Being bullied is not only bad at the moment it is happening, but it also affects children in the long term. Bullying itself also has a negative effect on development of a child. Development psychologist Carolien Rieffe tells us about this in the Week against bullying, 23-27 September 2019. How do we stop bullying?
Tackling the social environment alone is not enough to fight bullying. Changes in, for example, the physical environment can also contribute to a better social inclusive climate. Therefore a multidisciplinary project on this topic is set-up, where the Center for BOLD Cities, and reserachers from Computer Science (Leiden University) and Governance (Campus The Hague), Architecture (Delft),work together with organizations such as InterPsy and Lentis. This projects aims to map the school environment of the child on four levels: social, cultural, physical, and policy. In this way, social inclusion recommendations are based on an integrated approach at all these levels.
These multidiciplinary projects are imporant for social inclusion:
Rieffe: "Being different, and yet being accepted, is called social inclusion. Social inclusion is now a high priority for many institutions and governments, but how do you manage that? René Veenstra from the University of Groningen with whom our department works with, aims to make bullying a group process. If you want to stop bullying, you have to tackle the environment, all the children in the class, the parents and the teachers. Everyone must be involved in order to positively reverse this group process."