Monadnock Ledger Transcript – Viewpoint: Leaf Seligman – Combating bullying requires a concerted effort

Editor's Note: This column makes brief references to suicide. If you or someone you know is in crisis, you can get help by calling 988.

I read with interest Lisa Walker's viewpoint article (“Bullying, not just a school problem”) in the newspaper on September 17th. I share your deep concern about bullying. Every day we see the effects of behavior defined as “abuse and mistreatment of a vulnerable person by a stronger, more powerful person.”

A few weeks ago, as Walker mentioned, a Keene Middle School student died by suicide and on Wednesday, September 25, SAU 29 in Keene held a community conversation about bullying.

A little further from home, in Springfield, Ohio, JD Vance and Donald Trump spread blatant lies about Haitian immigrants and engaged in vitriolic verbal violence that resulted in bomb threats against schools, so much so that parents are now rightly afraid to send their children to school to send. This affects all children in a school, not just young people who are racially or culturally discriminated against.

We have a former president running for office again who literally uses the bully pulpit on a daily basis, and just look at a recent Senate hearing on hate crimes involving Louisiana Senator John A. Kennedy , Maya Berry, the only Muslim and Arab, harassed-American witness present, in front of colleagues, the press and the grieving mother of Wadee Alfayoumi, the six-year-old Palestinian-American boy who was stabbed to death last year to understand that we are in a Living a culture of bullying and not belonging. In a culture of belonging, Senate hearings on hate crimes would not be necessary.

As a restorative practitioner, I have met with the superintendents in both SAU 29 and SAU 1 and offered my services to collaboratively create a culture of belonging based on the right relationship and replacing ineffective punitive responses to harm with a more comprehensive restorative approach . So far my offers have gone unnoticed. The interest expressed, the reports commissioned and the discussions at meetings I attended in Peterborough about racial bullying have not changed the culture.

It is up to all of us in the community to embody this level of change. As Vermont Senator Peter Welch noted in the Senate hearing, “…if we as a society cannot assume the collective responsibility that we all have for each other's well-being, then it won't work.”

Bullying is not the result of poor parenting. Bullying is an embodied expression of a hierarchical worldview that misleads us all into the misguided and deadly idea that some of us are inherently more valuable. We have a politics, a designed and built world and an economy that reinforces this every day. The eighth grader who bullies a classmate, the former president who bullies his opponents, the community member who bullies a recent refugee all express a deep-rooted fear of losing power, status, and ultimately belonging.

The way to counteract bullying is to adopt a restorative worldview guided by man's innate desire for a right relationship. We are social animals, programmed to thrive in community, not isolation.

In “The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic,” Jillian Peterson and James Densley emphasize the importance of trauma safety screening at the doctor’s office or school as a first step. They note “years of deficits in the education system”. [that has] led to a chronic shortage of social workers and psychologists in schools” and underscores the need for social-emotional learning. SEL is important for parents, teachers, administrators, and community members of all ages alike.

Countless examples of public figures wielding power over the most vulnerable—and of exhausted principals, teachers, or parents scolding a child—illustrate the need for all of us to engage in the inner work of self-knowledge, self-compassion, and healing .

As humans, we all strive to acknowledge our pain, the violations of our dignity and our inherent worth. We long to belong and to know that we matter. Eliminating bullying requires sustained concerted efforts to dismantle hierarchies and replace them with caring cultures where the guiding questions are: “What makes a right relationship and how can we support it?”

Leaf Seligman, a restorative practitioner and author of “Being Restorative,” retired last year from 27 years of teaching. She lives in Hancock.