Ch. Master Greg Moody, Ph.D.

The Podcast:

Dr. Greg Moody (00:00):
All right. Thanks, everybody. Welcome to our second part of our bullying prevention training. This is our success training with me, Dr. Greg Moody, and Sr. Master Laura Sanborn. We’re going to be doing some training today on our second part of our bullying prevention training, myths, truths, and what to do. So there’s a lot of myths about bullying prevention, and we’re going to hit that a lot today. Mainly, our second part is going to be about what bullying is, what it isn’t, and some things that people have misconceptions about. One of the things that we do when we do bullying prevention training is we give teachers and educators tests on what they think bullying prevention is.
Dr. Greg Moody (00:43):
I got to admit for the most part, even really experienced educators really experienced, we do this with martial artists, that we do a lot of work with people that work with kids a lot, mostly they have the wrong ideas about what bullying is and isn’t and who bullies more, who bullies less, what bullying’s about. So, Master Sanborn, definitely pop in here and put your experience in here with what we’ve done with the different groups as well. But what we’ll talk about first is boys versus girls and the difference in data. Boys versus girls. When we talk about boys versus girls, what the assumption is and we hear a lot of, is that, well, girls bully a ton. Girls bully just as much as boys and that we assume that’s the truth. And what we find is, and that’s one of the questions we ask people, educators, parents even, and what we find is boys do bully about twice as much as girls based on our data.
Dr. Greg Moody (01:49):
Now, girls and boys get bullied about the same amount of time, but there’re similarities and differences in the way that boys and girls bully. The similarities, they are similar… Well, before I address the similarities and differences about boys and girls, let me address the usual a little bit of a freak out that I hear when I say that girls bully less than boys. They say, “No, no, that happens a lot. Girls are bullying and you just don’t have the right perspective. In our school or in our environment, we see girls bullying just as much.” The reason that that seems to be a misperception is, well, for one, you see it a lot in movies, in media. You see girls, the movie Mean Girls, or you see a lot of portrayals of girls bullying other girls.
Dr. Greg Moody (02:48):
The other reason that you see this idea of girls bullying girls as a common thing, what you have to do is go back to the definition of bullying. Bullying is, remember, it has to be intended to hurt. It has to be, which of course girls can do just as much as boys, it has to be repeated over time and there has to be an imbalance of power. So what happens in a lot of girls bullying, as we’ll see in the similarities and differences are, that girls do a lot of relational bullying, and they do a lot of bullying by rumors and the indirect bullying that we talked about last time. That can be noticed a lot more. Boys bullying, as we’ll see in the similarities and differences, can be physical and it can be conflict and can be teasing and taunting.
Dr. Greg Moody (03:42):
Now, that can get wrapped into conflict. So we assume that when bullying’s happening with boys, it’s just boys being boys. So a lot of the bullying that we identify with girls, we notice more. Bullying that happens with boys, we don’t notice. One thing we see with violence in terms of, and this is a separate conversation about suicide, which is not very pleasant for people, especially for children suicide, but boys suicide rates are about approximately four times higher than girls for suicide that is completed. Now, that’s not all bullying, of course. There’s a lot of other reasons and a lot of other mental health issues that go along with that. But we do know that as far as measurement of bullying itself, so these are separate issues, but that is just an example of what can happen if bullying goes on too long. And we’ll talk about that a little bit more about why bullying could lead to some of these other issues.
Dr. Greg Moody (04:49):
So let’s talk about boys versus girls and the similarities and difference of the type of bullying that they might do. So, similarities, first of all. Similarities. They frequently engage in verbal. So verbal bullying’s very common, and relational bullying. These two things, you remember from our prior module, where we talked about verbal bullying and relational bullying, teasing, calling names, keeping people out or excluding people from groups. That’s a really common thing that boys and girls both do. Now, differences between boys and girls. Again, most studies indicate that boys bully more than girls. Boys are more likely to be physically bullied. So for boys, we tend to see a lot more physical bullying.
Dr. Greg Moody (05:57):
Boys are bullying with hitting, pushing, shoving. A lot of other physical bullying can happen other than just what you think of as traditional fighting. It could be kids in the bathroom that might be pushing, shoving, keeping them out of the bathroom, holding the door closed so that they can’t get out of the bathroom. Lots of stories about kids getting [inaudible 00:06:24]. We all might know what that is. But in some cases, we’ve heard of reports of dirty [inaudible 00:06:31]. If you don’t know what that is, you might think about what happens in the toilet. And then the kids get their head put in the toilet when the toilet’s full of poop. That’d be a pretty horrible experience, right? So, physical bullying. Boys do that a lot more than girls.
Dr. Greg Moody (06:54):
Girls tend to do a lot more bullying through social exclusion, rumor spreading. They tend to do more cyber bullying and they tend to do more sexual comments. So they might say things about how somebody looks. They may say somebody did something with somebody else, they had a relationship or did something with another person. Boys aren’t interested in that type of bullying. Boys are bullied primarily by other boys, as you might expect. Girls are going to be bullied by both boys and girls. That’s how the numbers work out the way they are. So boys are going to be bullied primarily by boys. They get bullied a lot more. Girls are going to be bullied by both. That’s how girls get bullied just as much as boys, but boys do about twice as much bullying as girls. Okay. So, boys versus girls. Master Sanborn, did you have anything to add [inaudible 00:08:02]?
Sr. Master Laura Sanborn (08:01):
Yes, sir. Well, actually a question. So, sexual harassment on girls from boys, is that under bullying or is that a whole separate issue?
Dr. Greg Moody (08:12):
That’s a really good question. One thing that we didn’t cover, which might be good to cover at the beginning, is there’s bullying and there’s conflict. We talked about bullying versus conflict. But what didn’t talk about was bullying versus violence. When something’s bullying, it’s intended to hurt, there’s an imbalance of power and it’s repeated over time usually, although could be more severe. If something crosses line to violence, which sexual harassment would be or physical danger of, you’re in danger of hurting yourself or other people or serious injury or death. That’s violence. That puts things into a different category. And then we have to escalate the response into police intervention, different types of interventions need to happen.
Dr. Greg Moody (09:08):
So while it may meet some of the same characteristics that we have in these types of situations, so like sexual harassment or sexual violence, then the response needs to be escalated quickly and differently into a different category. So in this case, if you’re an educator, then that needs to go directly to the administration and then they need to follow their policies for how this needs to get reported to law enforcement and protective services or whatever their policies are for that. I’m not avoiding that question, it just goes into a different category from bullying. When it’s bullying, the conflict or the resolution, that’s not conflict resolution, but the resolution to that is going to be different. So there’s different categories of the way we would handle the situation. So we wouldn’t call that bullying. We would call that violence to answer your question.
Sr. Master Laura Sanborn (10:09):
Even if it’s mostly verbal or…
Dr. Greg Moody (10:14):
Let’s define sexual harassment. Sexual would be harassment, but we would call that bullying. That would be in the category of bullying. And then our interventions would be different, but yeah, that would be bullying because it’d be intended to hurt. It’d be [inaudible 00:10:28] power to be repeated over time. So yeah, girls tend to do that more than boys, although boys can do that as well.
Sr. Master Laura Sanborn (10:35):
Okay. Thank you.
Dr. Greg Moody (10:37):
Yeah. So tho those are, if somebody spreads sexual rumors, says sexual things or says things about their body or about who they are, or says who they’re doing things with or who they’re doing relational things with, that all would fall into the category of bullying. When it escalates into sexual harassment, the physical touch or touch of a sexual nature, then that moves into the category of violence and then the other action needs to happen.
Sr. Master Laura Sanborn (11:10):
Okay. Thank you, sir.
Dr. Greg Moody (11:11):
Yeah. It’s important to have that distinction for everybody that’s listening to this or reading about it when we read our transcripts for this. We don’t want to treat bullying like conflict, as we mentioned before, and we don’t want to treat violence like bullying. When it moves into serious injury, death, that’s violence, but also in categories where somebody’s escalated any action, regardless of whether, even whether it was intention to hurt or some of the other categories that we have in bullying into violence, then the action that needs to be taken is different and it might cross the line into assault. And so that we need to move our response into an assault category.

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