Abstract
Shame management is purported to be part of the healing process that is a goal of restorative justice. However, the development of shame management capacities and how they are engaged in conflict resolution remains a relatively understudied phenomenon. This study examines how shame management (acknowledgment and displacement) is employed by children as they move into and out of cultures of school bullying. The analysis is based on self-reported changes in bullying experiences of 335 Australian children over a three-year period. Children were classified into bully, victim, bully-victim, nonbully-nonvictim, or residual conflict groups. Shame displacement and bullying tolerance accompanied transition into bullying. Shame acknowledgment and control of bullying marked desistence from bullying. Effects of shame management and social control were not uniform across groups. Findings indicate that interventions to change behaviour need to be flexible and responsive to prior bullying experiences so specific risk and protective factors can be targeted. This study demonstrates that responsiveness to context, building socially responsible relationships, and adaptive shame management are all integral to behaviour change, supporting the use of restorative justice as a way of dealing with school bullying as well as other forms of harm.
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Notes
Data from the Life at School Survey (Ahmed 2001): 6% of children thought it was OK to hurt someone who bothered them and 2% said that bullying did not cause harm. Eighty-two percent thought bullying caused moderate or very much harm.
There is no assumption within shame management theory that acknowledgment is necessarily the normatively correct position. Sometimes social expectations are to be challenged, not accepted. In the case of bullying, however, a basic tenet of our research is that bullying involves domination of another and such domination is morally unacceptable. Therefore, acknowledging that one has bullied another is a normatively appropriate response, while displacement is an inappropriate response. For victims, excessive shame acknowledgment with a particular focus on self-critical thoughts is normatively undesirable.
Measurement of bullying in this study is through self-definition and questionnaires. Parents were also asked to report on their children’s bullying experiences as a way of providing some validation of the measures used (Ahmed 2001). While we have used our measures as continuous variables in most of our research, we have dichotomized variables and formed groups on past occasions (see Ahmed 2001, 2006). In this study we have used slightly different criteria than used in the past in response to criticism of the distinctiveness of the groups (Finger et al. 2005). More recently, multi-item interval scales have been recommended to assess degree of bullying in terms of frequency of occurrence and type of bullying action (Finger et al. 2005). These developments undoubtedly give a more fine-grained procedure for assessing bullying than that used here, although they do not provide a solution to the important problem of when for a child, cussing and joshing turn into bullying. Bullying remains a highly subjective phenomenon: One child’s play is another child’s terror.
The items of the displacement measure were almost unanimously rejected by nonbully-nonvictims in 1999. The measure needs to be improved to have greater sensitivity to assess displacement among older, more sophisticated and less overtly aggressive groups.
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Ahmed, E., Braithwaite, V. Learning to Manage Shame in School Bullying: Lessons for Restorative Justice Interventions. Crit Crim 20, 79–97 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-011-9151-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-011-9151-y