Hi, I'm Jennifer Hancock and in this unit we're going to talk about specific examples of how you can stop bullying using what I just taught you. Right? So, about a lot of bullying is actually verbal and I don't like the term bullying. It's a general term and it's about how the victim feels about what's going on. I really prefer that people use be specific about what's happening. Like if you tell me you're being bullied, I can't really help you.

I need to know is this verbal? Or is it text messaging? Are they threatening you? Have you been hit? Have your fingers been slammed no longer stuff being stolen from you? Like I blink doesn't tell me that.

All right. And in order to come up with a strategy to get it to stop, you need to be specific about what's happening to you. And the other thing that's gonna benefit you by being specific, is that if you go to a teacher and say Joe is bullying me or Sara's bullying me, the teacher doesn't know what that means. Either. All they know is there's some sort of interpersonal dynamic Going on that you don't like, right? That hasn't told them much.

If you go to a teacher and say, Sarah called me this name, or Joe threatened me, threatened to punch me on the playground, right? That's something your teacher can deal with and take seriously. So try to not use the word bullying, to describe bullying situations be very specific about the specific behavior that's problematic. And that's going to help you communicate what's going on to your parents, to teachers, and to everybody else. All right. And it's the same thing with parents when you go to the school and say, my kids being bullied, say so and so did this.

And my son did this and response and this is what the kid did. You know, this behavior is inappropriate, because that's what's important, this behavior is inappropriate. This is not about an interpersonal fight. The behavior itself is inappropriate, and you have to label the behavior to make that point. All right. So when we think of bullying, we think kind of a continuum of behavior, right?

There's harassment, verbal harassment, where someone's maybe calling someone names or their Socially excluding them. But what's going on is verbal, right? If what's happening is verbal, then your response is also verbal. Like an exception to that is if it's in the cyber world. All right. So your goal is to remove the reward.

And you don't do that by ignoring them. I mean, that's one way to do it. But really, you know, you can't ignore someone if they're in your face on the school bus. You can't ignore them if they're cornering you in the hallway. So what you need is something you can say so if it's verbal, you can respond verbally. Now, a guy at MIT Dr. Lieberman did a study on cyber bullying and he found that 95% of verbal bullying or cyber bullying which is verbal a form of verbal Burling involves words amounted to six things.

Your gender, your attractiveness, your intelligence, your ethnicity, your religion, basically, bullies us boys. To socially isolate people, right, they make the person the other in whatever way they can make them other. All right. And so you can respond to that knowing that their goal is to, you know, show that they can dominate up over you, they want to show that they can make you afraid so that they can make other people afraid. And if you're not afraid of them, and you respond to them by making eye contact, and remaining call, you've just removed the reward. So if someone says, oh, you're stinky, you say, thank you very much for that information.

It's very helpful and you make eye contact. And you wait for them to respond. And if you can't make eye contact, look at their hair, look at their ear, look at their chin, look at their nose. If eye contact is uncomfortable for you don't look at their eyes, but don't look down, down is submissive. You don't want to listen, you want to look confident. Alright?

And if you need to practice what you're going to say practice it before you get to school practice. Have your parents or friends, you know, say, oh, you're stinky. What do you say, and and practice it so that it will come out of your mouth when you are stressed. All right, and when you're challenged, and that's all you really have to do, it doesn't matter what they say, it doesn't matter how they upped the ante, you respond with the same phrase, whatever that phrase is, as long as it's calm, monotone voice, and you make eye contact. Okay? And usually what happens was with they'll, you know, they'll call us to go, we'll call you something and you say, thank you very much for that information is very helpful.

And they'll kind of giggle nervously and try it again and try to say something else. And you say, thank you very much for that information. It's very helpful. And they may try it again. But eventually they're going to stop within three or four times they will stop and they'll, they'll judge you not worthy of their time. That's perfect.

You don't want to be worthy of their time. That's exactly what you want. Right? Um, so You win. Right? And if they ever do it again, if they try to argue with you if they try to engage you in an argument Nope, not agreeing with me just thank you for that information is very helpful.

And the reason I don't want you to argue is you do not need to defend yourself from accusations that you're stinky or you've got four eyes or whatever it is they're trying to use to socially isolating. You don't need to defend yourself. All right, whatever they're trying to do. They're the ones that are doing something inappropriate, not you. So you just respond, thank you for that information is prepared to be as sarcastic as you want. Right?

Just don't argue with them and don't fight them over this because if they get you to defend yourself and say, well, no stinky I never pooped my pants, whatever it is, they've just won. Don't give them that. All right, you by arguing with them, you validate the premise. Don't do that. Just have something you can say. And leave it at that and stare at them and make them disengage.

Okay. Now Cyber Bullying is the use of electronics to harass someone. And a lot of that is also verbal. It's using text messages and things like that. Now, this is one case where I say, just ignore it. Don't feed the trolls, pretend you didn't see it.

Right? Because what they're looking for is they're looking to get a response out of you. They're looking for other people to see that they hit you. And to see how you respond to that by not responding, you remove the reward, and it's very easy to claim you never saw because you might not have seen it right. And if you need to block someone, block them, all right, let them let them have a one sided fight. Because that's what you're doing verbling when you're in person with them, but the more they fight themselves and a non existent enemy, the worse they look, and that's what you want.

So if it's cyber, you don't really need to respond to it. You might want to take pic screenshots of it and documented, but you don't need to respond to anything anything trollish online Line, just don't feed them. All right, that's the ultimate ignore them and they'll go away remove the reward. Yeah, you don't need to respond. Okay? Another way people get bullied is they're threatened and threats can be explicit meaning someone says, I'm going to punish you.

Or it can be implied, they kind of look down on you and say, give me your money. Right? And if you don't, and the implication is if you don't, then they're gonna hurt you. All right, so any threat. In an adult world, we call that assault, and it's illegal. harassment is illegal in the adult role, too.

All right. So, but if someone's threatening, you take it seriously. All right. And if they're physically intimidating, you, you make eye contact with them and say, don't do that. Like if they hit you, you know, if they nudge you whenever, not okay, eye contact, you know, acknowledge it, but remove the reward. They're the ones being the jerk and you're just feeding a matter of heat up.

Have to argue with them. Just don't do that. Or, you know, I will do that again and I'll report you. Right or if they're threatening to do something to say, if you do that, I will report you. Again, it has to be you need to say this calmly, in a kind of robotic monotone voice, you want to remove all emotion from it, and stated as fat and it should be fat, because if they do it again, or if they do what they're threatening to do, you should absolutely report them. That's what you're going to do every single time.

You're not going to let them get away with it every single time because it's consistency is going to work. So not only is threatening you not working you're not getting into the threat, but they're also going to get in trouble for doing it. Right so double whammy on them. Right and that's how you need to respond to those things. And yet you do run the risk of them. You know, doing it again, or doing what they threatened to do.

You know, but you're risking that by not doing anything anyways like when has given into a threat ever gotten the threat to go away? It never does. It never works in the movie, it doesn't work in real life. Right? You have to confront it and say, don't do that. Or if you do it again, I'm gonna report you.

And if they do, you report them. You're not threatening them, you're stating a fact, if they do it again, I'm gonna report you, and then you report them. Right? You need to document all of this. And I'm going to get into why in a little bit. All right.

And it's the same thing if the verbal bullying has been going on for a long, long time, document it because verbal bullying can be like a lot of little things over time, document every single thing, right show the pattern of behavior. Now, if you're being physically hurt, or someone stealing from you, or they're hitting you, you know, or they're beating you up, whatever it is, that's battery or, you know, theft, depending on what's going on. That's in the adult world. That's criminal. All right. You don't need to tolerate it in school, either.

Right? And the response to that is to make yourself get yourself someplace say report them every single time. These are not things you can report once and be done with that. You have to report every single incidents, you have to kind of arrange things so these people don't have access to hurt you again. And you need to be consistent. All right, do not be cowered by someone who's trying to use violence to get you to do things that they want you to do.

Right? Every time you cower and do what they want you to do, you're giving them the reward and that strengthening their desire to do more you do not get rid of these situations by letting the bully get what they want. Right, you escape and you report every single time to your parents to school, whoever will listen and you document it every single incident who was there who witnessed it? Who did what, when did this happen? Where did it happen? actual intelligence.

If you are going to school and saying someone's bullying me, and what's really happening is they're punching you in the head on the school bus. Like the teachers aren't going to understand that Because what bullying manifested itself when I was a kid, not how it manifests now, you need to be specific about what it is you're recording so and so threatened me, so until bumped into me in the hallway in a threatening way and I felt insecure. So punched me in the head and told me whatever they said when they did it. All right, that specific and I assure you, if you go to a school and say someone hit me and said this, they're going to take it seriously where they do not take reports of bullying seriously, because once you get to battery, you're talking about a criminal act. All right, and it's not that we want kids to go to jail for this.

But that's the seriousness with which what is happening is happening. All right. So if it's verbal, you respond verbally, if it's a threat, you say, if you do that, or do it again, I'm going to report you and you do and if it's violent or physical, you escape and report Right now, with verbal, you might want to report to if it's habitual, like once you've given a person an opportunity to stop every further instance is reported. Alright. So, you know, if someone's calling you stinky and you say, thank you for that information is very helpful. And they keep doing it, report it, get them to stop, make them stop by recording them, because what you're doing is taking away their reward and increasing the cost.

And the two of those things together is what's going to make them stop and the more consistent you are that recording and getting this done, the quicker this whole thing is over, right? If you do it sometimes and don't do it something you're going to draw this thing out for months. If you are consistent, it's over in a couple of weeks max. Okay. Okay, so report. Let's talk about reporting.

Okay. Reporting means, because what's happening is serious. All right. You need to document And when you document something, and I have I'm including a documentation log in the downloadable stuff. What I want you to report is who said what, when, who was what they said, who witnessed it, so that it can be validated by someone else. I'm recording everything.

You know, the problem with verbal harassment is it's not like one big thing. It's usually a bunch of things over the course of the day, right? document every single one. Because what you're going to use this documentation for is if the person does not stop, you're going to use that documentation, to get other people to force them to stop to get this teacher, the school administrators involved and say, This is what I'm being subjected to. Right on a daily basis. They're doing this they're doing this, they're doing this, they're doing this and then they're doing this and then at lunch, they're doing this and then after lunch, they're doing this on the playground, they're doing this, right, that pattern of behavior that all that stuff, if you're documenting it, you've got a much stronger case for intervention than if you just say Joe is bullying me.

Do Something about all right. No one knows what that what you mean by that. But when you come in with a documentation log, let's really full, they go, ooh, there's a real problem here. And that person's the problem, right? If they're doing all of this to you, they're a problem. And that's what you want when you report.

That's what the documentation log is for. All right. So if it's verbal, verbal response, eye contact, if it's a threat, verbal response, if you do that, I'll report you report them if it's violent or anything, that's criminal escaping report. Okay. If you have any questions about this, definitely ask them in the documentation. definitely ask them in the question form, okay.

And don't forget to download the documents I've included