Session 3: Schools (1)
1st Global Conference
Friday 6th November – Sunday 8th November 2009
Salzburg, Austria
Suicide and Bullying in Schools
Gavin Fairbairn
Department of Ethics and Language, Leeds Metropolitan University, United Kingdom
Bullying is perhaps the most important ethical issue of the modern world. It always involves the same basic human emotions. Those who bully act as they do because, for example, they enjoy the feeling of power that they get from dominating others, and find it pleasurable to watch others suffering. Those who are bullied suffer, not simply because of the cruel treatment they receive, but perhaps, most especially, because they are either powerless to do anything about it, or unwilling to do what they could do about it, because they fear the possibility that it might just exacerbate their situation. And so they not only suffer, but feel trapped in suffering. This is common, whatever the nature of the bullying; of the bullies, of those who are bullied, and the place or places in which it goes on.
Bullying can ruin lives and it can end lives. In this paper I focus attention on suicide, the most drastic of ways in which bullied individuals may act in order to escape from the bullying to which they are subjected, and especially on suicide among young people who are bullied.
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
Using Disability Models to Understand how Schools Create Bullying
Neil Duncan
School of Education, University of Wolverhampton, United Kingdom
This paper proposes a reconsideration of ‘the school’ as an unproblematically benign institution whose ethos is inimical to bullying, and reframes it as a social system in which bullying is inevitable. Most research and subsequent evidence-based interventions on school bullying follow an individual pathology model where children are seen as dysfunctional in terms of their personal variables which are categorised and catalogued using typologies such as high levels of aggressiveness, low levels of empathy and so on. But there exists a more radical collective responsibility model, where the school system itself is implicated in producing in its pupils the attitudes and behaviours the school purports to abhor.
Theoretical development of these models raises interesting parallels between the field of bullying and the field of disability where a similar bifurcation of value-positions gave rise to the concept of ‘medical and social models’ of disability. Furthermore, these paradigmatic comparisons can illuminate our thinking on bullying and progress it accordingly. The social model of disability has had immense impact upon special education globally through the ideology of inclusion, but seems not to have affected thinking about school bullying.
The paper deploys theoretical constructs drawn from outside the usual fields to critically examine many taken-for-granted features of mass schooling. It argues a moral imperative for more research on bullying that critiques political and systemic factors in education, rather than ever more funding for studies that designate children as psychological deviants.
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
Intensive Training in Youth Sport: A New Abuse of Power?
Melanie Lang
Faculty of Health and Life Sciences, York St John University, United Kingdom
In many popular sports such as gymnastics, tennis, skating, diving and swimming, children are pushed into intensive training programs at a young age1,2,3. Young swimmers, for example, train year-round, for longer periods and covering greater distances than in other sports: swimmers as young as 8 years old have been reported training between five and nine hours weekly, covering fourteen kilometers, while at age 14 this rises to twenty-three kilometers weekly3 – the aerobic equivalent of running 257 kilometers4. Commonly, these intensive training regimes are punitively enforced by the adults whom youth athletes look up to the most – their coaches and parents. Is this level of daily training healthy for a young athlete? Or is it a modern form of child abuse that has become such an accepted part of elite youth sport it is rendered invisible? Are coaches justified in pushing youth athletes towards success? Or is such behaviour bullying or even a flagrant abuse of power? Using examples from competitive youth sport, this presentation aims to trigger debate on normalized training practices in youth sport.
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