New "Youth Protection" Requirements for T-2C-1C

[OldGreyEagle 5]

I guess Arnold's charactor in the first Terminator movie could be considered a cyber bully as well.

 

I see the argument now, that T-F should concentrate on skills development. Knots, campsite selection, cooking, all scouty things. I guess the adding of how to handle Bullies "could" be seen as a skill as neccessary today as was making fire in years past. Then again, in years past bullies were certainly present so the emphasis on bullies today is new.

 

So, we have a clash, a Culture War one could say about what the requirements for T-F should be. Will they continue to be outdoor skill oriented or could the requirments also cover the necessary skills required of todays youth.

[FireKat 10]

I agree with Ed. BSA should cover dealing with bullying but to put it as an achievement makes the kid feel like if he cannot stop bullying he is a failure. That is why I am angry with BSA for adding it. The kids are confused and think BSA has the answer to how to stop it. Believe me, telling is not the answer, sometimes it make things worse.

[scoutmomma 10]

Ironically, right before these new requirements came out, we had a scout in our troop quit due to what his mother characterized as bullying -- and none of the adults recognized it for being what it was, as we were all laboring under our own childhood memories of what constituted bullying. Which was not what this boy was dealing with. Our adult leadership had several lengthy meetings to discuss HOW to deal with the situation...which ultimately we were unfortunately not able to resolve and the scout and his mother (a member of our troop committee) resigned.

 

So when the new rank requirements came out, I was not angry -- I was RELIEVED to have a platform on which we could begin addressing these issues in our troop. We have resolved that we do NOT ever want a scout quitting because of bullying issues.

 

Then fancy our surprise to find ourselves dealing with a similar situation within a couple of weeks of the new requirements coming out...and THIS time, felt prepared...and were able to resolve it in a much more satisfactory manner.

 

So count me among those who was happy to have these new requirements added. The scouts aren't confused about them either, because they've been hearing about these issues at school. It's definitely not over their heads...

[Bob White 20]

"BSA should cover dealing with bullying but to put it as an achievement makes the kid feel like if he cannot stop bullying he is a failure."

 

I do not understand that logic. The advancement requirement is to be able to share ways to deal with bullies not to have to go out and do it in order to be successful. A scout has to be able to describe the signs of a heart attack, if someone near him has a heart attack and dies the scout has not "failed" the requirement or himself.

 

Why be angry over a requirement? That seems very 'over the top'. I can understand simply not caring for it or not understanding its use as a requirement...but angry?

 

Bullies do not just exist outside of scouting. A new scout coming in to a scout unit where instead of being the oldes by 3 years in a pack now finds he is younger than scouts by 6 or 7 years may likely need some information and skills to help him deal with the unwanted behavior from older scouts. The requirememts of Tenderfoot to First Class teach basic life skills. Dealing with bullies certainly is a basic skill that can be useful to kids of this age group.

 

Now that we have read that there are adults willing to turn away and let older scouts drag a scout off for a forced bathing, I find the inclusion of these requirements very timely. Such adults are bullies themselves, they are just willing to let kids to the actual physical contact for them, but in knowingly allowing the conduct to take place they are as much the bully as the scouts committing the action.

 

 

 

 

 

[Eagledad 2779]

>>Why be angry over a requirement? That seems very 'over the top'. I can understand simply not caring for it or not understanding its use as a requirement...but angry?

[Bob White 20]

Evidently FireKat is angry. She wrote "That is why I am angry with BSA for adding it."

[FireKat 10]

It is just another way to say they are doing something while actually not doing anything, just as the schools do. They say see, we have this policy(training) so we are doing something.  Meanwhile the bulling continues and kids get hurt, mentally and physically.

Dont say you are doing something by making kids aware, really do something to stop it.

"Our adult leadership had several lengthy meetings to discuss HOW to deal with the situation...which ultimately we were unfortunately not able to resolve and the scout and his mother (a member of our troop committee) resigned"     This is what usually happens, the kid being picked on has to stop it by leaving.  Tell me, scoutmomma, what happen after the boy left? Were the instigators ever delt with or was the whole thing dropped?  Why did the same thing happen again? Same bullies?

 

[John-in-KC 311]

Ed,

 

As far as the SHOULD of the new requirements goes, I think they could have done just as well by incorporating them into Family Life and FORCING it to earn Star.

 

OK. I'm not the National Advancement Committee.

 

That's my point, I guess. I'm not the NAC. I can burn emotional energy over their stupidity in accepting the task from the National Youth Protection folks, or I can save my energy for more important things. At the moment, my emotional energy is best spent elsewhere.

 

That make sense?

[scoutmomma 10]

I wrote:

Our adult leadership had several lengthy meetings to discuss HOW to deal with the situation...which ultimately we were unfortunately not able to resolve and the scout and his mother (a member of our troop committee) resigned

 

And FireKat responded:

This is what usually happens, the kid being picked on has to stop it by leaving. Tell me, scoutmomma, what happen after the boy left? Were the instigators ever delt with or was the whole thing dropped? Why did the same thing happen again? Same bullies?

 

 

The main complaint of the 9th grade scout who left was that he was feeling excluded by four other boys (three other 9th graders and an 11th grader). They weren't actively excluding him so much as they were just being oblivious and not noticing his distress (he had a tendency to just get quieter and quieter), and by the time his mother brought it to our attention, it was too late as far as she was concerned. One of our ASMs, the father of one of the boys involved, sat all of them down to ask specifically about their behavior, at which point, the lightbulbs all went on over their heads, and they became very remorseful and wrote a group letter of apology to the other scout, which they hand-delivered it to his home. But it was too late by then; his mother had already informed us that they both were quitting the troop.

 

The second situation involved different scouts, three 8th grade boys who had always been close until this happened, and a fourth 8th grader who has always been in the periphery of the other three. This situation involved name-calling and intentional ostracizing, and one of the original three was pushed to the periphery in favor of the fourth. This was going on at school as well as in the troop. The school guidance counselor has met with those boys, and in the meantime within the troop, our only non-parent ASM sat them down and talked to them about how many points of the Scout Law they were violating by treating each other that way, and that he expected better of them in the future. For a couple of weeks, they just avoided one another; now the iciness seems to be thawing, and they are starting to talk to one another -- civilly -- again.

 

Neither situation was common knowledge throughout the troop. And we have continued to have adult meetings to discuss the fact that we need to pay closer attention to how our scouts are treating each other. Our biggest concern was how to bring our concerns to the troop without naming names and pointing fingers, and as I said the new rank requirements gave us a platform on which to bring the subject to the attention of the troop without singling anyone out.

 

[evmori 11]

I would not consider the 1st Scout in scoutmomma's example a boy who was bullied. The 2nd Scout in her example, probably.

 

Bullying is hard to define. There is the obvious (hitting, name calling) and there is the not so obvious. The not so obvious is the type that is hard to define & I would bet a lot of the time is mis-defined.

 

I like John's idea. Put this in the Family Life MB. It is an Eagle required badge so a lot of Scouts will complete it. This doesn't belong as a rank requirement.

 

Ed Mori

1 Peter 4:10

[Beavah 205]

Yah, I gotta agree with FireKat on this, eh?

 

I reckon all these anti-bullying programs are gonna end up like D.A.R.E. Once someone gets around to researching whether they're effective, after about 10 years of big expenditures and bullying "zero tolerance" and mandating participation of every student and whatnot, they'll discover that they aren't effective at all (and sometimes make things worse).

 

There's also been quite an inflation of the definition of "bullying" eh? Da research that got the whole fad goin' had a very tight definition of "bullying" that limited it to what we'd all agree was really bad stuff. But now it seems not paying attention to someone because you're hanging out with your own friends is "bullying" in scoutmomma's unit.

 

I expect this will, as with most poorly considered efforts, do more harm than good.

 

Me, I'd offer the following tried-and-true ways to prevent bullying:

 

1) Teach a kid real skills, so he is confident. Give him opportunities to use those real skills with friends so he is recognized as competent and confident, and has his own "gang." You know - Patrol Method.

 

2) Develop a unit culture where the Scout Law really matters to kids and adults, so a bully stands out like a sore thumb and himself gets ostrasized. Pay particular attention to things like troop elections, where social pressure is most obvious. The strong should get recognition by how they lead and protect those who are weaker. You know - Patrol Method.

 

3) Punch da bully. Hard. Repeatedly. Yeh don't have to win. Yeh just have to show that you aren't going to be an easy victim. Not patrol method, but works nonetheless.

 

Beavah

 

[scoutmomma 10]

But now it seems not paying attention to someone because you're hanging out with your own friends is "bullying" in scoutmomma's unit.

 

You're mistaken in this statement, Beavah. The scout who quit was being ignored by his friends. He was also being teased by the 16-year-old, and his 14-year-old friends did nothing to intervene, but chose instead to ignore him.

 

And the scout who was being taunted and ostracized was being taunted by his friends who couldn't recognize when teasing crossed the line. The ostracizing began when the put-upon scout started hitting.

 

Me, I'd offer the following tried-and-true ways to prevent bullying:

 

1) Teach a kid real skills, so he is confident. Give him opportunities to use those real skills with friends so he is recognized as competent and confident, and has his own "gang." You know - Patrol Method.

 

Both scouts I mentioned did have their own "gangs" -- the problems were occurring within a patrol. And the second scout was confident enough to have been recommended for and attended NYLT. He missed a troop camping trip because of it, and the trouble started when his friends refused to recognize the value of what he had done, instead continually telling him how the trip he'd missed was so much better than NYLT. And since he's the only member of the troop ever to attend NYLT, there was no one else in the troop to back him up on what a great experience he'd had.

 

2) Develop a unit culture where the Scout Law really matters to kids and adults, so a bully stands out like a sore thumb and himself gets ostrasized. Pay particular attention to things like troop elections, where social pressure is most obvious. The strong should get recognition by how they lead and protect those who are weaker. You know - Patrol Method.

 

This is where we are now concentrating our efforts, as well as discussing one word of the Scout Law at each troop meeting -- emphasizing that the points of the Scout Law have real, practical meaning, and that none of them stand alone, but are interrelated. We also have been talking about the issues at PLC meetings, as well as on an individual basis with scouts at Scoutmaster Conferences and Boards of Review. Ironically, both scouts who felt bullied were members of the PLC -- one being the troop scribe, and the other an assistant patrol leader (subsequently elected patrol leader). Keep in mind that we have a very young troop, with 85% of our scouts under the age of 15, including 8 out of 9 members of the PLC -- SPL and ASPLs included.

 

3) Punch da bully. Hard. Repeatedly. Yeh don't have to win. Yeh just have to show that you aren't going to be an easy victim. Not patrol method, but works nonetheless.

 

I can't believe you would seriously suggest this as a solution. Yeah, when we were kids, this is what our parents told us. This kind of behavior these days will get a kid suspended from school and is not tolerated in my son's troop. And it doesn't work, either: the second scout I mentioned responded to the taunting by punching, and it only got him ostracized at school and in his patrol.

 

It's a chicken-or-egg argument how any of this even got started in the troop. It's not even important who started what. The important thing, as I see it, is to recognize the signs and address them before they escalate. I'm sure we could have dealt with the situation with the first scout and avoided his resigning if we had recognized what was going on as being bullying behavior. But we were too stuck in our own childhood definitions of bullying, and passed things off as "boys will be boys" until it was far too late to do anything about it. And we lost a fine First Class Scout, who left the troop bitter and soured on Scouting, through no fault of his own. The failure was at the adult level, as far as we're concerned.

 

As I've said previously, to the extent that the new requirements have given us a platform on which to address these very real issues, I am relieved, not angry, that BSA has added these new rank requirements, particularly in an age where we continue to hear about cases of school violence that are escalations of perceived bullying.

 

If a kid feels like he is being bullied, I may or may not understand where he's coming from, but I can't discount his pain or distress simply because I don't agree that what he's dealing with is bullying. The bottom line is finding a way to help the scout deal with the situation, whether or not I agree that he is being bullied. These 13- and 14-year-old adolescents have enough problems dealing with their changing bodies, hormonal mood swings, and shifting social sands -- if one of them is distressed enough that the situation is brought to the attention of the adult leadership, we need to deal with it on a level beyond "everyone goes through this -- you'll get over it," which far too often seems to have been what these kids have been told.

[evmori 11]

Ignoring someone or not doing something because someone is being bullied by another is not bullying! This is the kind of stuff that happens when we go through these fads! Terminology gets skewed & the meaning is whatever someone wants to have it fit for them! Little Billy is being bullied by his friends! How? They are ignoring him! Give me a break!

[scoutmomma 10]

Ignoring someone or not doing something because someone is being bullied by another is not bullying! This is the kind of stuff that happens when we go through these fads! Terminology gets skewed & the meaning is whatever someone wants to have it fit for them! Little Billy is being bullied by his friends! How? They are ignoring him! Give me a break!

 

Ed, that's how we felt about it for awhile, too. And that attitude cost us a scout and a troop committee member -- shamefully we were too caught up in an attitude of "they're over-reacting" rather than "how can we help?" My point is that it does no good to tell a scout "you're not being bullied" and sending him away. His feelings were his feelings, and his pain was real. We failed him by not figuring out a way to help him resolve the situation other than by quitting Scouts. I can't say that I agree with how his mother dealt with the situation but I also can't discount her feelings and her son's feelings simply because we disagreed about what constitutes bullying. One of the scouts involved in that situation came up for his Life BOR last month, and we talked with him about the situation. He was still feeling bad about it, and told us that one of the reasons he still felt bad was that he never got the chance to make it right. He actually has been involved to an extent in defusing the second situation, and has been keeping an eye on the boys involved in that. So I think we have made progress in getting some of our scouts to be a little more sensitive to how they are treating each other.

[Bob White 20]

"Dont say you are doing something by making kids aware, really do something to stop it."

 

Expecting anyone to be able to remove bullying from society is not logical.

 

The BSA teaches scouts what to do in case of a house fire, but there is no way they can stop house fires from happening. Nor can the BSA guarantee that the methods taught will stop every fire.

 

We teach scouts how to recognize and react to contact with poison ivy, but there is no way the BSA can eradicate poison ivy or guarantee that the steps you take can cure the problem every time.

 

There are MANY skills taught by the BSA to help scouts recognize and react to problems they may face, None of which are going to stop the problem from every occurring nor are any guaranteed to work single every time.

 

But it is a step in the right direction, and since it is a part of of our society that can have a negative effect on the youth we serve then why not give them some basic tools for dealing with it?

 

Ed

When you are the responsible adult and you you not only know that the bullying is taking place but you condone it and pretend not to know about it, then you are indeed one of the bullies.

 

BW

 

 

 

(This message has been edited by Bob White)