Empathy May Be the Key to Stopping Bullying

Bullying has a tremendous impact on the lives of children in schools throughout the world, and can lead to mental disabilities when the kid subjected to it grows old. It can also make children have very little self esteem, and bow their heads down when in public, just because a stronger student tells them so and threatens to beat them otherwise. Now, researchers at University College London (UCL), together with American colleagues, have devised a program called CAPSLE (Creating a Peaceful School Learning Environment), meant to shift attention from bully to bystander.

Basically, what they're advocating is that bystanders should be empowered and motivated to intervene in case they see something out of the ordinary, such as a harsh exchange of words or a fight, instead of simply watching, or even cheering the fighters. The team says that empathy is one of the main ways to achieve just that, by making people feel sorry for those who are in distress.

“Bullying has an extensive impact on children's mental health including disruptive and aggressive behaviour, school dropout, substance abuse, depressed mood, anxiety, and social withdrawal. It also undermines educational achievement and disrupts children's abilities to develop social relationships,” the lead author of the new paper, professor Peter Fonagy, an expert at UCL Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology, explains.

“While school anti-bullying programmes are widely used, there have been few controlled trials of their effectiveness. CAPSLE is a psychodynamic approach that addresses the co-created relationship between bully, victim, and bystanders, assuming that all members of the school community, including teachers, play a role in bullying,” he adds.

“It aims to improve the capacity of all community members to mentalize, that is, to interpret one's own and others' behavior in terms of mental states (beliefs, wishes, feelings), assuming that greater awareness of other people's feelings will counteract the temptation to bully others. It also teaches people to manage power struggles and issues, both of which are known to damage mentalizing,” the researcher concludes.