With astonishment, I read the newspaper report of a criminal case in which a boy of 11 has been cleared of bullying a classmate by using a scarf to tie him to a goal-post in the school playing-field two years ago.
It isn’t clear in the report whether the boy is 11 now or was 11 then – but either way, it is utterly disgraceful that the police became involved, that they prosecuted, and that the case ended up in court, with a young boy being put through the mill of full criminal proceedings, dragging on for two years, for something that is routine boys’ stuff in the playground.
Have some people gone outright mad? Boys are always going to do this kind of thing on the playing field, in the locker-room and in the halls and corridors of their school. It is normal behaviour (not doing it is abnormal), just routine rough-and-tumble that is ordinarily sorted out with a talking-to by a teacher or the headmaster, if they bother at all. Most teachers and headmasters know that in these situations the worst thing they can do is make a bigger victim of the ‘victim’ by taking his side and offering him protection, thereby ensuring that he will never belong with the rest and will instead be singled out for contempt, scorn and ridicule for the remainder of his schooldays.
Those who have been looking after boys for years know how to distinguish between real bullying that takes the form of menacing cruelty which results in injury, and where there is generally an actual psychological problem with the bully, and run-of-the-mill rough-and-tumble and joshing that are normal male behaviour in the growing-up years. Boys are not girls; they do not behave or think like girls, and equality under the law does not mean lack of differentiation in biology.
Girls do not tie each other to posts with scarves while playing cowboys and Indians, which is what seems to have been the case here. Girls do not egg each other on to jump off considerable heights or dangle each other out of trees or propel themselves downhill in homemade contraptions and end up at the hospital’s A & E Department thinking what great fun it all was despite the plaster and stitches. Boys do, end of story.
Boys take risks, they are rougher and they do not treat each other with gentleness and sensitivity or respect for feelings. You can’t change nature and it is actually self-defeating to try and police boys out of this developmental stage: the challenges of the playground are how they sort themselves out to deal with the far bigger and more consequential challenges of life. If they don’t learn that, then the consequences can be pretty horrendous. We have had some rather unpleasant illustrations, in our own grown-up Parliament, of what happens when boys are unable to or prevented from learning how to deal with other boys in the playground.
The natural inclination of boys in the playground is to fight each other like savages and then to forget about it the next day, the fight itself being seen as a satisfactory resolution of whatever difficulties provoked it in the first place. When this developmental process is perverted or thwarted, you get boys who grow into men who bear grudges against other individuals for years and who fight their battles for a lifetime. People like Franco Debono and Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando are actually aberrations in the male world: the male way is to have one big, savage fight and get over it, forgetting it ever happened. So whatever went wrong for them must have gone wrong back in that playground.
Whichever way I look at it, the bullying of this 11-year-old boy by the agents of the state, in the form of the police and the Law Courts, has been immeasurably worse than his alleged – and in the end unproven – “bullying” of his schoolmate by tying him to a goal-post with a school scarf. How in heaven’s name did anyone think that putting a young boy through that level of trauma for a simple, routine prank would be in any way a good idea? It was a totally disproportionate response, and would have taught both boys involved – the one who was tied up and the one supposed to have done the tying – all the wrong things about keeping a sense of proportion, human behaviour, justice, standing up for yourself and having a proper perspective on things.
Worse still, this heavy-handed behaviour by the state in the matter of a schoolyard prank might actually have created a dangerous sense of victimisation/victimhood in the boy who was put through the pseudo-justice mill. It could well have engendered in him the sort of burning and resentful anger that warps a character and lasts a lifetime.
The parents of this boy probably have grounds for a constitutional case. Police investigation and criminal prosecution of an 11-year-old boy for a schoolyard prank – seriously? But I imagine that they won’t want to put their son through more pressure of that sort. The whole thing, though, is truly disturbing and scandalous.
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