Is your child a victim of bullying at school?
Parents are not always aware of the danger of school bullying.
At the beginning of every year when schools start, you can see mothers taking strain. Some of them rather tearfully though they try to hide it from their youngsters.
Anyone looking on would try to reassure these mothers. “Don’t worry. School is the best part of their lives!”
How often we heard this as children! But is it really true? Is school really the best time of your life? Ask any child and you will probably get a grimace that speaks volumes!
Schools are not always the safe havens they should be.
The sad truth is that bullying at school is no myth. There are bullies out there who can make a child’s worst nightmare come true.
I know. I endured it as a child, I saw it as a teacher and I fought it as a parent so I know all about bullying at school from all vantage points. It can be hell out there.
What an indictment! Schools are supposed to be places of safety for children – not hunting grounds for school bullies. But then bullies have always lurked around the school grounds and bullying isn’t exactly a new phenomenon.
Just think of “Tom Brown’s Schooldays” – a book with distressing scenes of school bullying that Thomas Hughes wrote as far back as 1857. Or Dickens’s “Nicholas Nickleby” which he wrote in serial form in 1838. In both these books bullying was a strong and powerful theme.
Sadly, even today – schools cannot guarantee safety from bullying.
The Scale and Brutality of Bullying at School
But what has changed is the scale and the brutality of bullying at school. We hear of killings at schools and colleges only too often. And now we have that awful new word “bullicide” which means suicide as a result of bullying.
Just about every day we read about one or two cases of school bullying in the papers and we know it has reached epidemic proportions. I believe it is a reflection of the society we live in.
Theories about it are all very well. But when it affects your child or the child of someone you know, it really hits home.
One of the worst aspects is that it makes you feel so helpless. In fact, many children tend to suffer in silence and keep their suffering to themselves.
There are all sorts of reasons for this. But sadly, because children are so reticent to talk about it, the people who really need to know about it are usually the last to know.
This is a subject that gets me very wound up. So I wrote a book about it showing and discussing some handwriting samples that illustrate the different personalities of bullies and their victims.
As you can imagine, the handwriting styles of the bullies and victims are poles apart.
You can tell a lot about bullies as well as their victims simply by taking a look at a their handwriting. It’s that obvious even to a lay person.
If you would like to follow up on this, my book is called simply “School Bullying” and you can get it here
Now it won’t do for me to expound on the merits of the book myself except to say that I’m very passionate about the subject. (You can probably tell!)
So instead, I’ll leave it to two Graphologists to review it briefly for me!
School Bullying – Help for Parents and Teachers
Sandra Fisher has more than adequately shown how bullying at school can be so devastating for the various victims, in some cases their families and eventually, for the bullies themselves. By using handwriting analysis and with plenty of cleverly well defined illustrations Sandra has managed to carve her own niche very well indeed within the field of handwriting analysis.
This is a terrific book – and more to the point, an education for many.
Peter West
In this fascinating study, Graphologist Sandra Fisher explores some of the characteristics of a typical bully and victim and shows how these are revealed in handwriting.
Sandra unravels, with great clarity and in a way that is easy to understand, what drives the behaviours of the bully and the victim. She expertly describes the dynamics behind the bullying syndrome and shows how the psychological makeup of both the bully and the victim, contribute to friction, sometimes resulting in violence
As she says, forewarned is forearmed, and teachers and parents will be in a much stronger position to help their children if they have an insight into underlying dynamics of the problem.
We have been running a professional association for three years and her book about graphology in the context of school bullying has been the focus of much discussion.
The book is an excellent study of the graphological signs of aggression and victim potential in young people.
Andrea le Sueur Professional Graphologist, Grafex SA.
School bullying – How to identify the signs of bullying in handwriting