In fighting bullying, family is the key resource.
Families have a central role and a significant weight in preventing bullying or cyberbullying events and victimization.
But to understand that point, it is necessary to re-discover the profound and intrinsic value family has.
Family is the heart of human life, family is the breast, the warmth, it is the most natural and the easiest place where answers and the right path can be found.
Bullying episodes and cyberbullying cases ending with suicides are much more common than ever: even in Italy bullying and cyberbullying have their victims.
While it is not helpful asking to what extent desperation stretches and what kind of mechanism generated abuse, persecution and bullies, nevertheless we cannot accept the absurdity of trunked human lives or broken families, nor can we justify that extreme and dramatic choices. Suspending judgement is due.
However, it is no longer possible to stay indifferent as a spectator.
Being spectator is equal to participate actively to that human life sacrifices. It also means to have neither care nor respect for next generations. While we are working for them and building the foundation of their future we are at the same time contributing to their death. If not physical, emotional and psychological.
So in fighting bullying we must fight the indifference firstly and the fear secondly. Fighting fear and indifference must be perceived as not only an individual commitment but also a collective responsibility.
Bullying is not a personal problem but a pressing and emerging social need.
In coping with such plague everyone can do a great job both in raising awareness and in engaging others to play an active role. Everyone can take part at schools, within sporting clubs, families, peers groups, communities.
Everywhere, everyone can give a personal contribution. Everyone’s commitment is the spark that spreads the necessity to face the emergency.
It is no longer possible to ignore, to let the responsibility pass on others. There are not isolated cases. It is not possible to blame someone else or something else.
No one is guilty. Everyone is guilty. Nor it is even possible to put the blame on how difficult communication is between adults and teens.
Silence is the first problem to fight. The absence of a closer contact, of a sincere and immediate interest and empathy between different generations is always harmful.
Mere surveillance is not enough, nor is it the continuous control over the teens or kids. Such control may be illusory and ineffective, if only relying on inadequate instruments such as inspecting diaries, computers or smartphones. When the awkwardness starts occupying the heart of a child and the perception of being abandoned becomes greater and oppressive, silence reigns and wins.
Monitoring shall not be pursued by means of external tools, but preferably through love and relationship.
But the relationship must be restored or recovered. Once relationship is woken up they have to be reactivated. When the sense of abandoning and the awkwardness become obscure mates of our teens, they follow and overcome them even at home, within the family and become heavier and worse once they enter the social environment.
Group dynamics may be constructive or destructive. Entrance, the acceptance and the permanence into a group are critical components in a critical phase of life as childhood is, they also persist in adulthood and influence the future behavior.
Every group has its rule: there are roles, not written but prescriptive within each group. Once you have a role, you stick to that role. Roles never change. Those who are subjected to them cannot refuse obeying and conforming.
Complacency and fear are the group basic roots and rules. Those rules are unbreakable, the law of the jungle is the law of the strongest. If you don’t respect the rules you will be out of the group. But this golden rule still holds true.
Thus, neither social network nor the web can be incriminated or considered a responsible source of suffering, isolation and a serious menace to our teens or kids.
We cannot demonize the technologies or the virtual places as responsible or root causes of phenomena that occur even in the real places. We should rather invest in someone else’s responsibilities, engagement and commitment.
We should invest in those who can discover, who cannot ignore, who cannot pretend not to know. We should invest in those who are the unique witnesses of their kid’s (or pupils) fears and suffering.
We should invest in those who can stop or prevent the situation from worsening.
We should invest in those who can do a lot but do nothing.
We should invest in families. The youngsters are let alone, more alone than past generations were. More the temptations, more the threats, more the menaces. And the weakest surrender, are excluded, marginalized, discriminated, hated, abused.
Relaunching families means starting from within the problem, but also hitting the bull’s eye.
Relaunching families means investing permanently in families and rebuilding society from the foundation. And then we have to ask ourselves how to restart to be a family how to become parents again, how to be born mother and father, how to recover lost time, how to fill the void, how to break silence and regenerate love feelings and gestures.
We must resume loving. Investing in love means to go on asking for questions each other parent versus kids, kids versus parents.
Restarting from families means restarting from compassion and love. By so doing, we will restart from self confidence, which breaks the fragile bubble of virtual life and illusions of being understood, beloved from people beyond the screen of a PC or the display of a smartphone.
The web is the reign of solitary socialization. Instead of being the place of dialogue, knowledge, connections, it has become the place of solitary people, maybe virtually interconnected but actually disconnected, separate from the real world. There is a viral video - Look Up – which expresses in an effective way such form of isolation, of latent and solitary socialization induced by the social networking.
Being disconnected means to have different languages, different communications styles, different mindsets.
So it’s difficult to intercept the turning point or the breakpoint where something has changed and situation becomes no more tolerable or completely unbearable to youngsters.
When stress created by bullying or cyberbullying translates in pain, suffering, fear, terror, depression, then control is no longer possible and no action can restore the situation.
Only families can intervene early and effectively from within, and can oppose responsible, mature and conscious resistance to bullying, be it real or digital.
