"One of the things I hope to do is stamp out the idea of 'ignore them and they'll stop' because it is one of the most harmful ideas I have ever encountered, yet people still spread it to children, apparently with no particular evidence that it works."
And frankie_ecap replied:
"This is very interesting. What should children (people?) do instead of ignoring?"
It's clear from leora's comments that there's a lot of pain involved. I want to weigh in on this issue; I'll try to be careful not to cause more pain by what I say.
The problem with just saying "ignore them and they'll stop" is that "ignore" is too broad a term. There's irnoring, and then there's ignoring. When "ignore it" is understood to mean just saying nothing back, there are two immediate problems. First, in most American English dialects, silence is itself a kind of attack; the metamessage behind the silence is interpreted as "You're so much less than an actual living human being that I don't even hear you when you speak." That's not going to help. The second problem is that one of the things the bully is after is an emotional reaction from the targeted person, and that reaction doesn't have to be in words. If the bully can tell from body language that the targeted person is upset -- from a flushed face, or trembling mouth, or tearful eyes, or a cowering posture, or any one of scores of other nonverbal signs -- that's very satisfying. It makes it worth it to the bully to do it again.
However, it's also true that responding to the bullying in any of the standard ways our culture teaches us only feeds the hostiity loop, rewards the bully, and keeps the abuse going. Anything you feed will grow. "Ignore it" works when the targeted person truly is not disturbed by the attack and can ignore it with detachment; then there's no emotional reaction to encourage the bully.
Once in a great while a child has that sort of detachment -- like the detachment a ten-year-old would feel when threatened by a furious toddler -- but for almost all children it has to be learned. Once in a great while a child is fortunate enough to live in a home where good conflict resolution techniques are modeled by the adults who live there. Most of the time, the only models our youngsters have are the ones they see on television, where the person with the meanest mouth gets all the applause and all the goodies; much of the time the adults around them have learned their methods for handling disagreement from similar tv shows.
Suzette
