Just ignore him! I was repeatedly offered that piece of advice, from Ms. Frizz, my parents, my older sister, and Diana. Their reasoning made perfect rational sense. If you ignore your tormentors, eventually they would get bored when they failed to get a reaction out of you and move onto another target.
Shannon Heuston, The Playground
The worst advice you can give a bullying victim
is to ignore their tormentors. Yet this
is the most common advice offered to children by adults. This is not groundbreaking wisdom. It’s the short-sighted observation of an
adult that does not grasp the bully/victim dynamic.
Adults believe if you ignore a bully, he/she
will not get the reaction they’re seeking and will search for another target.
This makes perfect sense, except it’s wrong.
Psychological studies have repeatedly shown that ignoring a bully
motivates them to try harder. This translates
to an escalation of the abuse. Bad news
for a victim.
Victims know the drill. You attempt to ignore the bully. After all, that’s what all the adults in your life tell you to do. But instead of stopping, the abuse gets worse. Now not only do you feel ashamed of being bullied, you’re also a failure for not being able to ignore them.
The ignore advice works in theory. Logic dictates that if a bully doesn’t get
the attention they’re seeking from their victim, they’ll move on to another
target. However, it fails to consider that
bullies are not seeking a reaction from just ANYONE. The bully needs a
reaction from their chosen target, and they will stop at nothing until they get
it. This is personal. Your child was carefully selected for reasons
known only to the bully. They will not
be satisfied with bullying someone else instead.
If you have siblings, you are no doubt
acquainted with the twisted game I’ll christen, I can’t hear you. This is
when your brothers and sisters decide to pretend you don’t exist.
First you try talking to them. They
respond by talking over you. They might say, “did you hear something?”
but if they’re skilled at the game, they will simply pretend they didn’t.
Then you start jumping up and down in front of
them. When that fails, you push them, or take their stuff, or turn off
the TV program they’re watching.
Each time they ignore you, you counter with
something else, slowly escalating until you’ve done something they can’t
ignore, like rip up their homework. You’re
pleased when they start screaming at you, because that means you’ve won the
game.
That’s precisely what happens when you ignore a
bully. In the above example, when your siblings ignored you, you did not
wander off to get attention from the kid next door. No, you stuck around
and made it your mission to get them to acknowledge you.
Bullies do the same. If you ignore the
bully when they call you a name, they’ll grab your hat and play keep away with
it. It’s hard to ignore someone taking your possessions.
Ignoring, absolutely, positively DOES NOT work. Your
child represents something missing in the bully, and they can only feel whole
by tormenting them. The bully is not
going to stop until they are satisfied. Like
an addict needing a fix, they require the surge of power they receive when your
child is in distress.
Not only is telling your child to ignore the
bully bad advice, it sends the message they’re somehow to blame. They’re
being punished because they failed to ignore the bully. Then they start
to feel it’s their fault, making them less likely to disclose abuse as it
occurs. You may think your child’s issue is resolved, only to find out a
month or so later that it’s a lot worse. Your child just stopped telling
you, because they felt you were blaming them for it.
Next time you find yourself
opening your mouth to advise the victim of a bully to ignore them, stop and
think. When has anything in your life
ever been resolved by ignoring? Never. Pretending problems don’t exist is always an
epic fail.
Your child is no
different.
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