Interventions Designed to Deal with Bullying in School - Coursework Example

Interventions designed to deal with bullying for mainstream children are not always applicable to special needs children. However, the role of the peer group has been reported to be a significant factor in determining the participation, and hence the inclusion of special needs children in mainstream settings. Interventions for special needs children need to be designed using peer support group as befrienders, mediators, mentors, and tutors. The present autoethnographic study explores the bullying intervention strategies applicable for special needs children in mainstream settings, based on my personal experiences with school bullying as a sibling and a teacher.

The study involves an autoethnographic account of my experiences and reflections, followed by a literature review exploring the factors and impacts of bullying on special needs children. This is followed by a study of the implications of interventions by investigating the correlation of bullying and special need children, effective anti-bullying interventions with special reference to peer support group and finally the status of bullying and anti-bullying interventions in Saudi Arabia. Bullying has a history as long as a human civilization with aggression being inborn in human beings.

However, the study of bullying as a social and psychological phenomenon began with the seminal paper of Olweus, justifiably called the ‘founding father’ of school anti-bullying programmes. Despite a vast amount of literature reported on school bullying, a consensus on its definition is yet to develop. Olweus’ defines school bullying as a subset of aggressive behavior so that the “person being bullied or victimized when he or she’s exposed, repeatedly and over time, to negative actions on the part of one or more other students”.

  The major actions that characterize bullying include acts that hurt physically such as hitting or punching; verbal assaults including teasing and abusing; indirect acts leading to emotional pain such as social and psychological exclusion, spreading rumors etc. Thus not all bullying is violence yet the two acts are significantly overlapping, with power imbalance being the uniformly accepted aspect of bullying.