Sticks and Stones Podcast 7 - Sticks and Stones ABA technical concepts covered in this podcast: Social reinforcers; negative reinforcement; response prompts; response cost; positive and negative punishment; group contingencies; manipulating motivating operations; function vs topography. Presenters - Bobbi Hoadley, Cathy Knights. Bobbi visits Cathy to chat about bullying behaviour and particularly how girls and women act, interact and react to it. Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words will never hurt me. An old proverb, that doesn't really hold true. It's a superficial way of looking at children's interactions when they are normalized, or abusive in nature. Boys are more likely to wrestle and have physical altercations. It can be healthy, as play wrestling. But bullying doesn't stop. People used to think it was just a kid thing. There are places where bullies feel more comfortable, or workplaces where bullies are reinforced. It's a serious issue to address. With adults, we can teach the different ways females bully vs males. As girls get older, it becomes harder to detect, because she can set up a whole system, and make it look as a "personality conflict" and the other person is somehow deficient. The more upset the person becomes at being a target, the more they look and sometimes act like an undesirable person. Any aggression that isn't overt, is passive-aggressive. Important to discriminate when it turns into bullying. Male bullying does tend to be more overt – physical or verbal. As boys get older, it is more verbal. For women, it often includes a withholding behaviour, which is subversive, e.g. withholding information to do one's job. Males can do it too. With female bullying is interactional alignment, trying to exclude a targeted person and trying to create a group. Over time, people in those groups, take on roles. One true bully still, but supporters who take part in it. Then a large amount of observers who feel helpless and do nothing, but they align with the bully to be accepted. Allies and observers fear becoming a target. With empathy for the target, they are more likely to align with the bully to prevent becoming the target. The target will be in a situation where they can't do anything right – confidence is undermined. People go on stress-leave for bullying. We are starting to be more aware of that and ‘out' those behaviours. The target is usually a person who's always been bullied, right from the start. With kids, I talk to them, "does anyone deserve to be treated that way?" Often the group blames the target for being treated that way. Look at the reasons why the bully is targeting. For everyone to look to the target for a solution, is a completing wrong way of supporting that person. Some bullying programs in school are still biased. Telling shy and undermined kids to confront your bully is impossible. How well does that work? The other school option of brining the bully and target together, is also problematic. Bully is unscrupulous, they will do whatever they have to do or say to look good. Duplicitous behaviours go along with what they have to do to survive as a bully. So to bringing them together with a person who is conflict aversive is horrible, they are scared and defenseless. The bully can actually make that person look bad in the meeting, e.g. cause them to not speak up for themselves, cry, etc. As a kid, it is the responsibility of the adults to help kids. The bully should not be reinforced with too much sympathy. Agree that the bully is a damaged person, where in their reality the bear eats you or you eat the bear, so they control the situation to avoid being the target. They don't have good trust or self-esteem, the confidence they show is bravado. They've been punished or hurt. It's possible they've also been influenced or modeled by bullying parents. When