Bullying
The child’s view
Jean La Fontaine
1991
Bullying: The child’s view looks at the telephone calls received on a special Bullying Line which ChildLine ran for three months in 1990, and contains information on bullying from another special line run in 1991, the Boarding School Line. In the course of its work ChildLine counsels hundreds of children about bullying every year, but the Bullying Line was a unique initiatie aimed at assessing the nature and extent of bullying whilst offering children help and support.
Jean La Fontaine’s analysis of calls to ChildLine about bullying is essential reading for teachers, parents, policy-makers and all concerned adults as it provides an invaluable insight into children’s experience of bullying in day and residential schools.
Children’s descriptions of bullying challenges the definitions of bullying put forward by adults – parents, teachers, educationalists. Children, La Fontaines claims, understand bullying in terms of the effects it has on them and consequently they class a far wider range of behaviour as bullying.
The report sums up children’s experience of bullying as a message of rejection and hostility, causing feelings of isolation and powerlessness. It concludes that ‘children do not feel that bullying is an inevitable part of growing up. They want it to be stopped.’
‘This research should be used by every school in the country, primary and secondary: it is a realistic, sympathetic and constructive curriculum-planning tool.’ Michael Marland, The Guardian
Jean La Fontaine studied social anthropology at Cambridge and has done field research in Uganda, Zaire and London. She completed her PhD in 1958 and taught anthropology in London University, at Birkbeck College and the London School of Economics. Her published work includes: City Politics: a study of Leopoldville 1962-64 (1974), Initiation (1985) and Child Sexual Abuse (1990). She was made Professor of Social Anthropology at the London School of Economics in 1978 and Professor Emeritus there in 1984. She has done freelance research and consultancy since 1984 and was commissioned by the Department of Health to undertake a study of the organised and ritual abuse of children.