Okay. Welcome to another edition of the safety net foundation safeguarding podcast where we talk about all things to do with safeguarding children in the online digital context. The online digital context comprises three areas of technology, law and ethics and culture where child safeguarding right in the center of this Venn diagram and it encompasses all stakeholders between a child using a smartphone and the content or personal online that they are interacting with. In this podcast we are returning to the topic of cyber bullying. In the UK we have the anti-bullying Alliance and last month we had the anti-bullying week in the U S there are many initiatives running in this space, but one of the largest, if not the largest, is an organization called no bully, which was established by a Brit, Nicholas Carlisle who joins me today. Hi, great to be here. Thank you Nicholas. Welcome to the podcast. Perhaps you could give us a raising me by way of an introduction so that we understand where you're coming from.
Yeah. So about 10 years ago, I decided that we needed to create a nonprofit around bullying and we call it no bully. And our focus was very much on getting schools and solutions they needed because schools were stuck around how do they actually turn around bullying and that nonprofit, no bully has grown. I started it in San Francisco. It's grown across the United States. It's now one of the biggest, uh, bullying prevention organizations that is out there.
Okay, thank you. Now your bio makes for quite harrowing reading because unlike most blokes, in fact, most people, uh, you, you are very open about what happened to you as a child. Do you say that the students called you the runt and students with money paid other boys to steal your clothes, food, homework, and to beat you up? But the most painful part was going through four years of school with no friends, four years of never hearing the kind word or having a reassuring hand on your shoulder. Now that's really quite shocking to hear from an adult. And I think these days we will probably refer to you as someone suffering or who had suffered adverse childhood experiences. How, how did you cope as a child with all of that?
Well, I don't think my story is that unusual. One third of, of kids, uh, are bullied and um, it's a phenomenon across the whole world. So the reason I tell my story is because I'm, I'm happy to volunteer it as an example of what so many kids have suffered and so many kids are still suffering. And when I was back at school, there were very, very few solutions to bullying. Typically, schools would, would go in and read the riot act to the bullies if they did anything. And of course, Neil, that makes it it worse. They stitches snitches and, and there's always retaliation as, as was there in my case. And it's really that, that, that failure of, of the adults to, to solve bullying and to protect kids from bully, that really motivated me to start a, a nonprofit around it.
If bullying is so prevalent and presumably those teachers themselves at the time were likely to have been bullied themselves as children. And so it goes back generational generation. Why do you think it's taken so long for bullying to become, to the fore of people's thinking about child care?
I think there's a lot of denial around bullying and that takes a form. What we find at no bullies at some schools simply say they don't have a problem. And that's crazy cause you and I know that one third of kids a bully. That's what the stats show across pretty much across the whole world with some variation between countries. So clearly they do have it. And the other form that Denelle takes is, is schools are very happy to to say, well it's just part of growing up. It's just boys being boys or girls being girls or in my case, uh, and it was one of the old traditional English private schools. It bullying was seen as as character forming that somehow if we, if you figure your way out through it, you're going to be a stronger person. So all of those ones that are, uh, uh, untrue that the, the evidence and the research shows that bullying is generally pretty damaging for children is not character forming. But schools still hang on to that. And I think also part of it is they don't know what to do. So it's easier to flip back into denial if you're not quite sure how do we actually solve this?
Okay. Now, uh, you later became a barrister and interestingly, uh, chair of amnesty international. Uh, and, uh, after that you then set up no bully and maybe a somewhat of a cliche, but do you feel that those, that career path was almost destined by the way you were treated as a child?
I've often wondered why I've taken the route I have through, through life, but certainly having gone through school, I was really passionate about the underdog and about protecting the underdog and about justice and fairness. Uh, and it became vitally important how we treat each other. And I'm sure part of that was because I had been through that, what you call it, an adverse childhood experience. Yeah. So, so the early forms of, of me of Nicholas where this human rights lawyer that was really fighting for the underdog across the world.
Okay. Now you gave a TEDx talk a few years ago, uh, and in that TEDx talk, which is, which I found very interesting indeed. And, and actually by moving, because you went into a lot of detail about your childhood, that you, there were three ways that it's the adults that are creating the bullying. What did you mean by that?
I think with the problem that size, one third of kids are bullied around the world. Adults have got to take responsibility for the conditions in which that's, that's happening. And inadvertently there's a lot that we're doing to create it. One number one we've talked about earlier is turning a blind eye to it, denial. Then there's the, the uh, seeming inability of people to be able to talk about differences in diversity. And that's a tricky one because so much of bullying is about differences. So the kids who have a different color skin or they had come from immigrant parents, less wealthy parents, uh, the gender differences. And, and, and bullying based on sexual orientation is, is common. Uh, sadly a lot of kids are bullied because they are less abled, both physically and mentally. And I think we get tongue tied about how do we intervene in those, in those situations without shaming the kids being being bullied.
And then because of our reliance on, on punishment and we seem to think that suspending children or expelling them totally from the school as a solution when actually it doesn't help them. The research shows that kids who are, who get consequences and suspensions actually, um, their negative behaviors increase. And at the same time, that was leading to a retaliation against the kids being bullied because no one likes get being gotten into trouble. And all of those factors, which are our, our, our adult responsibility where and have allowed bullying to continue in so many schools across the world.
Okay. Now what are the things that changes yours? Gold energy, since I was at school is the cyber element, the online elements. So how does cyber bullying manifest itself in your experience and knowledge and has it made things worse?
Well, what we find at no bully, and we'd go into many, many schools around the world is, is that the same students who are being bullied in the day and now the ones that have been the target of online bullying, which of course is a 24 seven phenomenon. So the advent of of tablets and smartphones doesn't seem to overrule increase the levels of bullying. But what it seems to have done is offered another platform, another place where it, where it happens. And there's some particularly invidious features of, of online bullying. It seems like if I can't see the whites of your eyes, there's no break upon my meanness, my aggression. And I'll say things which I might not usually say. I'll say them online. And then once something's gone online, it becomes a reality TV show, show of its own and people are following it and liking it and watching the videos that are posted online or the or the embarrassing pictures that are being shared online. And then once something's posted on the internet, as we know is it's very hard to get down. So cyber bullying or online bullying is, we prefer to call it has, has some really destructive features that are deeply concerning.
Yeah. And the day, sadly, there have been a number of suicides related to that. And in your TEDx talk you, you said that the three groups who in particular seemed to get singled out for bullying on the date, cyberbullying more than most than they are immigrants. Those people with, uh, mental and physical differences and gay or lesbian or non stereotypical dress preferences or behavior. Why do you think it is that those three groups in particular get singled out?
I think bullying is a water belong. And as kids go through school, one of the most pressing concerns that they have is, am I going to belong? What's my group? And oftentimes too, to secure that group, they will target others to say, you're not part of this. You're not, you don't belong. You don't belong here. And, and it's fairly predictable who they'd pick on. And the people that they, uh, target tend to be the same groups that adults society at large marginalizes. So we know that across the world there's a lot of tension around immigration. So immigrant children of immigrants, families absolutely are, are at risk because that same prejudice filters through to the kids in, in, in schools. And I also think there's a sort of sense of the other of the unknown and the scariness of the, of the, the other. So with kids who are less abled, there's some sort of sense that we S we skate them, that we, we can't handle it, that we, we, it's too easy to kind of put our anxieties on, on another kid. So we see that a lot with, with, with disabilities and, and then I think there's a lot of anxiety around in school around am I straight? Am I, am I gay? Do I look tough enough? Do I look masculine? And after I look feminine enough and just children trying to establish their own gender identity and who they are and, and, and uh, get respect for that. Again, they tend to, uh, pick on the children that don't follow standard standard stereotypes.
Oh, bull is essentially the cowards or scared
the research on bullies. Is is fascinating cause there's often an assumption that they know that they're SCAD or that they've been bullied and that they're just taking it out on someone else. And the research on, on, on bullying students says no, they're just almost regular. Just like regular students that are trying out power plays that trying to see what they can get away with. Uh, they often feel very justified in what they're doing. If you ask them, they'll say, well these, these other kids deserve it. So they've talked themselves into it being okay, but generally speaking they're not, they're scared kids. Kids are not the weekends
so they're not reacting out of feeling threatened
generally speaking, not some, some do. Okay.
Nope. No bully has a very interesting model because you deploy into schools, what you call a solution team and with your solution team you claim that you have a 90% success rate of dealing with bullying and I guess cyber bullying as a as well. What are, what is your solution team and how do they work and how do you measure that 90% success rate? What's that a measure of? What do you mean by 90% success rate?
Yeah, we created solution team, gosh, about 10 years ago now because schools were saying, listen, you've got to help us be using punishment and it's just making it 10 times worse. So we flipped that on its head and said, okay, what would it be like to bring the bullying students together with maybe three or four the pro, what we called the [inaudible] students and take punishment out of the equation, which is a radical move back then. So you say to those students, you're not in trouble. That's taking punishment out of the equation. They don't believe it. And then you say to them, you are the solution team. You have the power to really turn around a, a painful situation that one of your peers is going through. And then you, you tell them the name of their peer. So it's Nicholas or Richards and, and, uh, as you know, they, they're not happy at this school.
They, they dread coming back to school, frankly, Sunday nights, the worst night of the, of the week, uh, for this kid, Nicholas or Richard or whoever it is, because when they come back to school, they hear these names, they call these names day in, day out. People crash into them when they go outside, uh, and then say, Oh, sorry, it's an accident. People take the things they scattered around. They're saying these things about them online. As you can imagine, and you're talking to the students here, as you can imagine, they feel so much pain in the sides. It's the worst feeling to think that nobody likes you. They're so profoundly lonely at this school. And it's just embarrassing for them to be treated like this day in and day out. And sometimes they wonder what's the point of living. So what you can S you can see here near this is that we're walking this group of students into the shoes of their student who's being bullied.
And that experience, which is empathy in action, is extraordinary in melting a lot of the aggressive behaviors that we see. And sometimes there's a little bit of push back and they'll say, well, he's doing that, or he's, she's doing this. And we'll say, okay, that's good feedback. We'll take it back to Richard or Nicholas or whoever it is, but let's focus on what you can do differently. Yeah. And if you keep those students focused on that, essentially you're asking them to take responsibility for changing a situation. They come up suggestions. And the amazing thing is we meet with them a weeks later, a week later, and in 90% of cases the bullying is over and they're doing very simple things like that. Having lunch with that student or they're playing football with that student and in the break, some very simple things like that. But I mean the world to that student who for months maybe for years has been left out. And then we'd have a talker talk to them. And that's solution team.
It sounds almost unbelievably effective. It seems like a very simple idea, extraordinarily effective, almost to, to be true. I'm not dissing it by any stretch. It just seems incredible that it is so powerful. Do you not find that, uh, bullies, I, I have this mental images of some bullies in those sessions either being cynical in their responses to you just playing a long, but they're going to carry on any way because actually they've got that victim where they want them. All you're doing is saying to the bully job done. You've achieved what you want to achieve. Does that happen?
It seems incredible to us when we started on this. Uh, like it was never going to work. Like the bullies, everyone is understandably concerned that the bullets are just impervious. That why, why would they change? But when you get in that room, what seems to happen is the power of the bystander, meaning that you'd got in that room quite a few people that really are uncomfortable with the situation. So you may have a bully leader in, in that room. Um, the bully followers are rotten, very conflicted about what's going on. They will follow along, but many of them don't like it. And then you've got the pro social students in the room who really don't like it. So as you start to ask for suggestions from that group, the bully may say nothing, but that power starts to slide away because other people are saying suggestions.
And they know that in one week's time that you're all going to regather and talk about what progress they've they've made. So that group and those bystanders are the ones that really affect change. But you know, what's really incredible is, is, is, uh, not always, but often the bullying student will then start to make changes to, and will go along with the group. And I've seen a bully in one of these solution team meetings, put up their hand and say, you know, I'm going to ask the, uh, other students to, to, to, to cut it out, to stop doing this. And inside of me, I'm thinking that's navigate to happen. Really. Come on. You're just, you're just, you're just, uh, you're just trying to soften me up here. And, and, uh, the amazing thing is they do go out there and they do tell the other students to catch out. And we've had bullying students come back to us and say, you know, thank you. You gave me a break there because I was stuck in this role and I didn't know any way out. And, uh, I actually feel a lot better about myself now.
Well, that's really interesting because you said that you see that power melting away and they've built up this image of being the top dog based on their bullying behavior. But that image is then challenged. Their self perception must be challenged. They must find that quite threatening.
So, so I want to be realistic about the bullying students. Um, so you got one or 2% of students who are just so hardened in being aggressive that you're never really gonna change their ways. So there are some students that you can't change through the solution team process. Uh, but our message to schools is you can't get hung up on, on that. You can create change anyway, you can run a solution team and the bullying is going to stop. And for these really tough kids, you're going to have to find other interventions to work with them. They're going to have to work with a social worker or a therapist and you're going to have to really focus hard on, on, on changing that oftentimes that family dynamics.
Yeah. Okay, good. Thank you. Some schools and some countries have rules or law that, uh, prohibit students and taking phones into schools. And we talked about cyber bullying and obviously cyber bullying requires a phone and one solution to that is no phone, no bully. So do you find that that is a particularly effective part of stopping cyber bullying in schools? Schools do,
um, quite often want to take the phones away from the students during the daytime. Uh, and certainly what we see from that is, is the students, uh, less on their phones at school, but they get back on them in the, in the evenings and there's no proof. I think that that actually curtails online bullying simply restarts later in the day.
Now you recently launched a new project or a new program called the power of zero for what is the power of zero.
Increasingly, we've been concerned about online bullying and that is a problem across the whole world and it's a systemic problem and there's no way we as one NGO could solve it by ourselves. So the power of zero is a collaborative global campaign. And we brought with us into their campaigns and organizations have a lot of power in this space and also a genuine concern to make the internet a better place for children. And, uh, the members of the collaborative includes at UNESCO a UNICEF join recently, uh, Microsoft, Facebook, Hasbro all have seats at the table. Uh, one of the big U S telecom companies called ATNT have joined us along with NGOs from around the world. And what we're looking at is, is how do we prevent online bullying and also some of the other adverse behaviors you see online before it begins. Okay. So how'd you do that?
We believe in the power of education. And we know that if we can reach young children, that's the time when their brains are most malleable, when they're most susceptible to learning ways of treating others well, and also ways of how they stick up for themselves and develop resilience and learn how to handle adversity. And through that belief, we've been looking at how do we create a set of learning materials and videos and online games that are really going to speak to the generation of young children. Because the truth is, Neal children are getting online, younger and younger by the time of the eight, these average two and a half hours a day online. And because we think of them as digital natives, they seem to slip through no one's States, but spending the time to teach them the skills and the values that they, they're going to need in this online, offline world.
Okay. So, uh, this is an educational program instilling into children of, uh, eight or thereabouts, some values and knowledge about how to behave online and, and treating others with respect. I think that's,
is that a fair summary? We are focused on children four through eight. And what we realize is this school is a, for a long time been teaching things for social emotional learning, which is more popularly called life skills for young children. The sort of skills in social emotional learning, like how you manage your feelings, how you recognize feelings, how you read social cues, how you talk to other people, a role actually the most important lessons for the preschool and kindergarten years. But those needs to be updated for the online world in which children are growing up. And that has not happened. So you have a structure I think with the [inaudible] program, uh, which has 12 powers for good that you call them folk powers for good, which are ways that children can be safe and successful online. Yes. What w what are the powers for good and how do they specifically address cyber bullying?
The, the powers for the 12 powers that we have, um, contained some very, um, traditional social emotional skills like emotional regulation. And, and let's just pause there. Amend, because many psychologists say that's the critical skill of, of childhood. Young parents spend a lot of their trial time trying to Sue their children, trying to get them to understand their feelings, get into to manage their, their feelings. If children can do that, they're successful at school. If they can't do that, you see all the sorts of problems that children have with aggression on the one hand and becoming victimized on on the other. So probably that's the most foundational of the 12 powers for good, but we're also teaching children resilience, how you manage challenging situations and we want them to also really make the most of this amazing opportunity, which the internet is. We can find information on anything we, we, we want to, we can connect with anyone we want to around the world.
How do you use that? Well, how'd you use that for your creativity? I'd use that for your self-expression. How do you use that also to connect to other people. But how'd you do that wisely? Because there are people online that are going to take advantage of of children, so they need to learn that. At the same time, they need to learn critical thinking, who you can trust online, what you can believe on online. So those 12 powers were goods, uh, are set out on our website at [inaudible] dot org. But we say that every child needs to have mastered these skills by the time they're eight. Okay. Now there's some interesting background to this. Uh, in 1968, faith Rogers, uh, created a TV show in the States called Mr. Rogers neighborhood, uh, which was
extremely popular. It ran for 33 years and it was part of his legacy is the Fred Rogers center and the 12 pounds for good project is based, at least in part, I think on research led by them into technology and interactive media for young children. So what was that research? Can you go into a little bit of that and tell us some background about how you formulated these 12 powers?
It w we've, we've spoken to a lot of the leading researchers in young children technology around the world. And I want to highlight professor Jackie Marcia at the university of Sheffield's who's done really granular research into what young children are actually doing with, uh, the tablets and what are the apps that they're getting into. And also Stephane children in the European union has been leading a lot of research around across Europe, around, uh, what children understand by the internet and how do they actually connect with others. And has done these studies about young children being on Facebook at a really young age through their parents' accounts and Skyping with the grandparents around around the world. And what we've learned from those, um, experts is that children are getting online, very young but don't have much of a concept of what the internet is that matters because they don't often realize that there are real people on the other end of, of their connections.
And also they make the striking point that monkey does what monkey sees. And the easiest thing for children is to imitate what's going on around them. And the culture of the internet, even from a young age is quite aggressive and quite negative, especially if you look at gaming sites. A lot of them are getting into not just YouTube kids, but YouTube and the comments on so many of the videos are so dismissive that that's the pretty toxic culture that they're growing up in. And it's their thinking that helps shape us and help shape the, the 12 powers that we see as so critical.
Okay. Now, unfortunately, we don't have time to go through all 12. Uh, but I would like to focus on for the caught my eye if we may, and we've touched on one, which is the power of emotional regulation. Perhaps we could drill into that a little bit more. Uh, it almost sounds like British stiff upper lip, but it's not, is it, it's more than that.
Yeah. The, the, the most important task of, of young parents is, is to teach emotional regulation. And we do it unconsciously when we pick up a baby that's crying and we walk around with it and be patted on the back when we sued it. And, uh, what we, we find is, uh, and there's tons of research on, on, on this is that actually emotion, dismissive parents, which is the English way of, of, of pretending. By and large, the feelings don't exist and we don't talk about them actually have more emotionally distraught children as opposed to the parents. It takes some time to do a what's called achieving to their, their children, which means watching their children's faces and behavior and getting a sense of, okay, the sad right or the angry right now what they went through is really embarrassing for them. And, and parents who can start to name those emotions for their children, uh, find that that children also by simply by the fact that this feelings been named start to settle down, become more emotionally regulated. And over time, children learn to do that for them with themselves. If they don't, they're hijacked by their emotions. And you'd see the sorts of acting out behaviors or acting in behaviors that are quite common in preschool. Okay. The power of creative thinking. I love that. What do you mean by the power of creative thinking? How does that help address cyber bullying in particular?
Creativity is, is is really a big part of childhood cause it's a big part of of play and one strand of, of creativity is the ability to see things differently, to step into the shoes of other people, to take other other perspectives and that's what we're, we're teaching by by creativity. So taken as a whole, all of these powers reinforce and feed into each other. You can see our creativity feeds into something called empathy and the more that children are able to have empathy to realize the reality of a of another kid and that they too have feelings and wants to be loved and accepted just like like them, the more they get that it's a more, that's a break upon maybe some of that the mean behaviors and that extends into the lifetime. The more empathy someone has, the less likely they are to tear into another person. Okay. The power of critical understanding.
I often talk about little red riding hood in this context because the truth is we've been trying to teach children since the beginning of time about who you can trust and what can you believe. And the whole point of little red riding and, and this is true of so many of the fairy tales, is that when you go through the woods, the nice person that you meet there might actually be a Wolf. And there may be saying wonderful things to you, but you can't actually believe them. And you've got to try to trust your gut instincts. And what happens when a red riding hood goes into the wood cutters cottage where her grandmother is, is she has this gut feeling that something's really wrong. That's what the Grimm brothers, uh, say. But the Wolf talks, uh, out of trusting that, that gut instincts. So what were we, uh, trying to instill in children is that trust in that gut instinct to say they are approached by other people online or they're reading something online, trust their gut instincts, question it a little bit about is that actually true? Can you really trust this person? And it's become much more critical in a world where online world where you can connect with almost anyone around the world. So we have to be teaching critical thinking to children at a young age.
Okay. Is there a connection there between that critical understanding of a connection with someone and grooming, which is a different topic but it is related I think.
Yes. Yes. So the, the, what we're trying to do with the para zero is get children a foundational set of, of life skills that is going to stand them in good stead as they make this online offline journey. And on that online offline journey there are going to counter all sorts of great people but also all sorts of questionable people as well. And what we're aiming to do is to get them a broad set of skills that can be used to protect them from online abuse, from hate speech, from the type of people that are trying to groom them from sexual exploitation online along with training them how to use the internet Wells so that they get the most from it. So as you can see that this is a really a broad set of skills set scan to stand them in good stead for pretty much everything that happens.
Okay. And the final, uh, power, uh, the, I like to talk to you about as it very relevant because without them none of this would be happening. And that is the power of digital devices. How does that play? What, what are you trying to teach them about the device?
I got a, a somewhat of a digital divide happening right now and sometimes it's simply because of lack of, of access, but also it's, it's because of lack of skill that they haven't really learned how to use a device at home. They're, they're uncertain how to do it. So if we're going to teach children a broad set of skills for an online world, we have to actually take the time to show them just the basics of how you use a smart phone, how you use a tablet, how you search for something on online along with a little bit more detailed stuff there about how you protect your personal information or you don't share that stuff. So the power of a digital is really what some of those might be called digital citizenship skills and that needs to be taught alongside all these other skills we're talking about.
Okay, thank you. What's next then? Where are you going to take the power of zero
next we're inciting phase. Um, we are bringing together the, uh, philanthropic partners that are really going to launch this globally. We're creating a set of 24 lessons for four to five year olds, 24 lessons to six to eight to eight year olds. Uh, we've got some really, uh, fabulous, uh, video production company that we were gonna, uh, create a set of animated characters to bring all of this to life. And once that's up and running, we are going to be taking this to countries around the world.
Fantastic. Now, I could talk to you about this for much, much longer than one time we have, unfortunately, but we're going to have to wrap it up. So thank you, Nick. Thanks for coming in and the very best of luck with everything you're doing. Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you so much. If anyone is interested, go to para zero zero written like a the numeric form para zero.org