How to Deflect a Bully
Written by Jackie Humans Thursday, June 16 2011
Bullying never starts with one person brutally assaulting another. It doesn’t start that way in the schoolyard or the prison yard or anywhere else in between. A universal truth about bullies is that they go about selecting their prey by screening a variety of likely candidates.
The way they do this is by saying or doing something provocative as a means of testing the potential target’s reaction. What the bully hopes to find is a target who reacts in an emotional way by becoming sad or fearful or angry. Responding in any other way – whether by using humor or appearing bored or simply by saying something silly or nonsensical in response – takes all the fun out of it for the bully.
Physical bullying is what can ultimately happen when a target continues to react in an upset way each and every time the bully escalates the bullying. Eventually, unless the bullying gets reported or otherwise stopped, the bullying can progress to a serious level of violence.
The trick for potential victims to beat the bully at his or her own game is to realize that whatever the bully says about them is just a ploy to get them upset. Nobody’s perfect, and everyone has something about themselves that they wish were different. It’s imperative for kids to know that no matter what the bully says, what the bully is really thinking is, “I’d like you to get upset right now so I’m going to pretend that what I’m saying about you is pretty awful, and I sure hope you’re going to forget about common sense and believe that it’s pretty awful, too.”
A good way to teach children how to deflect bullying is by forearming them with lots of options for handling bullies. The best ways of “zapping” a bully aren’t terribly hurtful, won’t get the target in trouble, and actually work. What underpins every technique in my book (except the last technique of using the 5 Ws) is that the target refuses to take the bullying at face value. Without an upset reaction from the target, it’s “game over” for the bully.
Still, there may be some children who have been bullied so severely that they are unable to shrug off the bully’s taunts. That’s when using the 5 Ws can greatly help to increase the target’s credibility when reporting the bullying. By keeping a journal of who did the bullying, what happened, when it happened, where it happened, and most importantly, witnesses who saw it happen, a target stands a much better chance of being taken seriously by adults who can help.
When presented with this kind of documentation school administrators are no longer in the position of being asked to take the target’s word over the bully’s. Now administrators can discreetly and individually interview the bystanders who witnessed the bullying to get the whole story.
Jackie Humans is a graduate of the Workplace Bullying Institute, the only organization in the United States that trains individuals how to present anti-bullying programs for bullying in the workplace. She also works with Child Abuse Prevention Services, a nonprofit organization that sends volunteers into schools to present programs about keeping kids safe. She is a well-known speaker and program leader on subjects such as bully prevention, internet safety, sexual harassment, date rape, and child abuse. She is the author of 15 Ways to ZAP a Bully!
