Bullying through the children's perspective : social work interventions to help these children cope with bullying

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate the prevalence of bullying in Maltese State and Church Schools, to establish and explore the effects of bullying through the children's perspective and even to identify social work interventions that can help children to cope with bullying. In this study a total of 350 students from four Secondary Church Schools and four Secondary State Schools in Malta participated by completing a self-administered questionnaire on bullying. Two social workers were interviewed, while the other three social workers answered an interview guide. The social workers who took part in this study were two from the State schools and three from the Church schools. The results of this study show that bullying is dominant in Maltese State and Church Schools. It was indicated that more than 30% of the students who participated in this study reported that they are being bullied regularly, that is once a day or several times a day. The majority of the children bullied were boys, while the major effects that these children suffer because of bullying are low self-esteem and self-blame. Most of the children nowadays are not afraid to tell others that they are being bullied and the majority of these children tell their parents that they are victims of bullying. Results also show that social workers have several interventions that can be helpful to those children who are bullied. From these results one can see that bullying is present in our schools and that one should do something. The researcher suggests that the Anti-bullying policy should be implemented in every school, the environment of the school needs to be improved, there must be more awareness and supervision, students should be encouraged to fight bullying and the last suggestion is that social workers need to be involved when cases of bullying come to light. In applying these suggestions maybe in the future bullying will start to decrease.