Pointing The Bone

In Australia—amongst the Aborigines—there’s a practice known as 'Pointing the Bone'. If someone’s accused of a wrong doing—usually a fairly serious one—the tribal chief will point the bone at them and they are instantly ostracised. From then on no one will speak to them or have anything to do with them. Shamed and shunned by their peers, they are cast out of their village. For many it’s a sentence of death as they often take their own lives.

A form of Pointing the Bone—a far more insidious form—has developed in our schools. I refer to it as ECD or exclusion to cause distress. If someone does not conform to the group—is different—for whatever reason, trivial or otherwise, the same thing can happen. Dispirited and confused, the child is now a soft target for other forms of bullying. Pointing the bone has taken a grip and this practice is contributing to around 20 suicides a year of children under sixteen.

And that’s why Act Against Bullying was founded—for support. For anyone caught up in this situation it is at best distressing, at worst tragic. Today with our urge to belong to a cult, tribal behaviour is on the increase, and bullies are in their element. They are ‘well happy’. The tactics they use are only limited by the scope of their colourful, television-fuelled imagination—emotional blackmail, malicious rumouring, and public humiliation in a whole myriad of new forms—to name a few. Like a form of modern voodoo, this practice convinces the vulnerable, the sensitive that they are unwanted and worthless. It exploits children’s desperate need to be popular and ‘in’; it uses group dynamics and mob mod. In this way bullies egg on their followers to carry out acts of unbelievable cruelty, to harm both mentally and physically. Statistics—(and indeed commons sense) tell us 80 per cent of children would not be involved in bullying unless encouraged to do so—or out of fear of becoming a target themselves. Happy slapping, phone text abuse, stalking are just developing forms of the same problem.

Everyone is affected. Parent and children alike are intimidated. After all no parent wants their child to be the odd one out—pushed out, a victim.Contrary to belief, bullies do not all suffer form low self-esteem— quite the opposite. Many have an abundance of it and extremely healthy egos. They therefore wish to fashion the crowd— the gang— in their own image—so that children are bullied into a copy-cat society, wearing the same things, behaving in the same manner. Which is why so many feel obliged to say ‘I don’t want to be different’. Of course they don’t. They’re frightened of being different; they’re terrified of being different. And with very good reason.

In truth we are all individual and all different. Society needs this diversity. We need the winning teams, the A crowds in crowds, cool crowds—sports coaches are very successful at welding together diverse personalities into an effective cooperative group. The best teams are in fact made up of different personalities —in the words of Sven Goran Erickson, ‘You must not have too many of the same type in a good team’. A good group calls for an eclectic mix. A good team needs the nerds, the jokers, the loners, sociables, extraverts, and the introverts. But—as he goes on to outline in his book on football coaching—good grouping has to have very clear rules on how these different members behave towards on another—nothing spreads quicker through a group than negativity—things like criticism, verbal abuse, Prima Donna tactics—all these destroy the group morale in an instant. Positive energy is much harder to build than negative energy. But that should be our aim for our children’s sake.

Raising awareness of ECD is relatively easy because we all know how it works. And that is our primary function. Coming up with answers to it is far more challenging—lifting the lid on tactics specifically designed to hurt an individual is one way—encouraging rules of behaviour for young society along the lines of common decency, respect, kindness—is another way. So that’s what we are about.