Anyone can be bullied in kindergarten, school or at work. In most parts of the former USSR, people still keep silent about mobbing and bullying, or even don't know such words at all.
Where do mobbing and bullying come from, what should parents whose children have become victims or aggressors do, and why is tolerance for violence higher in the former Soviet Union than in the West? We talked to Daria Nevskaya, Doctor of Philology (PhD), creator and author of the first Russian-language website mobbingu.net and the YouTube channel of the same name. Daria is from Riga, but for eight years she taught in Moscow at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration and at her Dialogues on Culture (MAMM) course for children and teenagers, and conducted anti-mobbing trainings for teachers, parents and teenagers. In February, Daria returned to her native Riga.
Maria Boteva, a correspondent in Riga
REFERENCE
Mobbing (from English mob — crowd) is a form of psychological violence in the form of bullying of a team member by a group of individuals. Bullying (from English bully — bully, brawler, rapist) is psychological terror, beating, harassing one person by another.
I talked to various Latvian school teachers. They say that the children were expecting children from Ukraine, that they helped them, that there is no mobbing based on nationality. Is this really true?
There is no problem because Latvian teachers are prepared for this situation. For several years now, schools in Riga have been involved in anti-bullying projects. Psychologists and mental health specialists have given and continue to give lectures on bullying prevention in Latvian schools. We are working with teachers. Therefore, our teachers know how to prevent bullying in children's environments. This work by psychologists with teachers has paved the way for the adoption of Ukrainian children. They won't even let a cob of violence break out here. And, of course, the fact that they are treated with great sympathy here plays a big role in the perception of Ukrainian children. In Latvia, a large part of society sympathizes with the Ukrainian people. And we understand how difficult it is for children to integrate into a different cultural and language environment after their experience. Therefore, I am sure that Ukrainian children will not be bullied in our schools.
Is there no other way to prevent bullying, only with the intervention of adults?
The bullying situation can resolve on its own. For example, the same “aggressor” who subordinated the children to his influence leaves the class, and after he leaves, everything falls into place. This takes time, and during this time one of the children will definitely be psychologically traumatized.
Or a new teacher appears who keeps children busy with interesting projects. But this is also a matter of chance.
I am absolutely convinced that bullying in class can and should be stopped by a professional adult teacher together with a school psychologist.
I have always been surprised by the position of teachers who do not notice or pretend not to notice the development of a scenario of bullying and persecution in their classroom. In Moscow, I held meetings and trainings with teachers and told them about stereotypes of teenage persecution and signs of emerging bullying. My story was nothing new to them, but when I talked to them about how to stop bullying in the classroom, they shook their heads and said that it was “impossible, it's not about us.” Why did this happen? And why were my students and students always ready to share bullying mobbing stories in school that never featured the same “savior” — a wise adult? I have answers to these questions.
In order for adults to have an interest in preventing violence at school, it is necessary for society to actively discuss this topic, and for the state to be interested in financing state anti-bullying projects, as is the case, for example, in Norway, Denmark, Germany and the Baltic States. If a teacher knows that not only will no one support him, if he tries to resolve the conflict between the children, but he will also be crushed by the parents of an abuser child, who will also side with the school administration, then, most likely, such a teacher will turn a blind eye to the fact that his students are bullying their classmate. And then, not all teachers know how to resolve conflicts. Nobody taught them this at a pedagogical university; no one gave advanced training courses on this topic. A lot depends on the teacher's personal attitude, on his fearlessness and will. My site mobbingu.net has stories from teachers who noticed a problem and tried to work on it. Unfortunately, there are only a few such teachers in Russia.
I remember when school had some problems, my mother said: let's go talk to the teacher. We refused. Because it was thought you were knocking on someone. Then, for some time, we didn't hear much about the bullying at all, and a few years later the topic was raised again. They just didn't talk about it, or did there be more mobbing?
This is a very good question because when I, as a victim of academic bullying, went through this myself in 2011, I didn't know such words at all — “bullying”, “mobbing”.
When I became concerned about this problem and began to find out what the West was doing in this area, I learned these concepts and saw a huge number of websites and resources that, by the way, were often created by victims of bullying, not specialists or psychologists.
And I realized that a Russian-speaking person has no place to get information about mobbing/bullying.
And in 2013, I created the first Russian-language website mobbingu.net, entirely dedicated to bullying and harassment in the workplace, among teenagers, and in cyberspace. And when I started promoting this project of mine, it turned out that people don't know the concepts of “mobbing” and “bullying”. That is, they are familiar with the phenomenon of bullying, but they are not familiar with the concepts that the whole world has been using since the 1980s.
I remember that I started incorporating these words into my active vocabulary in 2013—2015, and people in Russia started accusing me of “spoiling the Russian language with foreign words”. And what's so good about these words. To express emotional violence against an individual, the Russian language uses such words, I would say, of an artistic nature — persecution and bullying. These words are familiar to the Russian ear, but in our worldview they have nothing to do with legal practice, namely, with the responsibility that must follow when a person participates in the bullying and persecution of another person. In other words, these are not legal terms; these words have not been introduced into the criminal or administrative codes of Russia and most of the former Soviet republics. In any case, this was the case with the use of these concepts in 2011-2015.
And mobbing and bullying are terms already accepted in international legal practice. And they are connected in people's minds with civil liability. That is why it was very difficult, first of all, to work with these concepts and introduce them. You could say that I was one of the first people to rock this boat in Russia, to write about it because this topic was taboo, and it was taboo because society was traumatized by government mobbing during 70 years of Soviet rule. It is traumatized by the fact that society did not perceive others' pain as their own pain.
Almost everyone was killed — either in kindergarten, or at school, or in a pioneer camp, or in a sports team, at home — by their grandmother, abuser moms and dads, or an older brother. After going through this as children, adults became stronger in the idea that bullying the weak, rotting the younger or the disobedient was the norm.
The book “The Road Goes Far” by Alexandra Brustein is a typical story of Soviet development, when her father taught a little girl that she should be like a seasoned adult revolutionary, should not cry and should not be afraid of pain. This lack of compassion for another person who may be in pain is very well described in a recent article by “The Cold” (Yana Kuchina's “You Think I'm Not in Pain”).
And Stalin's terror? Did he influence the public's attitude towards bullying?
Certainly! When most of society couldn't, they were afraid to feel compassion for those they were imprisoned. People were convinced that they “don't just sit in jail”, which means that the truth is on the side of strength and government. And this “truth” was not questioned. The one who carries out the violence is right, “they are better than me”. And these views fit very well into the system of violence presented by the French philosopher René Gerard in his book The Scapegoat. And over the years, society has not worked through this trauma, redeemed it, and has not been ill. The trauma sustained during the Stalinist terror was deepened and untalked about.
After all, trauma is processed in two ways. Or it is hushed up — the person closes in and stays silent. This is most of the time. Or a person talks about it all the time.
So, I'm constantly faced with people's reluctance to talk about bullying and persecution. This is still a taboo topic in most parts of the former Soviet Union. It can be very difficult for me to talk to parents about bullying their children at school. They either don't see any problem with their child being made an outcast in class, the teacher spoops and the children beat them up. Many fathers used to say the same phrase “I'll do it myself, I've been through it myself”. Parents of abusers do not want to agree that their children are capable of aggression. And when they start talking about relationships in their family or about their childhood, I immediately get a “picture” of abusive family relationships, the model of which the child has transferred to relationships with classmates.
Unfortunately, abuse is “inherited” — if several generations have been in an abusive relationship and have not experienced the trauma, then the child is likely to find himself in a mobbing situation in one of the “roles” — “abuser”, “victim” or “observer” who is injured no less than the rest of the parties to the conflict. These kids are more likely to simply accept abusive relationships in class or on a sports team as the norm. Because they live in this normal way, when grandma ruins their grandfather, grandpa ruins their mom and dad, and their older brother ruins their younger brother. And the main motto in such relationships is to be patient and don't air your dirty laundry in a hut where the “hut” can be a family, a school, a camp, a sports team or a work team.
If all this was kept silent and there was no job, where can we get specialists who will work with this? How can we change the situation?
School psychologists could do this. But not all of them do it either. The West, for example, trains not just psychologists, but crisis specialists. Some psychologists may also be crisis specialists. But, most importantly, they will be free to carry out their activities, as they will know that society and law are on their side. But psychologists in Russia are less and less willing to deal with children's problems because they don't want to take responsibility for the consequences and don't want to face inadequate parents who don't always understand that their children who find themselves in a bullying situation sometimes need therapy. Moreover, as a result of long-term bullying, all parties to the conflict are injured — “abuser”, “victim” and “observers”. Parents often don't understand this, but the psychologist is already involved, and he has to let these children go at some stage, because the parents are against it.
If we compare the Western system of training these specialists, a lot of work has been done on preventive measures since the 1980s. For example, in Denmark, the state allocates funds for such school electronic trainers. When a child can play a computer game at recess, it's actually simulating a situation of aggression in which a student chooses how to act. Teachers and psychologists discuss bullying during class hours.
It is difficult for me to imagine that, for example, in Russia, the “Talking about important things” lessons would be devoted to the prevention of violence in the school environment or armed attacks in educational institutions.
Let me give you an example from the experience of Norwegian schools. At a Norwegian school, parents, administration and children sign a tripartite agreement at the beginning of the school year. Starting from the first grade, children undertake not to offend their classmates, not to tear textbooks, not to hit them, not to call names. Parents promise to control this, and the school promises child safety and an objective approach. This agreement is signed by the school, the parents and the child. And in some schools, children accept and sign a “code of conduct”, which must include anti-bullying clauses. They know that bullying is bad, it's embarrassing and reprehensible to others.
When a child has a blurred outline of “what is good and what is bad” and no one has told him that bullying is a bad and shameful act, he is likely to perceive bullying as a norm and an integral part of school life. In general, I think that a purely speculative idea of the “bad” misleads society, because, as we can see now, not all adults know what is bad.
It turns out that not everyone knows what's bad — seizing foreign territories, going to war, killing, ravaging cities, killing children. Russia has not developed a clear idea that violence in any form is evil.
If school bullying is considered the norm in society, then killing someone whom the state has designated as an “enemy” or a “scapegoat” will not be considered a deviation from the norm. I believe that Russian culture, cultural figures, writers and directors have done very little to make society understand that violence against others in all its forms is evil. We should start with children and work with them so that over time, the concept of violence against others goes beyond the “norm”.
What should we do now in this war situation? Does it have a very strong impact on bullying, relations, not just ethnic ones?
Of course, the war has had an impact on the deepening of violence — interethnic, school, and intrafamily violence. But bullying and persecution are timeless. I don't intentionally politicize my site so people can see that persecution and bullying have common signs and stereotypes of persecution that are not marked by politics or war, but they get worse during these periods. It is very important for me that all people, including those separated by this monstrous war, can use my website and our consultations with Taras Ivashchenko, a psychotherapist from Riga.
Of course, the situation of school mobbing in Russia has been exacerbated by national antagonism and state propaganda directed against the people of Ukraine. And there are so many problems and tragedies within families now, when there is a split according to the principle of supporting or condemning the war in Ukraine. Real wars are taking place within families. If abuse was the norm in the family anyway, now it has worsened. These are real family-related tragedies. As long as the war is going on, as long as people are killing each other, people will kill each other with words.
This is a very long way from perceiving violence as a norm to perceiving violence as an anomaly that is condemned by society. Can it be started during the war?
Yes, it is a very long journey. And as long as the war is going on, violence at all levels and in all its manifestations will be accepted as the norm.
How can parents know that a child is being bullied when they believe that school violence is the norm?
I tell my parents what are the signs of bullying, and my website lists these signs. For example, a younger student in a mobbing situation does not want to go to school; he begins to have physiological manifestations: nausea, stomach ache, headaches. He comes home from school with ruined things, and explains it: he fell into a puddle, hit him, tore him up. He becomes silent, he locks himself in the room, lies under the covers with his head up. If this is a small child, then, passing by a group of children, he clutches his mother's hand very tightly and hides behind his mother. Nobody calls, chats, or invites a younger student to a birthday party, and he can't ask anyone for homework. Outcast is one of the most powerful effects on a child in a bullying situation. When they are beaten and called names, they perceive it as the norm of children's life. But when society, class, and their peers are expelled from their team, it is deadly painful. Because a child's development and identity, age and personal identity, are formed through belonging to a group. And when this identity doesn't exist, the child doesn't know who he is or what he is; he thinks he's a freak, terrible, useless. By the way, this inability to identify by belonging to a group of peers is very often the cause of suicides.
What should parents do if they notice all this? Leave school?
As for the situation in Russian schools, I have always recommended that parents pick up their children from school without waiting for a decision from the administration. Even if parents begin to actively intervene and raise the press, the child, staying in class all this time, is emotionally abused.
The parents' task is to take the child away from a toxic environment. Well done to those parents who are fighting for their children.
Children need to know that their parents are always on their side. But it is necessary to pick up the child from a school where the administration is not on the side of the child and the parents of the “victim”. I think that children should be given the opportunity to come to their senses at home, rehabilitate themselves through family education, and then look for another school. And it would be very good to go to therapy, because you need to prepare your child to go to another school. Some children are absolutely sure that exactly the same thing will happen to them at another school. Therefore, therapy, working with a child, is not throwing him out of the frying pan into the fire right out of the frying pan, but working with him so that he calms down and learns to resist violence. I suggest that parents train their children how directors teach actors — how to properly resist bullying, how to react. I don't call for violence in any way, but a child must be able to respond appropriately to teasing, devaluation, insults and physical abuse. “React correctly” also includes the ability to ignore insults. And some children should be taught this, as well as building relationships with new classmates.
As for Western practice, parents there also pick up their children from school, but more often they try to solve the problem together. The school administration is interested in resolving this situation so that no one feels disadvantaged.
We're only talking about victims right now. A woman told me that when she realized that her child was poisoning, she just sat in front of him and started hitting him on the cheeks. Because she remembered her childhood, how she was beaten, how she went through it. And this is also, of course, an extreme step.
This is not an extreme step, it is just absolute helplessness. Because violence is helplessness; it is when a person cannot use words, persuasion, authority and love to influence their child. Then he hits. This will lead to nothing, or rather, it will lead to the child someday becoming violent towards the mother.
Therefore, I only suggest friendship and conversations; conversations with children should be endless, about everything in the world, stories about your childhood, stories about how the parent himself got out of certain difficult situations that you can sometimes even think up and simulate. Sometimes you can borrow a good modern children's book and discuss situations that children find themselves in. I'm not a psychologist, I'm a philologist, and I go to children through a book. Through a modern teenage children's book. And I discuss difficult life situations with them using book cases. When I performed at Moscow schools, I took my books with me and talked about what they were talking about. And right away, from my behavior in the classroom, I understood what the classroom situation was like, what groups the class was divided into, who their “outcast” or leader were, and who their “elite” were. You can see it right away.
Therefore, when teachers tell me that they did not see and did not notice, this is an absolute lie. It's impossible not to see it.
When there are interested parents and activists in the classroom, they also cannot help but know when talking to their children who is an outcast in the classroom. And this is where I always turn to parents: help someone else's child, lend a helping hand, invite your child to a birthday party, talk to your child, get in touch with the parents of the child's offenders, that is, do what you can, talk to the teacher. If the teacher denies everything, write to the administration that there is a mobbing situation (use these concepts — bullying and mobbing). Refer to the Education Act of the Russian Federation, which guarantees protection, including psychological protection, for children (I have links to relevant articles of the law on my website). Send an application to the principal and note below that you are sending a copy to the Department of Education.
And I am absolutely convinced that the school should help not only victims of bullying, but also aggressors. Recently, Latvian President Egils Levits proposed amendments to the Education Act, which require schools not to exclude “aggressors” but to work with them as they become members of society. This is very correct — the aggressor is often the victim of abuse himself. The school should not “get rid” of such children. It should help them cope with difficulties and understand the reasons for their aggression. The school has the authority to deal with the situation of mobbing and help children overcome the consequences of bullying. I think it's great when the country's president thinks about this as well.
What is the difference between mobbing and bullying?
Zoopsychologist Conrad Lawrence wrote the book “Aggression” in the 1970s, and he first described the behavior of cloven-hoofed animals towards predators. That is, for example, when antelopes slaughter a lion with a herd. But the aggressor in the team often enjoys the support of observers. He's recruiting a group, part of a class, for example. And these recruits are victimized because they are afraid of being in the victim's shoes, and they go to his assistant. That's why any bullying, even at the workplace, among adults (bossing is also called when your boss is rotting you, he often does it not himself, not with his own hands, but with the team's hands), any bullying almost turns into mobbing, so I named my site that way, using the broader term “mobbing”.
Mobbing (from English mob — crowd) is a form of psychological violence in the form of bullying of a team member by a group of individuals. Bullying (from English bully — bully, brawler, rapist) is psychological terror, beating, harassing one person by another.
Can you mobbing at any age, apparently?
Yes. Every person is prosperous and marginalized. Any child — bespectacled, redhead, thin or fat — any child can find themselves in a mobbing situation.
At what age should you start warning your child?
Since kindergarten. I recommend reading and analyzing Andersen's The Ugly Duckling with the kids. I asked teenagers when they first encountered bullying, and I often heard the answer that they were in kindergarten. This is the effect of a group, a closed team — very often.
I would like to ask about criminal liability.
It's not there. It's nowhere to be found. Incitement to suicide is the next level. That is, when it is criminal liability. But this has to be proved. In general, mobbing bullying is very difficult to prove. That's why I recommend that kids keep a journal when things just get worse. You can't wear the diary to school. But it is necessary to conduct it. If there are groups in the class, there is an “elite”, there is a confrontation between parties or leaders when they start bullying and ruining things. It is up to the parents to make a medical examination on time if there are bruises or bruises. This is all very necessary. Because it is very difficult to prove it.
Why do they become bullers?
No one cares for his opinion. As soon as he finds himself in a different environment, he begins to behave aggressively, for example, to compensate for his humiliated, overcrowded position in the family. When a child is happy, free, liberated, he doesn't need it. Some aggressors don't even understand why they need to manipulate others. And at home he is manipulated, for example, by his mother or sister.. And some children spin their webs directly, because at home they have a situation of learned helplessness and the same reaction to events. The child knows how the mother will react, how dad and grandmother will react, what needs to be done to achieve a concrete reaction. And the school world is very diverse, and the child begins to manipulate and sees that his manipulations work. I knew a lot of good guys; they are now studying at universities that were such abusers and bullers in their class. They tried to explain it this way: “I'm better than this Vasya. I'm right to the nail, and everyone else too.”
It has always been believed that nothing can be done about it. Is there anything we can do after all?
It is possible if the society is healthy. If the society is healthy, if persecution and bullying are not welcome at all levels, then we can do it. My kids love to watch the Green Book movie. They're amazed that it was only 70 years ago. They say: What should have happened in society for a black man to become President of the United States later? I always say that society is everything! — Intellectuals, artists, journalists, and white people at that, in all their works, public speeches and statements, they should have insisted on how terrible and ugly racial discrimination is.
And when everyone hits the same point—everyone, in chorus, after a while, society reads this message and realizes that it's embarrassing.
And society is coming to the conclusion that I'm not going to follow this, because only idiots and scumbags nowadays can persecute a person because of a different skin color.
Maybe rejection. Many people say: how much problematic children's literature can be?
Yes, there may be rejection, but not in Russian society, where the conversation about violence has not even begun; it is closed before it even begins. And society demands social demand for teenage books about mobbing in the West. You can choose books for your child for any situation in life. And in this sense, unfortunately, Russian authors of children's books are losing. Because they, too, are not as keenly aware of this topic as Western writers; they avoid it and polish it. Maybe this taboo applies to them too. Or they are afraid of a resonance if they start talking openly about bullying in Russian schools or teenage suicides. The publishing houses “Samokat”, “The White Raven”, and “Pink Giraffe” are actively publishing books by Western and Russian authors who cover the topics of bulling/mobbing. On my website, I have a list of so-called anti-mobbing books for children and teenagers, including wonderful Russian authors: Daria Dotsuk with the book “The Voice”, Daria Vilke “The Jester Hat”, Alexey Oleynikov with her rap poem Sonya out of 7 Bue. “The Glass Ball” by Irina Lukyanova, Evgeny Basov with “Boy Ashim”. Well, all Scandinavian children's literature is just about that. Because they have a social order, because Norway and Denmark have government support for anti-bullying programs. Accordingly, if this is the case at all levels, if there is a readership request, then children's writers cannot help but respond.
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