Anti-bullying camps
The association 'Zi de bine' organizes camps for groups of children, parents and teachers to address bullying-related issues
Ana-Maria Cononovici, 25.06.2024, 14:00
When we were little, we could hardly wait for the holidays to come and start packing for the summer camp. And, back then, nobody would speak or even be aware of bullying, let alone organize camps particularly to address the issue, which has been finally recognized as such.
Eliza Vlădescu, a communication specialist with ‘Zi de bine’ association, told us about the specificity of these camps: “The idea is not really new. We organized the first anti-bullying camp in 2022. This summer’s camp will practically be the 4th anti-bullying camp. Last year we took a little break from anti-bullying and went to a nutrition camp, but this summer we decided to repeat both, because we saw that the need is very high. After both camps, we received a lot of requests from parents, asking us “will do you do it again”, “when are you going to”, “what should we do”, “think about it and organize them again”.
But what is an anti-bullying camp? Eliza Vlădescu explains: “We thought in like this: bullying is indeed very present in schools, but it is not necessarily an issue that can be exclusively associated with school. Bullying is about a person’s behavior and not a personality trait. It’s what we end up doing when we’ve been victims ourselves and we’ve seen no other way out other than to become aggressors ourselves. But there are two defining environments for children and teenagers. It’s school and it’s home too. The school and the home environment are like two communicating vessels and at any time one can overflow and get into the other one, depending on where these dysfunctional relationships appear, if there is communication that invalidates one and so on. That’s why, when we thought about the anti-bullying camp, which is a camp for children, we said that it is mandatory to bring parents and teachers to the table, because what the child ends up doing at home or at school is just a symptom of a dysfunctional relational system. And bullying is not a problem that you can leave on the child’s shoulders and let them solve them by themselves, although, of course, you try to empower them there where they are. But parents and teachers are responsible for children and they are the ones who have them, so they can be part of the problem. We all know situations of illness that start at home or come from teachers to students as a real abuse of power. But at the same time, parents and teachers can be part of the solution. So, in the camp, this is how we approach it. We bring pairs, parent and child, 30 pairs, and also 15-20 teachers from the primary and the secondary school and we work independently on all these three groups. Each group is taken over by a team of psychotherapist and they approach the groups depending on the age and the problems affecting them.”
We asked Eliza Vlădescu if there are situations, during the camps, when the participants may discover that, perhaps, certain behaviors that were considered normal at home are actually bullying, or behaviors that were considered traditional in schools, are actually bullying, the adult who is practicing them not being aware of this:
Eliza Vlădescu: “There were many moments of people becoming aware of parent-child, teacher-child communication patterns and even parents-teachers communication patterns. It’s about this behavioral pattern of putting the blame on the other, of throwing the cat in someone else’s yard, that is blaming someone else for your mistakes. So there were some moments of awareness that were not easy at all. This anti-bullying camp that we do is not the easiest, as it involves a lot of vulnerability, and I noticed that when we step out of the role of adults, of the role of parent and of teacher, we are like children ourselves, who need guidance, who actually need to talk to somebody who’s going through a similar situation and get some feedback and some help and some techniques or tools that they can take at home or at school and be able to implement them and solve a situation. And indeed, they all come to the camp with their own fears, both the children and the adults; it’s this fear of being vulnerable and opening up to strangers, but, eventually they come to like the camp and want to extend their stay.”
Eliza Vlădescu gave us more details about the camp: “What I would like to point out is that you can get out of a situation where, for some reason, you ended up being a victim at some point. There are children who came to the camp from all three perspectives, as witnesses, as victims and as aggressors. And we had bully kids who understood why they ended up bullying. Parents who understood why their children ended up aggressing and who found other ways to deal with comments, retorts, situations, found in themselves resilience and the desire to do good. I left the camp with children who wanted to change, to turn from aggressors into volunteers, helping and contributing to solving this problem for other children like them.” (MI, LS)
