School environment plays crucial role

Sunday, August 10, 2003

BY MARY O. BRADLEY
Of The Patriot-News
Harrisburg, PA

In 1999, Gail Pursell Elliott collaborated on a landmark book examining the syndrome of mobbing, in which co-workers, subordinates or superiors launch a collective covert assault to force a colleague off the job.

In her latest book, Elliott tackles the issue of mobbing in school, where students gang up on a classmate to freeze him out emotionally.

The new kid in class, a boy whose parents do not belong to the right clubs or a girl whose clothes are not in style might be potential targets of mobbing simply because they are different in some impersonal way, Elliott said.

"Mobbing is group bullying," said Elliott, a graduate of Cumberland Valley High School and a human-resources and training consultant in Roland, Iowa. "It is ganging up on someone using the tactics of rumor, innuendo, discrediting, isolating, intimidating and, above all, making it look as if the targeted person were the guilty party or instigated the behavior.

"As is typical of many abusive situations, the perpetrators maintain that the victim 'deserved it,'" continued Elliott, author of "School Mobbing and Emotional Abuse: See It -- Stop It -- Prevent It With Dignity and Respect."

While the perpetrators of mobbing are often faceless, the result can be violent if the disheartened victim retaliates or commits suicide.

In her professional workshops, Elliott asks participants, "Do you make fun of people behind their backs? Do you spread rumors? Do you embarrass somebody and humiliate somebody and act like it's a joke?"

Most students and adults will admit to participating in behaviors that constitute mobbing, but they say they did not realize how harmful the practice can be.

"They don't understand what kind of impact it leaves and how these victims are afraid to go to school," Elliott said during a phone interview.

One student might start the mobbing behavior, but others join in because they fear they will not be accepted or they get caught in the power trip. She compares mobbing to barnyard pecking, in which chickens isolate one chick and periodically nip it. No one assault is fatal, but the accumulated attack of all the chickens eventually kills the chick.

While the book is accessible for children, Elliott's key target is the adult -- "anybody who has any kind of interaction [with students] because our children model and follow our lead in terms of the behavior that they see."

She has found that educators unconsciously engage in mobbing when they label students based on the records of older siblings or past behavior problems, as in one teacher telling another, "Wait till you get so and so next year. Is he a piece of work."

"Nobody wants to be labeled," Elliott said. "Every motivational speaker will tell you to let each day stand on its own. How many opportunities do children have to do that in a school environment, or does everything follow them along?"

In her book, Elliott offers suggestions for creating a better school environment based on dignity and respect for everyone.

"The purpose of this book, she said, "is to create insight and awareness and to get people to start looking at each other with new eyes as human beings who are worthy and entitled to be treated with dignity and respect. If everybody made an attempt to see each other this way and without exception, we wouldn't have nearly the problems we have."

"My company, Innovations Training with a Can-Do Attitude, promotes dignity and respect with no exceptions."

That philosophy extends to the mobbers, Elliott said, adding that "the bully's a human being, too. That's where the dignity and respect part becomes difficult." Elliott said that a check of the bully's background typically reveals that he or she was mistreated.

Mobbing might scar victims emotionally for a lifetime "unless they go through some kind of epiphany within themselves and understand that it was not their fault and they did not deserve it," she said.

"When I did a presentation for a bullying conference in Iowa several years ago, the keynote speaker was the governor. He talked about being bullied in school. That wasn't as surprising to me as was the fact that all these years later he knew the name of the bully, he remembered exactly what had been done to him, exactly what he had done about it and beyond that, he knew whether this person graduated from school ..., whether this person had been successful in life...."

Elliott said one of her favorite personal quotations is, "We have to live the philosophy if we are going to achieve the dream. We can't just say we believe in dignity and respect. We have to act like we believe it.

"We tell our kids to just say no to all kinds of drugs. We can teach them how to just say no to this type of manipulation."

MARY O. BRADLEY: 255-8147 or mbradley@patriot-news.com

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