Our second item is a discussion on cyberbullying. This evidence session will consider how schools should respond to cyberbullying, and we have identified in advance some of the areas that we want to discuss with today’s witnesses. I welcome Laura Tomson from Zero Tolerance, Brian Donnelly from respectme and Tony Rafferty from the National Parent Forum of Scotland. Unfortunately, Caroline Harris from Anti-Bullying East Lothian has been unable to attend this morning.
Before I move to questions, I apologise for keeping you waiting. I know that you have been waiting patiently, so I apologise for the delay.
We begin with a question from Neil Bibby.
Good morning, everybody. We have a good panel and I hope that the witnesses will be able to offer different perspectives, because cyberbullying is a complex issue. I start with a general question. How can children be kept safe from cyberbullying in these days of increased connectivity, use of social media and the internet?
Our focus is gender-based bullying, so any answer that I give will be focused on that. We do not see cyberbullying as being particularly different from any other kind of bullying, although it presents some slightly different challenges.
There is a massive focus on the idea that children are less safe online than they are in other areas. I am a bit worried that, in focusing on the idea that technical problems may be a challenge but they can be solved by teaching children how to use the internet safely and by putting apps online to help children to do that, we are avoiding tackling the bigger issue, which is sexism. That is the problem that young people face at school, and it not just online. Bullies can target people online, but bullying is happening all the time in lots of different ways.
The evidence seems to suggest that young people are tech savvy—they know how to block people on Facebook and how to stop people contacting them, but that does not mean that they do it. They face a lot of pressure not to do that. For example, a girl who gets harassed by a boy for pictures of herself in her bra might not delete those messages and might not stop those messages because her friends tell her that it is cool. They say that the boy must love her, so it would be mean to delete them. That is the kind of culture that we have to tackle, and telling young people specifically how to be safe online is not going to tackle that.
I agree that educating parents, in particular, and teachers about how young people get online, the technology that they use, where they go online and how to make that safer is only part of what we could do to respond to such behaviour. Bullying is about relationships—it is done by people to other people—and what underpins bullying that takes place online is the same as what underpins other forms of bullying behaviour, it is just how bullying looks in 2014. If you and I were friends but we had a falling out and you ignored me one day at school, I might go and post something on Facebook or Twitter about that, and that might carry on the next day in school or on the bus. There is no clearly delineated place where it happens. It happens to people, and their online life and online profile are as much part of their social identity as other parts of their lives such as school and friends.
For a number of years, we have encouraged people not to make distinctions because if we focus on one type of bullying, we ignore other types of bullying. The focus on what is happening online has led to a dilution and an ignoring of what is happening to children more regularly, which is stuff that happens face to face or behind their back.
Sadly, we have found some recent evidence from where I live that parents themselves are participating in cyberbullying of the teachers. It transpires that the children are copying what the parents are doing. Although there is a lot of evidence that parents are not aware of what is happening until it is too late, there is no mention of what part the parents might have played in the children doing the bullying. As well as looking at the problem for schools, we must look at how parents are involved. I have evidence of that from two things that I have been involved in. I was asked to get people to take some horrific remarks about a headteacher off Facebook. The remarks were made in an open Facebook account, which meant that children were able to look at what the parents had been writing about the teachers. If the parents are doing that, how can we expect the children not to follow?
That is an interesting point about the parents. I will focus on schools—what can schools do to help and support children while they are at school? A lot of cyberbullying surrounds school pupils outwith school and in school. Should there be some sort of national programme or should the issue become incorporated into daily discussions about internet use? For example, I was at an event recently where the advice that was given to children there was to tell somebody they could trust about the cyberbullying abuse that they were getting, as they would be encouraged to do if they were being bullied in another context. What would you like schools to do to tackle the issue?
Schools need to have a fundamental policy in place whereby it is part and parcel of the curriculum for excellence—it should be looked at as just another subject, almost—and schools should ensure that they involve all the outside agencies and not just keep things within the school. Up in Aberdeen, where I live, we involve the outside agencies an awful lot in coming into the schools and holding regular events, especially from primary 4 to 7. Sessions for parents are also held to make sure that everybody is included and those sessions are really well attended. If we take an inclusive approach within the school so that children and their parents can sometimes attend the same meetings, that can be very rewarding and everybody gets an awful lot out of the meetings.
Understanding of the issue has certainly grown in many schools in recent years, with schools seeing it very much as a behaviour issue, not a technology issue. The bullying that happens online needs to be treated like other types of bullying. We do not see any need to have a separate policy on what happens online. The school anti-bullying policy should encapsulate all types of bullying. Also, different types of bullying happen online, such as gender-based, racist and sectarian bullying—a whole host of types of bullying. Homophobic bullying takes place online and offline as well. We need to be very careful not to carve out cyberbullying from other bullying.
The evidence suggests that when schools approach anti-bullying in a broad sense, with an equalities focus and a children’s rights focus, they talk about relationships that happen face to face and about relationships that play out online. Most children online connect with people whom they know—people who, by and large, go to the same school or live in the same area as they do.
It is about parents role modelling appropriate relationships and recognising that parents can and do have an impact on how children relate to each other. We need to involve parents and young people in the promotion of positive relationships. When we discuss how children should conduct themselves online and what the impact is of commenting on or passing on something online or hearing something in the corridor, we need to put it in the realm of respectful relationships. That lets us talk about how relationships play out everywhere, because children and young people do not differentiate in the way that adults do. Children know the difference between online and offline but they do not differentiate in the way that adults do—they do not see cyberbullying as being this phenomenon over here and other bullying as being that phenomenon over there. It is all about relationships and behaviour.
I agree with that. I would add that discussion about gender needs to be part of relationships, sexual health and parenthood education; it needs to be fundamental to teaching RSHPE. RSHPE should not just be about how to avoid getting pregnant. Young people really want to learn about healthy relationships. They need to talk about the issues that surround them—about the sexualised images or perhaps the pornography that they are seeing. They are desperate to talk about those things and how they might affect how they treat each other. That discussion needs to be part of tackling the issue. It is about creating a whole-school philosophy. It is about creating a culture in the school of respecting other people.
It is not that the technology stuff is not useful, but it should not be the main thing. It should not be seen as the answer—we should not think that if we can just control the technology somehow, young people will not be bullied any more.
Legally, there are a few grey areas when it comes to online bullying and abuse. Teachers could perhaps have clearer guidance on that. For example, there is no specific law against sharing an intimate image of someone without their knowledge, but there are laws that can apply to that. It is quite a complicated area, and the law is only just catching up in the guidance that is provided on what people can be prosecuted for. It would be useful for teachers to have a tool that told them when behaviour crosses from bullying behaviour that can be dealt with in school to abuse and harassment, which are against the law and need to be taken a bit more seriously.
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What are your views on internet access in schools? Earlier, you mentioned access to sexualised images. Do you think that we have the right balance between providing access to websites that will have an educational benefit and prohibiting access to sites through which children can be subjected to cyberbullying or harassment?
I think that we are getting better but, by and large, schools still err on the side of caution. I will give an example. YouTube is a fantastic resource for parents and children and young people. It has a lot of “how to” material on it, such as information on how young people can keep themselves safe and how to set up useful learning tools, as well as great videos by young people from all over the world. Despite that, YouTube is one of the hardest sites to access in schools. There are versions of YouTube that are safer—smaller intranet sites—but we need to be a bit bolder in going on that journey with schools and families and, collectively, getting over the fear.
Recently, I was contacted by a journalist because a school had blocked Snapchat on its wi-fi network. The journalist wanted to know what the latest scandal involving Snapchat was—he wondered whether a young person might have hurt themselves—but there was no scandal. It was just that the school did not want to provide access to any social networking sites, for fear that it would distract the children and young people.
We are still in our infancy in dealing with the issue, but we need to replicate the positive steps that schools have taken and embrace the use of access to the online world as a tool. If the online world is part of pupils’ everyday lives and is something that they access at school, that will make it possible to talk about how to use it respectfully, but if access to the online world is blocked, banned and demonised, it will not be possible to engage on how it should be used.
“A National Approach to Anti-Bullying for Scotland’s Children and Young People” contains the statement:
“We have ... aimed to avoid labelling children and young people as bullies or victims because these labels can constrain thinking of the problem as solely a characteristic of the individual, rather than as a problem that emerges from complex social dynamics.”
Is that gobbledegook?
Absolutely not, and I am not saying that because I wrote it. [Laughter.] Labelling children is risky. The character of adolescents is not fully formed. No one is ever just one thing. Children can bully and be bullied, so how can we label them?
The statement that you read out is not an example of finding a nice way to talk about a difficult issue. We do not change someone’s behaviour by labelling them; we change it by telling them that what they did was wrong, why it was unacceptable and what is expected instead. That is a fundamental tenet of behaviour management. Labelling goes against that and causes stereotypes. If someone’s child is labelled in a particular way and they do not think that their child fits that stereotype, it can be hard for them to view their child’s extremely damaging behaviour as bullying.
The approach that we take in Scotland has been commented on and has impacted on policy and practice around the world. We are seen as being at the forefront of an approach to bullying that seeks not to demonise and label, but to deal with behaviour. It is a solution-focused approach.
I ask you to forgive my passionate defence of that, but it is fundamental to the success that we have had.
One thing that surprised me was the fact that there are differing opinions on whether cyberbullying of girls is more prevalent than cyberbullying of boys. I am not sure whether the evidence that is given in the Scottish Parliament information centre briefing points one way or the other, but table 1 on page 2 of that document suggests that there are significant differences between the level of bullying in primary school and the level of bullying in secondary school. I presume that that is to do with the development of the child and how that affects what they are interested in bullying people about, for want of a better expression.
As children get older, their online profile matures. In primary 7 and secondary 1 and 2, it is all about using the internet to socialise, connect with people and expand their social networks, rather than using it as a tool, as they did when they were younger. Their use of the internet reflects how their relationships develop and change as they get a bit older.
Do we have evidence that children who have been bullies in primary school continue to be bullies in secondary school?
It depends how successfully any intervention has worked. Children who were labelled in that way in primary school might still be labelled in that way in secondary school, which is part of the problem. However, if we do not intervene to address their behaviour and give them a way of repairing relationships and developing more respect for relationships with their peers, then their bullying behaviour is likely to continue. If it has not been challenged appropriately, it will continue. Similarly, if it has been rewarded in terms of status, it will continue.
Do we have any evidence on the success of intervention at primary school level in preventing reoffending in secondary school?
Not that I am aware of.
No scientific evidence has been gathered in Scotland in relation to that. However, we know from evaluations that we have done and work that we have done with other agencies that, where the environment and ethos in primary school is about repairing relationships and not labelling but helping to find solutions, that can make children more pro-social and less likely to engage in bullying behaviour. However, sometimes children experience a dramatic change of school ethos and culture between primary school and secondary school. Most of them cope with that, but it can present challenges.
From what we know about child development, particularly around boys and girls maturing at different ages, S1, S2 and S3 are significant years for children figuring out who they are, where they fit in and how they respond to the world around them. I hope that that helps the committee.
It is also well known that that is the age when children come into contact with stereotypes about being straight and gay, and what boys and girls should be like. The adults around them will influence whether they latch on to those and use them to isolate other young people.
I was interested in what Mr Donnelly said—although I think that all of you said it—about treating bullying as a whole and having strategies for dealing with it as a whole. All that makes a good deal of sense. However, with online bullying, there is presumably the capacity for bullying to expand and be done by those who would not have been involved were the online option not there. I think that we are all aware of the perils of putting stuff online that we would never dream of saying face to face. That must mean that bullying, whether that is done directly or simply by being part of the mob that isolates, is expanding and becoming more widespread. Does that present particular challenges for schools tackling bullying? Without separating out the kinds of bullying, how do you begin to tackle it?
I suggest that the problem is that we are not talking about it enough as a relationship issue.
Absolutely.
It is about how they conduct themselves online and seeing that as an extension of developing respectful relationships. As we pointed out earlier, children can be quite savvy and are aware of stranger danger, despite the fact that some might feel that they could never be exploited. Children feel that they know what to do and how to block online contact, and they know about some of the practical elements of it. It is about engaging with them on the impact of, for example, letting a comment slide on Twitter and not making an input to say that they dislike or disagree with it. Alternatively, it can be pointed out that if they like it and share it, they feed it.
Young people have always commented about other young people. They have always gossiped about what people wear, what they said, what their mum is like or who they fancy. Such comments tended to just circle around the people who made them, whereas now they can be made online and can become permanent and grow arms and legs very quickly. It is not about focusing on what the technology can do; it is about focusing on helping young people to understand how to conduct themselves in the online social space. The internet is a place, not a thing.
There needs to be better understanding of that, because one cannot see the impact that an online comment—whether one initiates it, likes it or shares it—has on the individual or individuals concerned.
That is right.
It must make the challenge of talking about relationships a bit more difficult.
As adults, we need to acknowledge first that cyberspace is a social space that children occupy. That is what is new, so we need to integrate what we know about how we have always helped children to manage and negotiate risks and relationships with the impact that their actions can have in that new place.
People have always talked about anonymity as being the driving force behind cyberbullying, but there is no research that supports that. The research suggests that those behaviours continue because of a belief that you will not get caught because the internet is so vast, and because of the failure of a lot of children and young people to understand the permanence of comments that they make online. We know that, so we know that we need to focus on educating them about the permanence of online activity, rather than focusing on making technology less anonymous. Anonymity is not the massive problem online that some people would have you believe.
There are certainly things that happen online that would not happen face to face, and we need to learn the new language that children are using online. If somebody posts a photograph of themselves online, thousands of people can suddenly see that photo and they may start posting all the little words that are used now to tell the person in the photograph that they are ugly, or whatever. That can have profound effects because such activity can be taken to a whole new level. However, it is still part of the whole package and, as Brian Donnelly said, we need to make people aware of what they are doing. It is all about the social aspect.
It is a massive children’s rights issue, as well. We all have a reasonable expectation of privacy, and children have a right to privacy enshrined in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child but—it is a big “but”—that does not apply to the world wide web. If you do not make something private, you cannot reasonably expect privacy, because anyone can read it, copy it or screen-grab it. We need to focus on helping children to understand their rights in relation to that, but also the risks that go with it: if they want something to be private, they need to be aware that the default settings for any sites that we use online are not designed with privacy in mind. We need to educate parents, teachers and young people about rights and expectations.
I have two short questions. We have a SPICe briefing paper on cyberbullying and I have been looking for some sort of evidence base. The submission from respectme reports the finding that 16 per cent of eight to 19-year-olds have been cyberbullied. Livingstone’s research on internet use by 25,000 young people across Europe found that 6 per cent had been cyberbullied. Ditch the Label’s 2013 survey found the figure to be 17 per cent. When my colleague Liz Smith wrote to all the councils in Scotland to ask about the number of cyberbullying incidents in the past 4 years, 16 councils responded and 16 did not, and the answers ranged from one incident in the Highland Council area to 95 in West Lothian.
Respectme’s research base is the most authoritative, but which figure is accurate? That is what I am struggling to understand. I know that cyberbullying exists and I acknowledge the problem, but I am trying to ascertain the extent of it and whether it can be measured.
It is difficult. Not all young people differentiate between what happens online and what happens offline, because bullying may have both online and offline elements. When we did our research, the 16 per cent figure entirely mirrored research that had been done in Northern Ireland, Wales and England. There are some organisations that have a vested interest in getting money to develop resources and build websites, but we found that 16 per cent of children had been bullied and that 25 per cent were worried about it. Other organisations would, in order to get more traction, have added those figures together and said that a larger percentage was affected by cyberbullying.
I think that the number may have gone up, but that is because behaviour has migrated to where children spend time, and children are spending more time online than ever. At the time of the survey, I think that that figure of 16 to 20 per cent was reflected across the UK.
I am pleased to see that you work with the Scottish Association for Mental Health; I have huge respect for that organisation. I note that the Scottish Government is doing a training day for teachers, and that is to be welcomed. You have also developed a two-and-a-half-hour training session for parents, which you are piloting in the central belt. Can you explain that initiative to us? I know that parents need help on these issues, so what are your plans for rolling it out?
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The training sessions were set up to address a specific need that came out of our research and the extensive amount of training that we have done on bullying and online bullying. We have found that when parents understand the notion that the internet is a place and not a thing, and when they acknowledge that they have to learn how Twitter and Facebook work, they are more confident in dealing with problems that arise.
We have done a lot of work with schools, but we found that parents were sometimes being left to one side. Some parents are very engaged while others are not engaged at all, so we tried to figure out a way of doing the work at local level rather than through strategic partnerships or by putting on training in particular places.
We ask schools and organisations to get 15 or 20 parents to come along for two-and-a-half hours of an evening, for which we provide a trainer to introduce the parents to the reasons why we talk about bullying in the way that we do, and what we have learned about the links between bullying and online bullying, and online safety. The second hour of the workshop is entirely hands-on. Parents can either bring their own devices or use computers to which we have access through schools and partners, and we walk them through the process. We show them how to make a safe profile for a 14-year-old on Tumblr, Instagram and Facebook. Young people who are under 16 need to go through about 16 clicks on Facebook to ensure that it is as safe as it can be, and a lot of people do not know how that is done.
We give people practical time to engage with the technology and understand the places where their children are going. We encourage them not to see the issue as a technology issue, but to understand that, if they have children or play a role in children’s lives, they have—just as adults have always had to do—to understand the world in which their children spend time.
We are rolling out the programme in the central belt purely because of value for money and the use of time, but we have already engaged with Renfrewshire, East Renfrewshire, Glasgow, City of Edinburgh and North Lanarkshire councils, which have new state-of-the-art classrooms or learning centres with computers that will be perfect for training 20 to 30 parents in an evening in order to give them the core messages about respectful relationships and bullying. At the end of the six-month or seven-month pilot, we will make recommendations on how we can roll out the scheme across the country, and on the resource implications and the partnerships that we will need to make it succeed.
The national parent forum would absolutely welcome that. At present, most councils generally tend—as the council in my area does—to hold an evening session that deals only with internet safety. That is where it stops, which is why we need to open the training out and make it about the whole package.
The internet is 25 years old this month, but it is certainly not 25 years mature. Over time, our attitudes to privacy will change and some of the services will have to adapt to the concerns that have been highlighted.
I am glad that we are discussing the issues today, and I am aware that there have been some excellent cross-party contributions to a couple of debates in Parliament recently. One was a member’s debate on revenge porn, and the other was a debate on the Equal Opportunities Committee’s report on child sexual exploitation. Both those debates touched on safety issues and dangers, and on the dangers to women in particular—although the issues are not all gender specific and can affect both genders.
Are we getting out to young people out a proper message about the dangers, early enough? Obviously, they move on in terms of sexual maturity as they get older, but should we be putting out a much stronger message about personal safety and privacy to younger people?
Yes—but I would be wary of focusing too much on what potential victims can do to protect themselves at the expense of focusing on what young people should not be doing to other young people, which is what really needs to change. There is only so much that a young person can do to protect themselves. Young girls talk about being harassed by getting 50 texts a day from boys asking them for images of themselves, so it is not enough just to tell them to ignore it or to block messages from particular boys when boy after boy is involved in such behaviour, because it is part of the culture. The culture is what needs to change. I cannot emphasise enough that schools must tackle that. They need to be brave enough and skilled enough to talk about those issues with young people. More resources need to be provided to ensure that parents are skilled up to talk about those issues. It is only possible to do so much telling girls and women to carry their keys in their fists when they walk home.
I am aware that we have focused quite a bit on what schools can do, but much of the bullying that we are talking about will be unknown to the school, because those who do it do not use the internet in school to do it. Young people turn up at school with tablets and internet-enabled phones, and a lot of cyberbullying takes place outwith school.
Are we engaging enough with third sector organisations that deal with young people? Are we going into communities to places where poor young people socialise, to get our messages across?
We work with youth groups on general issues to do with relationship abuse rather than on cyberbullying specifically. The organisations that we have spoken to have been fantastic and seem much more ready for such engagement than some schools are, perhaps because young people feel more comfortable in that environment and more able to talk about such issues than they would be with teachers. The organisations that we have had contact with are ripe for more support and input on that, but it is hard for me to give a more general view.
We have done a considerable amount of work. Our largest group of stakeholders are in education. Our work is underpinned by the message that the issue is not about where bullying happens, but what happens.
I know of cases in which young people have told the headteacher that they are scared because a threat has been issued online, only to be told, “That didn’t happen here, so I can’t do anything about it.” I have heard that view being generally acknowledged by a roomful of professionals. If a child has confided in a teacher that they are scared and worried, it does not matter where the thing that has made them fearful happened. If a child was not being fed or clothed at home, or was being neglected, it would be perfectly legitimate for them to raise that with the school and to expect the school’s duty of care to come into play.
Absolutely.
When we gave evidence at the summit in December, there were schoolchildren who talked about the school being involved. I was not surprised by that because, by and large, practice is good.
We have also done training with foster carers, social care staff and residential workers. We have done quite a lot on child protection in sport with coaches and a fairly broad range of third sector partners. The training that we offer is free and available to everyone. There is no doubt that it is patchy, but we do not focus solely on what schools can do, although that takes up most of our time. We have other examples of people who have embraced the message and who are well placed because they are in the community.
Practice is at its best in schools that are genuinely community schools. I am talking about schools whose doors do not close when school finishes and which are part of the community.
As Brian Donnelly said, teachers still have a duty of care, which means that they must follow up when something is happening. When bullying happens online, there is a good chance that it will follow on into the classroom, with the result that the unfortunate children concerned will end up being bullied physically at school. The bullying does not stop online.
In a perverse way, that is how the situation with the Hamilton school in Aberdeen—which has now been closed—developed. That started off on Facebook, with parents slagging off a headteacher, which was followed by someone putting in genuine comments about what was happening. A policeman who was a friend of one of the parents thought that he ought to take action, so he submitted a report. The Care Inspectorate went into the school the next day. It was followed by Education Scotland, after which the school got closed. It is extremely difficult to box such behaviour into one area.
I add that schools need to go further rather than just saying, “Okay, we have had a report and now we will act on it.” They need to be open to receiving that information. It is about having a specific school culture and talking about the issues. It is incredibly difficult for a young person to share information when it comes to sexual bullying, images being shared and so on. I suggest that the statistics do not show the true picture, because young people would not necessarily class some things as bullying and certainly would not tell a parent that someone had shared around the school a picture of them having sex. It is necessary to create such a culture and for teachers to say, “Come and tell us if any of these things are happening to you.” Youth workers and social workers all need to show that they understand the issues and that young people can go and talk to them about the matter.
That leads on to my question. What is the scope to link the work into the getting it right for every child agenda or the child protection work? There must be times when people are put in a position whereby they feel that they need to feed such information into the system. I am not sure how that process works or whether it could work better. What are your views?
We have seen significantly increased consistency in terms of local authorities having a policy position on what they mean by bullying and the types of behaviours that they would expect to be recorded and reported. If they follow our approach and work in partnership with us, we ensure that their policy and training are in step with health and wellbeing outcomes and curriculum for excellence, and that their policy reflects the GIRFEC outcomes.
We will work with colleagues to produce guidance on the named person in relation to sharing welfare concerns, because I think that bullying will probably be a daily concern when it comes to welfare. We are trying to ensure that the policy is joined up. Sometimes it is about helping schools or agencies to understand what they have to do with the GIRFEC agenda.
A good anti-bullying approach that recognises different types of bullying, children’s rights and equalities will take them a considerable way down the road towards being able to demonstrate and produce evidence that children’s welfare is paramount, that they promote respectful relationships and that children are safe, healthy and so on.
Has any work been done on—or is there any awareness of—whether bullying is a bigger issue for children with learning disabilities? Does any research show that that is the case?
Yes—very much so. Enable conducted research across the UK. Everyone and anyone can be bullied for a variety of reasons—from hair colour to size, gender or ethnicity—but research suggests that if someone is lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender or is disabled, or is perceived to be LGBT or disabled, they are likely to be bullied more frequently.
Mr Donnelly mentioned the level of success that we have achieved so far and you said that others around the world are looking at work that is being done here. How do you define success?
We had a 27-month external evaluation of the service—the longest evaluation that I have ever been involved in. It looked at the impact that our service had on our stakeholders and asked whether we built the capacity and confidence of stakeholders. The second part of the evaluation looked at what impact that had on children and young people and asked whether they saw a difference and felt more confident in themselves and in the adults around them, such that they felt that if they had a problem with bullying, people would know what to do.
Over that 27-month period, the evaluation found that we do make a difference—that is where the title of the report comes from. It found that respectme is a catalyst for change and that we contribute to schools and local authorities establishing ownership, and having the confidence to recognise and respond to bullying more effectively.
The elements that the evaluation said had contributed to success in making a difference in children’s lives were a flexible approach to training, policy support and strategic policy influence around child protection and getting it right for every child to make those link up; working in partnership with local authorities; and having resources and campaigns that complement all those efforts, which all combined to be the catalyst for change. Rather than there being a campaign, or training, or resources, or a Government policy, it is cohesion and consistency in language throughout all the elements that has given a more consistent picture.
Given that big picture of what you have defined as success, is bullying going up or going down?
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ChildLine’s statistics show that bullying is no longer the top reason why young people call ChildLine, so in that sense it has gone down. We have commented on that, but ChildLine was first to comment that it feels that that is the result of a clearer, cohesive policy picture in Scotland and of the work that we do.
Awareness of bullying is increasing and I am happy to say that reporting of bullying is increasing, but that does not mean that there is an epidemic or an increasing problem with that behaviour or phenomenon. Behaviour that has always existed continues to exist, but it has migrated to new social spaces. From that point of view, I do not think that we are seeing an increase of bullying. In Scotland, the behaviour in schools survey suggests that it is not the gigantic problem that perhaps the Daily Mail would have people believe. However, that in no way detracts from the real challenges of the impact that such behaviour has on people.
Perhaps there is a difference between the reality and the perception. I suspect that many people have a perception that bullying is, at the very least, not going down, and that it may in fact be getting worse because of the cyber aspects of it. We probably all agree that that is just one aspect of bullying, and that bullying is bullying whether it takes place in the playground or online, but has the massive expansion of young people’s access to internet-capable devices at all times not led to an expansion in bullying? Before, it was constrained by the need to be in physical contact with a person in order to bully them or to be bullied, but online spaces and social media make it much easier to bully an individual. Has that not led to an expansion in bullying?
There is no evidence to support that. It is as simple as that. As I said, it is about not thinking that you will get caught and not understanding the permanence of it. That is what has led to it, but we have seen that the profile of such behaviour has increased because of media interest in what children and young people are doing and in the dangers of social media; there has been a massive conflation of all online risks and how behaviour can escalate to become abusive and predatory, but that is not bullying and a distinction should be drawn.
The internet presents new challenges. It presents adults with a challenge to learn about the new social space and how it works, and about how to promote positive relationships on it, but there is no evidence to suggest that simply having access to a laptop, tablet or other online device makes people more likely to bully than they would have been if they did not have such things.
I was not suggesting that it makes an individual more likely to bully. I was suggesting that the ability to do has expanded.
I suppose that it has, and that is in step with what I have been saying. People who are likely to bully are likely to do so using whatever means are at their disposal, whether the internet is 25 years old or not. If I were inclined to bully and had access to the internet, I would be likely to use it to bully. If I am not inclined to bully, having access to the internet will not necessarily make me do it. The expansion might mean that some people’s behaviour has become more prolific, but it does not mean that a whole new group of people is involved. There is a small group, but not a new group of people.
I was not suggesting that there were extra people; I was suggesting that there were extra incidents because individuals who wish to bully others now have the ability to do it 24/7.
It is perhaps a matter of what we would class as incidents. Some children might not necessarily realise exactly what an incident is. Going online and thinking that, when somebody says something horrible about somebody, it is okay and fun just to click “Like” on several comments is a lot different from going into the playground and hitting somebody. There might have been an increase in such online behaviour, but that does not mean that the children themselves are bullies.
The way in which children contribute to Facebook, Instagram and other such sites can easily make it look as if the number of incidents has been going sky high, but I have not seen any rockets in schools and there is no great evidence that there have suddenly been more expulsions or suspensions from school. If there was a lot more bullying online, we would expect it to be mirrored in the school as well.
You will be aware that the Children and Young People (Scotland) Bill, which was recently passed by the Parliament, incorporated GIRFEC into legislation and, as part of that, created the named person service. Will the support of a named person for young people and their families help to tackle the problems that you have described?
It is early days. I cannot comment on that until the service is embedded and working. I hope that it will.
It probably would.
I imagine that the matter would not get to the named person until the young person had been extremely bullied. The service might help with that, but—I return to gender—it will not help with the day-to-day sexism and harassment that girls face but might not talk about.
We have an opportunity to provide good and robust guidance on sharing information based on concerns about welfare to go alongside that element of the Children and Young People (Scotland) Bill. That is a change from sharing concerns on safety and harm. Bullying, online or offline, will obviously have an impact on welfare.
We want to be able to use illustrative examples of the challenges that might be faced. The young person might not want a named person to know about the bullying that they are experiencing, because it could out them in a way that they do not want if they are emerging from that experience and are not ready for anyone to know whether they are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender.
We are working around guidance that says that sometimes it is okay for someone to make the professional judgment that, although they are aware of a child’s situation, they will not share it. However, now they have to record why they did not share it. With the guidance, we have an opportunity to improve practice on focusing on sharing concerns with the best interests and wishes of children at the heart. If the legislation was applied very literally, some days the named person would not be able to move for concerns about behaviour.
The bill will impact on every policy throughout the country because the expectations on sharing concerns about welfare will have an impact on local authorities in which, currently, recording is not good.
Earlier, the convener highlighted a point on the access that schools have to the internet. The information and communication technology in education excellence group submitted a report to the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning, which was accepted in full. One of its recommendations was that the blocking in school systems should be moved down to teacher level so that, when teachers wanted to access something on the net on which there was a blanket ban, they would be able to remove it for the time of their lesson and then put it back on.
The national parent forum thinks that that would be a great way to allow teachers to access sites that they cannot access, which Brian Donnelly mentioned. In schools in some authorities, if someone wants to know something about Middlesex and types the word “Middlesex” into the internet, they cannot get in, because it has the letters S, E and X in it. Today, with my day job, I was over in Fife and—I do not know why this is—NHS Fife has banned access to Marie Curie Cancer Care. I was reminded of that when I saw the convener’s daffodil. We need to get such issues sorted.
Indeed. I cannot understand why that would be the case. We know many examples of perfectly innocent words that could be interpreted as something else when we type them into Google or whatever search engine we use.
Absolutely. It is imperative that teachers have access to all the tools so that, once they have been taught, they can go on to the internet and explain the dangers to children as part of a lesson. At the moment, they cannot do that, because they cannot access Instagram, Facebook or Twitter and tell children, “If you do this, this is what happens. Everybody sees it. If you send something to a friend, your friend might be open and pass it on to all their friends.” We would be all for teachers being able to use such sites for the purposes of teaching and then to shut them down again.
Thank you very much. I apologise once again to the witnesses for the delay in getting to them. It has been an interesting evidence-taking session. We appreciate you coming along and giving of your time to the committee.
With that, I close the meeting.
Meeting closed at 13:26.Previous
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