Meline Kevorkian - Tackling Bullying in Athletics: Best Practices for Modeling Appropriate Behavior

Tackling Bullying
in Athletics

Best Practices for Modeling
Appropriate Behavior

Meline Kevorkian and
Robin DAntona

Rowman & Littlefield Education

A division of

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.

Lanham New York Toronto Plymouth, UK

Published by Rowman & Littlefield Education

A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706

http://www.rowmaneducation.com

Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom

Copyright 2010 by Meline Kevorkian and Robin DAntona

All rights reserved . No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kevorkian, Meline M., 1968

Tackling bullying in athletics : best practices for modeling appropriate

behavior / Meline Kevorkian and Robin DAntona.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-60709-379-4 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-60709-380-0

(pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-60709-381-7 (electronic)

1. SportsPsychological aspects. 2. AthleticsPsychological aspects.

3. Bullying. 4. BullyingPrevention. 5. Aggressiveness. I. DAntona,

Robin, 1946 II. Title.

GV706.4.K48 2010

796.01dc22 2010023013

` The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

This book is dedicated to

Simon Francis DAntona

19791993

If you are picking up this book, perhaps you are a coach, the parent of an athlete, a recreation director, a school administrator, or even the athlete about whom the authors are concerned. You may be saying to yourself, Who needs another book on bullying?

The authors are, without a doubt, experts in the field of bullying prevention. Yet more than that, they are deeply and personally determined to protect young people harmed, sometimes fatally, by the target-aggressor-bystander bullying dynamic. This book offers concrete information to help you understand how bullying plays out, in its more obvious and most insidious forms. Even more important, it provides concrete, research-based suggestions on how to reduce or even prevent bullying.

The authors have written a straightforward, highly readable book about bullying in athletics. They have purposely chosen not to delve into the annals of athletes and sexual harassment or the details of the law known as Title IX that plays a central role in supporting females in sports and in preventing sexual harassment. But if, after reading this book, you want to learn more, I urge you to dig further.

No book can give the secret ingredient that enables uswhether adults or young athletesto intervene when bullying occurs and to take steps to prevent it in the first place. That secret ingredient is, quite simply, courage. What is courage? Why is it needed?

While athletics offer great tests of physical courage, stamina, determination, and discipline, there is another very different form of courage. Moral courage is the willingness to do what is right in the face of pressure from peers, parents, community leaders, supervisors, team members, and so on. Bullying and harassment (a form of bias-based bullying with roots in civil rights laws) thrive when adult authority figures fail to identify and intervene, choosing to ignore or justify such behaviors. Teachers, coaches, administrators, and parents are role models. When young people, athletes or not, see these adult authority figures (and this means you) displaying moral courage, they too learn to follow that path.

Several years ago, a serious bullying incident occurred during a summer training session for a fall high school sport. Out of a large group of bystanders, only one boy backed up the targets story. His father told him he had to do so, because it was the right thing to do. None of the other bystanders spoke up until he did. Their parents had urged them to remain silent. Legal charges were brought and the athletes who had committed the acts were removed from the school. The boy who spoke up was an upstander, not a bystander.

The path of moral courage is not an easy one for adults or for young people. If it were, there would be far less bullying and probably far less violence. The culture that promotes the ideas I dont want to get involved and I dont want to be a snitch is not uncommon among young people. But when adults cry out against this culture, we need to look first at ourselves. Are we ignoring or justifying behaviors, such as bullying and harassment, because we lack the moral courage to follow the guidelines in Tackling Bullying in Athletics ?

Randy Ross, MS, MA

The Education Alliance at Brown University

April 2010

How Extensive Is It?
From Shaking It Off to Suicide

On Saturday, September 25, 1993, after Simon, a 14-year-old high school freshman, and his three friends attended a home varsity football game, they went to one of the boys homes. There were many varied reports of what was going on and what they were actually doing that afternoon. They were full of fun and happy to be part of the football teameven if only as members of the freshman squad.

According to one account, they were feeling frisky and they went to the local supermarket, which was located in the center of town. They were parading up and down the supermarket aisle laughing and having fun in a way that adolescent boys think is funny. One of the boys wore a pair of underpants on his head. The boys were playful, acting silly, and laughing at this juvenile stunt. However, when they met a former teacher in the supermarket, they apparently felt embarrassed and claimed they were being hazed. The hazing component may or may not have been true.

Months later, investigations never confirmed nor refuted this statement. Regardless, that claim set up a chain of events that would lead to extreme bullying behavior that would end in tragedy. Once the report of what happened in that supermarket that Saturday afternoon became known to the members of the varsity football team, the boys were subjected to threats, bullying, exclusion, and other cruel behaviors that would become unbearable. Their dreams of participating in football were dashed. It was September of their freshman year and they had become outcasts in a world they had only just entered.

The chain of events began when the teacher reported the incident to the athletic director, who then arbitrarily decided that it was probably a prank the older football players had played on the younger boys. He instructed the head coach to look into the incident but to keep it quiet. The coaches consulted with other coaches, administrators, students, and parentsbut not with the parents of the freshman boys involved.

By Tuesday, the football team and everyone connected with the team were buzzing about the alleged incident. The varsity players let Simon and his friends know they would handle the situation in their own way. When these freshman boys went to practice, the others, including upperclassmen and the assistant coaches, constantly yelled at and mistreated them. Even when Simon managed to run the ball through the line for a 10-yard gain, he was berated and made to feel that he could not do anything right.