Anti-bullying Week

Paul Masterton Excerpts

Thursday 23rd November 2017 Westminster Hall

[Paul Masterton (East Renfrewshire) (Con)]

I welcome the opportunity to speak in this important debate, and I congratulate the hon. Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire North (Gavin Newlands) on securing it. We have probably all been teased or made the butt of jokes at school— I should know; I am ginger, and it goes with the territory—but it does not take much for things to cross the line, and for us to start feeling intimidated or that we are being laughed at, not with. We start to feel uncomfortable and unsafe. That is when we get into the realm of bullying.

As other Members have commented, last week was Anti-bullying Week, which gave us all the opportunity to encourage young people to celebrate what makes them unique, to empower young people to be themselves without the fear of being bullied and to demonstrate to young people that diversity is to be welcomed and not something to be prejudiced against.

As the hon. Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) mentioned, the Anti-Bullying Alliance tagline for this year was “All different, all equal”. I was brought up on the simple premise: “You are no better than anyone else, and no one else is better than you.” Such a simple, defining message can go a long way in terms of how we treat other people. It is a high benchmark, but one that we must promote and meet if young people are to grow and learn throughout life. It is vital that children going into school do not worry about what the day has in store for them, but look forward to making new friends and learning new things.

The anti-bullying strategy in my constituency was changed in 2015. In the updated strategy, the local authority ensured that each type of bullying, whether targeting race or religion, or of other kinds, was categorised with solutions for dealing with each as they arose. Subsequently, research on prejudice-based bullying commissioned by the Equality and Human Rights Commission cited East Renfrewshire’s anti-bullying policy as,

“a clear example of good practice…as it included suggested strategies for dealing with each form of prejudice to which it referred”.

Although that comment was welcome, and as much as we might like to congratulate ourselves on the progress that we are making, bullying is still a prominent problem throughout our schools. I am sure that we have all had distressed parents come into our surgeries or offices at their wits’ end about what to do with their child who is having a hard time at school, and who do not feel that they are being taken seriously. In one case of mine, a pupil who was badly bullied in primary 6 and 7 moved up to senior school, looking for a fresh start, but found herself placed in the same reception class as her bully, despite assurances from both head teachers that that would not happen.

Every year, Ditch the Label, a UK-based anti-bullying charity produces an annual bullying survey. This year more than 10,000 young people were surveyed, and the findings make for stark reading. It found more than half of respondents had been bullied and that one in five had been bullied in the past year, one in 10 in the last week. Of those who were bullied, half stated that it was down to their appearance, while 36% of those bullied developed depression and 24% had suicidal thoughts.

Bullying does not stop at the school gates. An ever more connected world brings ease of online abuse. I did not get my first mobile phone until I was in my third year at high school; my three-year-old daughter can already find her way around a tablet and likes playing with “smiley faces”, known to the rest of us as Snapchat filters. The world has changed, and mobiles are just one more thing that kids have these days.

It is an uncomfortable truth that suicide remains a main killer for anyone under 40 years of age, and there has also been a dramatic increase in suicides among 15 to 19-year-olds since 2013. We need to get to grips with that. Figures from the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children show that Childline delivered 12,248 counselling sessions about online abuse in 2016-17, a 9% increase on the year before. Worse than that is a 44% increase in child sexual exploitation online.

As parliamentarians, we are no strangers to online harassment—or indeed harassment in more traditional forms, such as odd Christmas cards—but I can only imagine the emotional strain on our young people growing up in a world where they are expected always to be available, contactable and showing the best sides of their lives. A telling statistic from the annual bullying survey is that 71% of young people do not feel that social networks are doing enough to prevent bullying online, so it is essential that we create parity between both offline and online abuse. Nearly half of all respondents stated that they had been a victim of cyberbullying on Instagram. If social media outlets are to get serious about online bullying, that cannot continue.

What can be done? In Scotland, we have taken a slightly different approach from the rest of the UK. Organisations such as respectme, an anti-bullying service based in the west of Scotland and mentioned earlier, have helped to reshape how we define bullying. In Scotland, “bullying” is centred more around behaviour and impact than intention. We should also consider how we talk about it. I am not sure that labelling people as bullies and victims necessarily works. As the hon. Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire North said, people are not born to bully; they bully because of learned behaviour emanating from the current circumstances of their own lives. Compounding the issue with a “bully” label can degrade self-worth or have the reverse impact of becoming a strange badge of honour that people feel proud to carry around. Respectme believes that redefining bullying can bring about the cultural shift that the hon. Member for York Central mentioned in her remarks.

In conclusion, we must stamp out bullying wherever we see it, but we must also be flexible enough to take new approaches. We have entered the age of online abuse, and we are losing. We must put pressure on social media outlets to stamp out bullying, but we must also put pressure on ourselves to bring about the much-needed culture change that the 21st century requires of us.