Hath not a Jew eyes?

Dealing with bullying and stereotyping in the young can be tricky. If it is left unchecked however it can turn into much uglier behaviour as we are see with racist murders like that of  Stephen Lawrence.

Every year children who are bullied suffer some so much that they take their own lives. Simply telling young people to stop is not enough and much ca be done by using drama. We have already discussed the benefits of role play and alongside that work on scripts can really bring things to light in a safe and secure environment.

In one of the workshops we run we use a technique from Forum Theatre where the young people can choose a different ending to the one in the play and can use the ending in the script as a springboard to discuss how they might change things with people like teachers, their peers and their parents, making different choices and behaving in different ways. We often use the play Mugged by Andrew Payne - a Shell Connections play for the National Theatre where one of the characters takes on the playground bullies who have taken a mobile phone and tries to get it back but gets stabbed in the process.

In our workshop we ask the young people (14-15 year olds) to imagine how things might have been different and what options there were apart from one of the group being bullied going and taking on the bullies by himself. We brainstorm ideas and act them out and then each group talks to the others about what other options there were. In this way ideas about how to tackle bullying are coming from the young people themselves and options can be discussed and acted out to imagine possibilities.

Other techniques using drama are also very worthwhile pursuing. Running a bullying workshop for 8 year olds we looked at a story about a girl bought up in a forest who is caught by a hunter who locks her up and makes her behave in certain ways. She escapes and the animals help her. We drew pictures of the story and improvised on different choices which the girl could have made. We also asked the children to look at the behaviour of the hunter and to think about why he did the things he did and what he might have done differently. With the girls we looked at how she could communicate her needs to the hunter and stand up to him.

In both these workshops for very different groups of young people we are letting them work things through rather than giving them the answers and invariably their creativity and ingenuity come up with things we have never considered no matter how many times we repeat the workshops each group is different. Tackling a big subject such as bullying through drama means that things can be discussed without so much emotion and that it can be taken out of the personal to protect the participants from having to disclose things they may not want to. If they do want to disclose it gives them a safe and secure vehicle to do it.