the right structures, policies and procedures to help people get things done and ensure everyone is treated with respect. However you also need to be able to deal with issues effectively. Below is some ways in which you can promote a healthy organisation and minimise some of the risk factors.
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9 risk factors involved in mobbing behaviours

When looking at examples of mobbing behaviours a number of factors occur regularly. Because they happen more often they become known as risk factors. To try and deal with mobbing it is important that we look for the risk factors and attempt to stop them from developing into actual problems. Below lists 9 types of risk factors (from Duffy and Sperry, 2012) for workplaces and school environments: Read More...

Mobbing: A checklist of indicators

In the 5 stages of mobbing post I mentioned that for those within an organisation it can be difficult to identify mobbing. The reason for this is being apart of the organisational culture and systems can blind us to seeing how we act in an objective and unbiased way. Researchers have provided a way of checking to us check to see if it is happening in our organisations. Westthues (2006) provides 16 items to check. Read More...

How does Mobbing happen?

Mobbing occurs when bullying behaviour is carried out and the organisation is also involved. Negative and aggressive acts that do harm are repeated against someone with some degree of organisation help and support. In my research I came across this video about the 5 phases of mobbing. Read More...

7 Types of actions that mobber's use

The difference between mobbing behaviour and bullying behaviour can initially be confusing. But we should not get to distracted by the terms as the individual behaviours are basically the same. What is different is that rather than just one or a few people use this behaviours towards the target, everyone gangs up and joins in mobbing the target. Trawling through a list of example behaviours lead me to create the following seven categories of behaviour. Read More...

Mobbing, the next step up from bullying behaviour

There is a lot of information about bullying behaviour and its use and impact. But there is even a darker side to it which is know as mobbing. Bullying behaviour sits in the middle of a continuum with healthy relationships on one side and mobbing on the other. Mobbing is bullying behaviour carried to the extreme. Read More...

Don't allow the festive season spirit to undo all your good work

With the festive season now in full swing it can be easy to overlook behaviours that we would not have accept a few weeks ago. For some reason we can think that because it is the season of goodwill its fine to ignore inappropriate behaviours so as not to upset others. Unfortunately that can just set a bad example. Read More...

Navigating which method to use in dealing with bullying behaviour

The last 9 posts have outlined separate ways of responding to bullying behaviour. Each have strengths and weaknesses and times when they should and should not be used. It is hard to work out which path to go down so to help solve this I have developed the ROBB model. Read More...

Sometimes you need outside help

Sometimes we can get stuck in the mindset of having to always be the expert or having to handle every situation. There are be times with bullying behaviour that the best course of action is to refer it to the authorities. When the behaviours involved are very serious or illegal you need to consider if the appropriate authorities should get involved. Read More...

Another way to deal with group bullying behaviour

There are similarities between using the Method of Shared Concern (MSC) to the Group Support Method (GSM) in my previous post. MSC builds empathy and understanding while using peer influence to take shared responsibility for changing the bullying behaviour. But it does so by working individually with members of the group. Read More...

How to deal with groups using bullying behaviour

It is not uncommon for groups to use bullying behaviour against someone. While there may be an key instigator, the rest of the group or bystanders can support the behaviour. They might join in, laugh or just say nothing. All of these signal that it is okay to use that sort of behaviour. The Group Support Method (GSM)... Read More...

The Collaborative Problem-Solving and Resolution (CPR) Approach

When bullying behaviour occurs it is important to help all the parties involved. The Collaborative Problem-Solving and Resolution (CPR) approach does this by allow the targets voice to be heard and balance restored. This can lead to the bullying behaviour user acknowledging responsibility and accepting change. This is how it works: Read More...

Restorative justice - an empathy building approach

The idea behind Restorative Justice (RJ) is supporting change in behaviour by developing empathy for the target. So for bullying behaviour it's facilitating a meeting between the individuals or group involved and possibly other community members. They all speak about the experience and to explain their feelings. The trained facilitator… Read More...

Mediation is not that helpful in dealing with bullying behaviour

Mediation is about bring parties together to work through the conflict and arrive at a solution. It seems a great solution for bullying behaviour until you realise that bullying behaviour is not about disagreements or conflict. Being excluded from joining in because of the way you look is not conflict. Both sides not are trying to present their own views, it is one side using its power against the other. Read More...

Is punishment over used for bullying behaviour?

Everyone accepts that there needs to be some form of punishment for behaviour that is clearly unacceptable. The idea is to discourage and deter the behaviour by having consequences. The difficulty with bullying behaviour is it has such a large spread of different behaviours that means punishment does not always suit the particular problem. But it seems to remains the go to approach for many. Read More...

Strengthening the target to deal with bullying behaviour

There are lots of information and training out there that suggests helping the target to deal with bullying behaviour. Things like supporting the target emotionally and provide skills to help them to become less vulnerable, deal with issues, deflect bullying behaviour and resolve conflict. A key draw back...
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4 direct responses to bullying behaviour

The direct response to bullying behaviour is about saying something when you see it occur to promote behaviour change. This is the foundation of dealing with inappropriate behaviour. Four types Read More...

9 responses to dealing with bullying behaviour

You might have guessed from recent posts that bullying behaviour is something I have been working on recently. I have been looking at ways you can respond if you see or hear of it occurring. There looks to be nine ways of doing something about it:
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It's not bullying, but it is bullying behaviour

I have been reading quite a lot at the moment regarding the problem of "bullying". A quick count of my personal library of books is up to 13, plus of course there is also articles, websites and downloads. Some of the way the subject is discussed concerns me because I come from a strength based approach. Using the label "bullying" can be counter productive. Read More...

The irony of passiveness

I quite like the Apple dictionary (v2.2.3) description of passive which is "accepting or allowing what happens or what others do, without active response or resistance…" But what I really wanted to highlight was the interesting combination of possible messages that can be communicated though passive behaviour. Read More...

Dead Person Test checks if what your asking is a replacement behaviour!

You see a behaviour and respond. This should include a description of the behaviour so they know what needs to change. An effective method to modify behaviour is offering them another option of how to behaviour. This little test can help you make sure you are giving them a replacement behaviour option. Read More...

Don't allow the smoke to distract you from the fire

Dealing with young people smoking is problematic at the best of times. While not wanting to condone the practice you sometimes need to move through the vale of smoke so that you can work on other important behavioural problems. That means accepting that they are going smoke. Here is some idea's on working with adolescence smokers. Read More...

Denying feelings never helps

We all have feelings. Even though some of us may find it at times difficult to recognise or understand them. It is amazing how often we can ignore this fact and this can lead to two possible impacts. We can sometimes deny our own feelings or we deny the feelings of others. Read More...

6 reasons to avoid using punishment

It is tempting to think that using punishment will solve a behaviour problem. These behaviours need to be change but most do not need a heavy handed approach. There are some people that think using punishment is the way to go, including using physical punishment. The problem with this is: Read More...

Beware of blaming either nature or nurture.

The age old debate continues about the influences of nature verse nurture and how this impacts on behaviour. It is easier to focus on one or the other but the reality is more complex. We can tend to blame one or the other just to suit the situation we face. Both play a part and we need to beware of putting too much blame on either of nature and nurture. The reasons for this is it can limit our view on the solutions. Read More...

Boundaries will change

As life and society changes over time, so do the boundaries or rules that we expect people to live by. Especially as children grow older it is important to recognise that the boundaries must change to allow for increasing knowledge, maturity and need to become more self reliant. So it becomes important to choose the when and how those changes in boundaries occur. Read More...

Balanced boundaries is better

Boundaries are rules that we expect people to live by. Groups of people have them to help make life run smoother. There is a balance between having not enough and too many boundaries. But the point of balance is not always in the centre. Read More...

Where is the boundary?

Boundaries are rules that we expect people to live by. Groups of people have them to help make life run smoother. So as we go about our daily life’s we encounter all sorts of different groups and so the boundaries change. There will be different expectations based on if we are with family, at school, at work, walking down the street or sitting in a movie theatre. It is import to have stable boundaries that do not move or change too often. Read More...

Building and eroding respect.

The previous post talked about there has to be a minimum or basic level of respect that everyone needs to give and receive. That is how we can get society to function at its best. But our behaviour can help build this respect to a new level that improves and deepens our relationships. Read More...

It all starts with basic respect.

Having covered what is respect, how to show it and self respect in other posts it seems clear that there is many ways of expressing respect. So is there levels of respect? I think there is because in my past work it has been useful to use the concept of basic respect. Read More...

What is self respect?

One behaviour that seems to be really important in being able to show respect, is being able to respect your self. This idea dates back thousands of years to the Sayings of Confucius - “Respect yourself and others will respect you.” How can we respect others if we do not respect ourselves? Read More...

How do we show respect?

There are lots of ways of showing respect. While having respect for someone can be a feeling, we show respect through our actions and behaviours. Here are a range of examples:
  • Asking to use someone else's stuff
  • The way we speak to people using tone, words and body language
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What is respect?

Show me some respect. What do we mean by that and how can we show respect? Over the next few posts I will try and shed light on what is respect. Most people consider respect as a value or virtue. Read More...

It is the behaviour, not the person!

It can be tempting to let fly when someone does the wrong thing. But using a label like “your bad”, calling people names or using putdowns does not help the situation. There is a range of reasons why. Read More...

4 Secrets to creating good behaviour agreements

I think having an agreement on what is the expected behaviour norms is essential in encouraging positive behaviour. That is because agreements outline types of behaviour, rules and/or boundaries to follow. It will lay the groundwork for consistency, justifying why the behaviour is not appropriate and creates expectations of mutual respect. A good agreement needs to have four things: Read More...
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