'If you tolerate this, then your children will be next.' Compulsion, compression, control, and competition in secondary schooling

“A freak that no one can love”: difficult knowledge in testimonials on school bullying

“…moments where they, as abject individuals, had to meet the most threatening normals. However, this type of 'selfisolation' strategy (Thornberg et al 2013, 316) is very difficult to enact in a compulsory school, where everyone is forced to abide under the same roof (Duncan 2013). Making oneself small or closing up 'like a clam' are ways to solve this dilemma, but they also contribute to increased feelings of isolation and loneliness.…”

Approaches to Reduce Bullying in Schools – A Critical Analysis from the Viewpoint of First‐ and Second‐Order Perspectives on Bullying

“…Horton (), on the other hand, points to the possibility of teachers’ indirect contribution to bullying through their pedagogical practice showing that teacher and pupil relations and bullying is connected to the institutional setting of schools. Duncan () provides us with an analytical account on how school structures are co‐producing bullying with respect to schools as compulsory, compressive, controlling and competitive. Others support this argument by pointing to school structures such as standardisation and competition — which all imply individualisation — as part of producing bullying in schools (Walton, ; *Yoneyama and Naito, ).…”

“…This way of understanding the different roles in a bullying situation can be critiqued as merely individualistic, categorising, behavioural and stigmatising and could tend to disregard the institutional setting of the school, the social processes of the involved and how societal and historically constructed structures of inequality are part of producing bullying in schools (Bansel and others, ; Davies, ; Duncan, ,b; Horton, ; Kofoed and Søndergaard, ; *Thornberg, ; Walton, ,b, ; *Yoneyama and Naito, ). These critics point out that if we look for aggressive and weak children, respectively, we might become blind to bullying as social situations involving ordinary children.…”

“…Even though these interventions operate at several levels, they retain the view that the professionals are the solutions to the problem of bullying. Thereby it remains the psychology of the individual child which constitute the locus for the intervention rather than social patterns of interaction within the community of children and the connectedness of these patterns to the institutional setting of school, societal discourses, power relations and inequalities, which several critics in different ways formerly have expressed (Bansel and others, ; Davies, ; Duncan, ,b; *Thornberg, ; Walton, ,b; *Yoneyama and Naito, ). Furthermore, it has been suggested (Davies, ; Duncan, ; Walton, ,b) that the individualisation of traditional intervention programmes is part of reproducing social power relations by categorising individuals and making the individual responsible.…”

“…Several recent publications (Bansel and others, ; Davies, ; Duncan, ,b; Horton, ; Kofoed and Søndergaard, ; Walton, ,b, ; *Yoneyama and Naito, ) point to societal discourses and power inequality in relation to the understanding of bullying and children's social dynamics. These critiques offer some arguments for why bullying remains a problem despite decades of research‐led interventions.…”