Ch. Master Greg Moody, Ph.D.

The Podcast:

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

So what would happen then if you had a zero tolerance policy? Well, what ends up happening is the threshold of teachers who will actually execute the zero tolerance policy is going to raise up and up and up so that the only bullying that really does get reported when you have a zero tolerance policy would be very high. So the only bullying that would get reported would be very severe bullying. The example I like to use is this. If the speed limit is 65 miles an hour and we had a zero tolerance policy for speeding, and every time somebody was at 66 miles per hour, the police officer arrested them and put them in jail, how many police officers would actually arrest somebody at 66 miles an hour? Probably not too many police officers would pull a lot of people over.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

Now would that control the speed limit pretty well? Probably not many people would speed, but the police officers would have a really tough decision to make. Would I arrest people right at 66 miles an hour? They have zero tolerance so it’s 66 miles an hour. They’ve got to arrest people. What would end up happening is the threshold for arresting people would go up and up and up and up. Pretty soon it would be 75 miles an hour, 80 miles an hour. Then at 80, the police officer has to decide, I guess I got to arrest you and now arrest you at 85 miles an hour, and if the penalty is you go to jail for two weeks and it’s a felony, well, as soon as the penalty starts going up and up and up, I’m not going to arrest you if it’s a felony and you’re going to go to jail for two years, when would I arrest somebody for that?

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

It might be a hundred miles an hour. I’m not going to arrest somebody at 66 miles an hour and they go to jail for two weeks because maybe they weren’t paying attention to their speed. So what we need to do is have a policy that you can implement negative consequences at small instances of bullying. Just like if you speed a little bit in most states, if you’re zero to 10 miles over, you get a warning or you get a small penalty. It doesn’t take a lot of points off your license. So zero tolerance policies for things that are common can’t work. Zero tolerance policies don’t make sense for these things.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

Now why do people have or why do schools have zero tolerance policies? Because it sounds really good. It sounds wonderful. We have zero tolerance policies for bullying. That makes you sound really tough and like you’re taking a really strong stance on bullying. It actually doesn’t make any sense if you think about it.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

All right. The other one is mediation. This is one of my favorite topics is conflict resolution, but mediation or conflict resolution for bullying issues. Mediation and conflict resolution doesn’t work for bullying. Conflict is different from bullying. Remember, bullying is an imbalance of power, intention to hurt, and it’s repeated over time. Well, if you and I are having an argument, if we just don’t like each other, or we are arguing over, if we’re kids, maybe we’re arguing over who’s using the swing set on the playground. We’re just arguing over it. Well, that’s not bullying. That would require mediation. Who’s going to get the swing set first? Who’s going to get it second? Who’s going to get the resource at the school first? Who was right or wrong about something? That’s conflict. That needs mediation.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

Bullying means I have a different power structure than you. I’m bigger. I’m stronger. In some ways, this is like abuse. So in that regard, there’s a different position of power. So if a teacher tries to help or a parent if we have parents listening, a parent tries to help and there’s two kids and we try to get them to resolve conflict just by talking it out, well, that’s never going to work in a bullying case because one kid already has a lot more power. He can just tell the other kid what to do and they pretty much have to comply. They might be bigger, stronger. They have a difference in power.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

I’ll give you an example of that in an adult situation. Let’s say you have a boss and an employee. Well, if they have conflict, who’s going to win that conflict? Most of the time it’s going to be the boss, because they can just tell the employee in the end, this is what is going to happen. That’s not really a conflict or mediation situation if the boss is bullying the employee, if the boss doesn’t care about the employee and there is an intention to hurt. Remember those three things about bullying. Intention to hurt repeated over time and there’s an imbalance of power means that conflict resolution skills will not work.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

All right. The other thing that is important is selecting inappropriate supplemental materials. So what do we mean by this? So inappropriate supplemental materials might be similar to what I said earlier. So let’s say we’re going to do a bullying prevention workshop with the kids and most of it is about everybody being nice to each other. Now that’s positive. That’s a really good thing to do in a bullying prevention workshop, why we would be nice to each other. However, it doesn’t really address what happens if somebody does bully. They should know what happens. If somebody’s bullying another kid, what are the consequences? We should know what the consequences are and not ignore those things.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

And sometimes there aren’t any consequences. As we talked in one of our prior workshops or podcasts, if I bully somebody else and there’s no consequence for that, then it may not be a bad idea. It might help my social status. It might help my self-esteem to continue to do it. So inappropriate supplemental materials might not include that kind of full picture of the story. Okay? Now I don’t want to mention very specific programs. Let me see if I can share this photo of somebody who did a… I don’t mind being a little bit critical of this one gentleman who was doing a bullying prevention program.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

And let me see if I can share the portion of the screen along with my notes. Apologize for the little bit of mix up. I’ll share the picture with you first. So here’s somebody who is a good example of a program that I don’t recommend. And this would be somebody who might be invited to your kid’s school to teach kids to stop bullying. This is a guy who is a former tattoo artist, as you might guess since he’s got a lot of tattoos, and he legally changed his name to The Scary Guy. That’s what his name is right now. His name in on his driver’s license says The Scary Guy. And he was using his persona and his kind of frightening appearance to, well, I would say scare kids into stopping bullying, but I think it’s more like he’s purporting that he’s teaching kids into stopping bullying.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

So he used to be known as Earl Kauffman. You can look him up. And he was reported by CNN and he was a self-professed bullying prevention guru. He was supposedly eliminating hate and violence and prejudice. But he charged about $7,000 and the schools would pay for him to come to their school. And many schools did have him come. He was making kind of a living doing this and he would do all kinds of things. He’d inappropriately push people and inappropriately grab people and all kinds of different things I’m amazed that the schools allowed, and then tell kids, “Hey, what would you do about this? What would you do about this?” And you would use a lot of negative examples. So this would be an example of a program that we don’t recommend, that would be in all ways ridiculous. And as I tell you this, you’d I’m sure agree with me. But this is an example of programs that schools use.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

Another example of programs that schools use are very frequently programs that are feel good programs. And what I mean by feel good programs are, and again, I don’t mind making The Scary Guy feel bad if he’s listening to our podcast, but other programs that are again well meaning, but they don’t have any evidence basis for their success. Because they don’t have any success where they’ll come in and have kids write essays about why they should be kind or nice to each other, but they don’t have any real function because they don’t have any ongoing characteristics of a successful program. So what would those kind of programs be? What would programs that are going to be successful have? So let’s talk about that.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

Let me list a couple of them that we have seen that do have some evidence base. So education programs that work, and there are more than a list here. And if your school doesn’t have one of these on their list, you don’t have to quit that school and go somewhere else. There’s some research you could do, and I’ll give you some characteristics that you can think about that or that you can look into to see if their programs support this. Also, I’ll give you some other suggestions that we’re going to follow up with our other podcasts about what you can do, because even if your school has some of these programs, they may or may not adhere to them completely. And even if they did adhere to them completely, you should still be doing other stuff with your kids to prevent bullying because even the best school based bullying prevention program can never eliminate bullying completely.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

So some of the ones that we really like or that we’ve seen that in all of our research that work really well. Let’s see here. Bullying Prevention in Positive Behavior Support, that was started by my alma mater, Arizona State University, in a group of different programs that worked with them. This reported by teachers as a lower incidence of bullying prevention. Internationally, UNICEF has a good program, so the one that you’ve heard about in lots of other ways. And this reported abusive behavior down by half. So UNICEF has a really good program. There’s one also the government has, No Bullying Allowed. That’s another good one. And this mainly lowered students’ fear of bullying. Not so much bullying reduction, but lowered their fear of bullying. And my favorite one that I’ve done certifications in is the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program. And it doesn’t stand for anything. It’s named after a guy named Dan Olweus, so O-L-W-E-U-S.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

And this has five components and these are five really important components that should go into go into any program. There’s one component of how the school operates, the classroom, the individual student, the parents, and also the community. And this one reported a 62% reduction in kids getting bullied. So it’s the best program. It also reported by the way, a 33% reduction in kids bullying others. And this is after about an eight month test. Now this has been done in many, many, many, many schools across the world. It started in Norway but it’s widespread across the United States. Even though it’s in many, many schools, it’s not in every school, many, many schools use different programs. So there’s a lot of different bullying prevention programs out there. These are four of our favorite ones that we’ve looked at. The Olweus Bullying Prevention Program is probably given the best results and has the best evidence basis for working in schools.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

Now it does require again, school, classroom, student, parents, and the community some work in. So what does that mean? What that means is that the school develops a system for implementing negative consequences for bullying. And let’s talk about that a little bit more. It’s not just the negative consequences for the kid who’s bullying, but also let’s say they’re bullying somebody. We’ll call that the one who’s being bullied. Put that in our chart here. But also all the other kids in what the Olweus program calls a bully circle. So there’s other kids that are supporting the bully. There might be kids that are supporting the bully and start engaging in the bullying when bullying happens. There’s kids that are egging the bullying on, all the other kids involved in bullying, but are not actively engaging in bullying.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

There’s kids that are not involved and don’t really want to get involved. There’s kids that don’t want the bullying to happen but don’t do anything about it. And then there’s kids that do help with bullying. They do try to help support the kid who’s being bullied. So this whole kind of ecosystem of kids that are involved, the Olweus Bullying Prevention looks at all of these. It addresses all these kids. And what they try to do is have the school identify these kids and who’s involved in this whole process when bullying’s going on so that the teachers can do a better job of seeing what’s happening, and then move all the kids one step closer to being a helper kid. And these helpers, the ones who are supportive of the kids that are being bullied, we want to try to develop more of those in a school.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

So the school system that’s being developed would have negative consequences for these kids that are bullying or that are supporting the bullying, and then encourage more of this helping behavior, and also supporting the kids that are being bullied so that when this happens, they recover quicker. They get some support and they’re not abused themselves. What can happen sometimes in a bullying situation is the kid who gets bullied can be told, “Well, if you weren’t wearing those clothes, you wouldn’t get bullied.” So that’s really telling the kid that’s getting bullied that it’s their fault. Or, “If you didn’t talk so funny, you wouldn’t get bullied.” Or, “If you didn’t look so funny, you wouldn’t get bullied.” Or, “If you didn’t act that way, you wouldn’t get bullied.” Well, that’s telling the kid that it’s their fault.

Dr. Greg Moody, LAC, Ch. Master Instructor:

Very frequently bullying ends up having a blame assigned to the kid who’s getting bullied. This is extremely common. And when one of these programs that’s working well is implemented, the teacher can identify that a bullying situation’s happening, that this imbalance of power is going on, and then they know that it’s not a time to be correcting the kid who’s getting bullied, that they need some support and they need to address it in a different way. In the classroom, then they have weekly meetings so that they address some of these social situations better. What the great effect of this is is that the overall school discipline and the overall systematic culture in the school environment changes and improves and that helps the students too.

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Dr. Moody is also a licensed psychotherapist and maintains a practice at Integrated Mental Health Associates (IntegratedMHA.com) where he specializes in couples therapy and mens issues.