In this safeguarding podcast we talk with former barrister and Chair of the non-profit section of Amnesty International UK, Nicholas Carlisle. As a Child & Family Psychotherapist, he used his own traumatic childhood to fight for human rights and to start an organisation so that children could go to school free from bullying. His “Solution Team” for schools achieves an astonishing 90% success rate.
There’s a lightly edited for legibility transcript below for those that can’t use podcasts, or for those that simply prefer to read.
Neil Fairbrother
Welcome to another edition of the SafeToNet 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 centre of this Venn diagram and it encompasses all stakeholders between a child using a smartphone and the content or person online that they are interacting with.
In this podcast we are returning to the topic of cyberbullying. In the UK we have the Anti-Bullying Alliance and last month we had Anti-Bullying Week. In the US 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.
Nicholas Carlisle, No Bully
Hi, great to be here.
Neil Fairbrother
Thank you Nicholas. Welcome to the podcast. Perhaps you could give us a resumé by way of an introduction so that we understand where you’re coming from.
Nicholas Carlisle
Yeah. So about 10 years ago, I decided that we needed to create a non-profit around bullying and we call it No Bully. And our focus was very much on getting schools the solutions they needed because schools were stuck around how do they actually turn around bullying and that non-profit, No Bully has grown. I started it in San Francisco, it’s grown across the United States, it’s now one of the biggest bullying prevention organizations that is out there.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay, thank you. Now your bio makes for quite harrowing reading because unlike most blokes, in fact, most people you are very open about what happened to you as a child. 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 did you cope as a child with all of that?
Nicholas Carlisle
Well, I don’t think my story is that unusual. One third of kids are bullied and it’s a phenomenon across the whole world. So the reason I tell my story is because 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 go in and read the riot act to the bullies if they did anything. And of course, Neil, that makes it worse. The [phrase] “stitches are for snitches” and there’s always retaliation as was there in my case. And it’s really that failure of the adults to solve bullying and to protect kids from bullying, that really motivated me to start a non-profit around it.
Neil Fairbrother
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 generation on generation. Why do you think it’s taken so long for bullying to become to the fore of people’s thinking about child care?
Nicholas Carlisle
I think there’s a lot of denial around bullying and that takes the form… What we find at No Bully is that at some schools simply say they don’t have a problem. And that’s crazy because you and I know that one third of kids are bullied, 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 the denial takes is schools are very happy to say, well it’s just part of growing up. It’s just boys being boys or girls being girls or in my case, and it was one of the old traditional English private schools, bullying was seen as character forming, that somehow if you figure your way out through it, you’re going to be a stronger person.
So all of those forms of denial are untrue, the evidence and the research shows that bullying is generally pretty damaging for children and 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?
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. Now you later became a barrister and interestingly Chair of Amnesty International, and after that you then set up No Bully and it maybe a somewhat of a cliché, but do you feel that career path was almost destined by the way you were treated as a child?
Nicholas Carlisle
I’ve often wondered why I’ve taken the route I have 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 and it became vitally important [to me] about 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 the early forms of me, of Nicholas, were this human rights lawyer that was really fighting for the underdog across the world.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. Now you gave a TEDx Talk a few years ago and in that TEDx Talk, which I found very interesting indeed and actually very moving, because you went into a lot of detail about your childhood. But you said there were three ways that it’s the adults that are creating the bullying. What did you mean by that?
Nicholas Carlisle
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 happening, and inadvertently there’s a lot that we’re doing to create it.
Number one we’ve talked about earlier is turning a blind eye to it, denial.
Then there’s the seeming inability of people to be able to talk about differences and diversity and that’s a tricky one because so much of bullying is about differences. So the kids who have a different colour skin or they had come from immigrant parents, less wealthy parents, the gender differences and bullying based on sexual orientation is common. 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 situations without shaming the kids being bullied.
And then because of our reliance on punishment, and we seem to think that suspending children or expelling them totally from the school is a solution when actually it doesn’t help them. The research shows that kids who get consequences and suspensions, actually their negative behaviours increase. And at the same time, that was leading to retaliation against the kids being bullied because no one likes get being got into trouble.
And all of those factors, which are our adult responsibility, were and have allowed bullying to continue in so many schools across the world.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. Now one of the things that’s changed since you were at school and since I was at school is the cyber element, the online element. So how does cyberbullying manifest itself in your experience and knowledge and has it made things worse?
Nicholas Carlisle
Well, what we find at No Bully, and we go into many, many schools around the world, is that the same students who are being bullied in the day are now the ones that have been the target of online bullying, which of course is a 24/7 phenomenon. So the advent of tablets and smartphones doesn’t seem to overrule increased the levels of bullying, but what it seems to have done is offered another platform, another place where it happens.
And there’s some particularly invidious features 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 of its own and people are following it and liking it and watching the videos that are posted online, 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 cyberbullying, or online bullying as we prefer to call it, has some really destructive features that are deeply concerning.
Neil Fairbrother
Yes and indeed sadly, there have been a number of suicides related to that. And in your TEDx Talk you said that there are three groups who in particular seem to get singled out for bullying and indeed cyberbullying more than most, and they are immigrants, those people with mental and physical differences, and gay or lesbian or non-stereotypical dress preferences or behaviour. Why do you think it is that those three groups in particular get singled out?
Nicholas Carlisle
I think bullying is a war to 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 to secure that group, they will target others to say, you’re not part of this, you don’t belong. You don’t belong here.
And it’s fairly predictable who they pick on and the people that they target tend to be the same groups that adults and society at large marginalizes. So we know that across the world there’s a lot of tension around immigration. So children of immigrant families absolutely are at risk because that same prejudice filters through to the kids in schools. And I also think there’s a sort of sense of “the other”, of the unknown and the scariness of “the other”.
So with kids who are less abled, there’s some sort of sense that we scapegoat them, that we can’t handle it, that it’s too easy to kind of put our anxieties on another kid. So we see that a lot with disabilities. And then I think there’s a lot of anxiety around in school around am I straight? Am I gay? Do I look tough enough? Do I look masculine enough? do I look feminine enough? And just children trying to establish their own gender identity and who they are and get respect for that. Again, they tend to pick on the children that don’t follow standard stereotypes.
Neil Fairbrother
Are bullies essentially cowards or scared?
Nicholas Carlisle
The research on bullies is fascinating because there’s often an assumption that they’re scared, or that they’ve been bullied and that they’re just taking it out on someone else. And the research on bullying students says no, they’re just like regular students that are trying out power plays, that are trying to see what they can get away with. They often feel very justified in what they’re doing. If you ask them, they’ll say, well these other kids deserve it. So they’ve talked themselves into it being okay, but generally speaking they’re not the scared kids or not the weak kids.
Neil Fairbrother
So they’re not reacting out of feeling threatened?
Nicholas Carlisle
Generally speaking, not. Some do.
Neil Fairbrother
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 cyberbullying as well. 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?
Nicholas Carlisle
Yes, we created Solution Team, gosh, about 10 years ago now because schools were saying, listen, you’ve got to help u, we’ve been 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 of what we called the pro-social students and take punishment out of the equation, which was 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 painful situation that one of your peers is going through. And then you tell them the name of their peer.
So it’s Nicholas or Richard and as you know, they’re not happy at this school. They dread coming back to school. Frankly, Sunday nights are the worst night of the week for this kid, Nicholas or Richard or whoever it is, because when they come back to school, they hear these names, they are called these names day in, day out. People crash into them when they go outside and then say, “Oh, sorry, it’s an accident.” People take their things, they scatter them 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 inside. 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 see here Neil, is that we’re walking this group of students into the shoes of the student who’s being bullied, and that experience, which is empathy in action, is extraordinary in melting a lot of the aggressive behaviours that we see.
Sometimes there’s a little bit of push back and they’ll say, well, he’s doing that, or he or 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 here. 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 week later and in 90% of cases the bullying is over and they’re doing very simple things like having lunch with that student, or they’re playing football with that student in the break, some very simple things like that, but they mean the world to that student who for months, maybe for years, has been left out and no one’s ever talked to them. And that’s Solution Team.
Neil Fairbrother
It sounds almost unbelievably effective. It seems like a very simple idea, extraordinarily effective, almost too good be true. I’m not dissing it by any stretch. It just seems incredible that it is so powerful. Do you not find that bullies, I have this mental images of some bullies in those sessions either being cynical in their responses to you just playing along, but they’re going to carry on anyway 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?
Nicholas Carlisle
It seemed incredible to us when we started on this. Like it was never going to work, like the bullies, everyone is understandably concerned that the bullets are just impervious. That 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 that room. The bully-followers are often 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 you’re all going to regather and talk about what progress they’ve made. So that group and those bystanders are the ones that really affect change. But you know, what’s really incredible is not always, but often, the bullying student will then start to make changes too, 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 other students to cut it out, to stop doing this. And inside of me, I’m thinking that’s never going to happen. Really? Come on! You’re just trying to soften me up here. And the amazing thing is they do go out there and they do tell the other students to cut it 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 I actually feel a lot better about myself now.
Neil Fairbrother
Well, that’s really interesting because you said that you see their power melting away and they’ve built up this image of being the top dog based on their bullying behaviour. But that image is then challenged. Their self-perception must be challenged. They must find that quite threatening.
Nicholas Carlisle
So, I want to be realistic about the bullying students. So you got 1% or 2% of students who are just so hardened in being aggressive that you’re never really going change their ways. So there are some students that you can’t change through the Solution Team process.
But our message to schools is you can’t get hung up 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 changing, oftentimes, their family dynamics.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay, good. Thank you. Some schools and some countries have rules or law that prohibit students from taking phones into schools. And we talked about cyberbullying and obviously cyberbullying 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 cyberbullying in schools?
Nicholas Carlisle
Schools do quite often want to take the phones away from the students during the daytime. And certainly what we see from that is the students are less on their phones at school, but they get back on them in the evenings and there’s no proof I think that that actually curtails online bullying.
Neil Fairbrother
It simply restarts…
Nicholas Carlisle
… later in the day.
Neil Fairbrother
Now you recently launched a new project or a new program called the Power of Zero. What is the Power of Zero?
Nicholas Carlisle
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.
The members of the collaborative includes at UNESCO, UNICEF joined recently, Microsoft, Facebook, Hasbro all have seats at the table. One of the big US telecom companies called ATT have joined us, along with NGOs from around the world. And what we’re looking at is, how do we prevent online bullying and also some of the other adverse behaviours you see online before it begins.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. So how’d you do that?
Nicholas Carlisle
We believe in the power of education. 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, Neil, children are getting online, younger and younger. By the time they are eight, they 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 spending the time to teach them the skills and the values that they’re going to need in this online/offline world.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. So this is an educational program instilling into children of eight or thereabouts, some values and knowledge about how to behave online and treating others with respect. Is that a fair summary?
Nicholas Carlisle
We are focused on children four through eight. And what we realize is schools for a long time have been teaching things called 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, are all 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.
Neil Fairbrother
So you have a structure I think with the Power of Zero program, which has 12 Powers for Good, which are ways that children can be safe and successful online. What are the Powers for Good and how do they specifically address cyberbullying?
Nicholas Carlisle
The Powers for Good, the 12 Powers that we have contain some very traditional social and emotional skills like emotional regulation and let’s just pause there because many psychologists say that’s the critical skill of childhood. Young parents spend a lot of their time trying to sooth their children, trying to get them to understand their feelings, get them to manage 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 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 want to, we can connect with anyone we want to around the world.
How do you use that well? How do you use that for your creativity? How do you use that for your self-expression. How do you use that also to connect to other people? But how do you do that wisely? Because there are people online that are going to take advantage 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 for Good are set out on our website at powerof0.org. But we say that every child needs to have mastered these skills by the time they’re eight.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. Now there’s some interesting background to this. In 1968, Fred Rogers created a TV show in the States called Mr. Roger’s Neighbourhood which was extremely popular. It ran for 33 years and part of his legacy is the Fred Rogers Centre and the 12 Powers 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?
Nicholas Carlisle
We’ve spoken to a lot of the leading researchers in young children and technology around the world. And I want to highlight Professor Jackie March at the University of Sheffield’s who’s done really granular research into what young children are actually doing with the tablets and what are the apps that they’re getting into. And also Stephane Chaudron in the European Union has been leading a lot of research across Europe, around 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 the world.
What we’ve learned from those 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 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.
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 helped shape us and helped shape the 12 Powers that we see as so critical.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. Now, unfortunately, we don’t have time to go through all 12. But I would like to focus on four that 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. It almost sounds like “British stiff upper lip”, but it’s not is it? It’s more than that.
Nicholas Carlisle
Yes. The most important task of young parents 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 we pat it on the back and we sooth it. And what we find is, and there’s tons of research on this, is that actually emotion dismissive parents, which is the English way of pretending by and large that 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 what’s called “attuning in” to their children, which means watching their children’s faces and behaviour and getting a sense of, okay, they are sad right now, or they are angry right now, what they went through is really embarrassing for them. And parents who can start to name those emotions for their children find that their children also, simply by the fact that these feelings have been named, start to settle down, become more emotionally regulated.
And over time, children learn to do that for themselves. If they don’t, they’re hijacked by their emotions and you’d see the sorts of acting out behaviours, or acting in behaviours, that are quite common in preschool.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. The Power of Creative Thinking. I love that title. What do you mean by the Power of Creative Thinking? How does that help address cyberbullying in particular?
Nicholas Carlisle
Creativity is really a big part of childhood because it’s a big part of play and one strand of creativity is the ability to see things differently, to step into the shoes of other people, to take other perspectives and that’s what we’re teaching by creativity.
So taken as a whole, all of these powers reinforce and feed into each other. You can see how 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 them, the more they get that the more it’s a break upon maybe some of that the mean behaviours and that extends into the lifetime. The more empathy someone has, the less likely they are to tear into another person.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. The Power of Critical Understanding.
Nicholas Carlisle
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 Hood, 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 they 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 Little Red Riding Hood goes into the wood cutter’s cottage where her grandmother is, is she has this gut feeling that something’s really wrong. That’s what the Grimm brothers say. But the wolf talks her out of trusting that gut instinct. So what we are trying to instill in children is that trust in that gut instinct to say if 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 an 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.
Neil Fairbrother
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.
Nicholas Carlisle
Yes. Yes. So what we’re trying to do with the Power of Zero is to get children a foundational set 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 give 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 well so that they get the most from it. So as you can see that this is a really a broad set of skills that’s going to stand them in good stead for pretty much everything that happens.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. And the final power that I’s like to talk to you about as it’s very relevant because without them none of this would be happening, and that is the Power of Digital Devices. How does that play? What are you trying to teach them about the device?
Nicholas Carlisle
We’ve got somewhat of a digital divide happening right now and sometimes it’s simply because of lack of access, but also it’s because of lack of skill that they haven’t really learned how to use a device at home, 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 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 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.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay, thank you. What’s next then? Where are you going to take the Power of Zero?
Nicholas Carlisle
We’re at an exciting phase. We are bringing together the 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 for six to eight to eight year olds. We’ve got a really fabulous video production company that is going to 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.
Neil Fairbrother
Fantastic. Now, I could talk to you about this for much, much longer than the time we have, 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.
Nicholas Carlisle
Thank you so much. If anyone is interested, go to powerof0.org
Speaker 1: 36:53 Fantastic. Brilliant.