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Marie-Estelle Dupont: "School bullying, the reasons for failure"

2023-06-07T13:12:26.768Z

Highlights: After the suicide of Lindsay, 13, and Lucas, 10, the psychologist denounces our passivity in the face of school bullying. The decline in educational attainment and the despiritualization of society largely explain this violence, she argues. Marie-Estelle Dupont, clinical psychologist and psychotherapist, published Getting free from one's toxic self (Larousse, 2017) and L'Anti-mère: Une psychologue tells how she survived an abusive mother (Albin Michel, 2022)


FIGAROVOX/MOOD - After the suicide of Lindsay, 13, and Lucas, 10, the psychologist denounces our passivity in the face of school bullying. The decline in educational attainment and the despiritualization of society largely explain this violence, she argues.


Marie-Estelle Dupont, clinical psychologist and psychotherapist, published Getting free from one's toxic self (Larousse, 2017) and L'Anti-mère: Une psychologue tells how she survived an abusive mother (Albin Michel, 2022)

Thibault, 10, hanged himself after two years of bullying. Lindsay, 13, committed suicide on May 12 after being harassed. By filing four complaints against the academy of Lille and Facebook, in particular, the family of the victim believes that the competent authorities and social networks have failed in their responsibilities. Have we "collectively failed", as Pap Ndiaye claims?

" READ ALSO School bullying: from legitimate emotion to difficult judicialization

We need words to get out of the repeated astonishment of these barbaric acts that push minors to suicide, to think about this phenomenon, because there is a denial of reality. But as long as destructiveness is not elaborated and channeled, it multiplies. I would not call it a failure, because that would imply that there was a posing action. This is not the case. His parents moved heaven and earth. No one intervened. Thibault's mother was told she was too "brooding" with her son.

We would probably like to tell ourselves that we have failed. The reality is that we have not tried, that we have been cowardly, inhuman, abject, indifferent, unworthy, dehumanized. And so, accomplices. Our society has given up on protecting our children. She has forgotten that adults have responsibility for minors in the community, both to prevent them from becoming perpetrators and victims. There is an inversion of values in our contemporary society where minors are the object of neglect and even non-assistance to people in danger. Whether it is the crisis of early childhood staff, lack of training, declining levels of education, weak justice regarding sexual violence or abuse, harassment or the weight that weighed on their shoulders during the health crisis at an age when their development did not allow them to be equipped to face restrictions, restrictions that have made some of them, already on a ridge line, caged lions. What does this say about us, about our relationship to transmission, to life, to the most vulnerable?

When a society forgets that the needs of children are the duties of adults, it no longer has safeguards against barbarism and sadism.

Marie-Estelle Dupont

A society that does not protect its children is a sick society, it is a society where adults themselves are too immature to carry out their responsibilities properly. The needs of children are our duties. Collective cowardice has wiped out his entire family and that of so many silent victims because the possibility of the worst arises when a society fails to protect its children. Officials who watch the curée, the daily lynching of terrorized teenagers, arms folded, without the slightest hint of empathy, pointing to the screens as responsible. But who are we? When a society forgets that the needs of children are the duties of adults, it no longer has safeguards against barbarism and sadism. When adults are dissociated from all empathy, from any protective instinct, from any sense of honor, our children are deprived of the hope that there is a helping figure in the adult world. Who are we to tolerate that at ten, twelve or thirteen years old, children commit suicide for lack of a glimmer of hope and a moment of respite?

" READ ALSO School bullying: "Many minors are devoid of empathy and drunk with power towards their victim"

The issue of bullying as it manifests itself today goes far beyond the question of social networks or lack of resources. Of course, once home, the child scapegoat had a respite until the next morning, while the effects of the pack are unleashed anonymously and with impunity, next to the parents sitting in the living room, who are not aware that their son or daughter is participating in a lynching that is not virtual. Certainly, screens and social networks are a public health problem and are a scourge for physical and mental health, as well as for the social body. But here, the multiple insults, humiliations and beatings suffered by this teenager as by others took place under the eyes of passive adults. Harassment today therefore reveals not that human nature is changing, because this is not the case, but that frames and prohibitions are no longer worn, embodied by adults who try to be more or less exemplary identifying figures in front of the minors in their care. On the other hand, it would seem that the rules and prohibitions laid down are likely to awaken in them aggressiveness more than the social skills of adaptation and management of impulsivity.

The question of parental education is therefore at stake, even if we prefer to tell ourselves that it is a problem of screens or social environment.

Marie-Estelle Dupont

This reveals on the side of the harassers that the failure is obvious in their education: the establishment of the superego, the respect of others, the notion of alter ego which imposes to retain a possible rage, the difference between reality and imaginary have not been put in place. There is no difference for them between "playing fighting" and "beating". There is no pros and pros and forses, as Maurice Berger explains. The minimal innate empathy in the baby has not been cultivated to transform itself into a social skill to distinguish right from wrong and identify with the other. The question of parental education is therefore at stake, even if we prefer to tell ourselves that it is a problem of screens or social environment. It is first of all we parents, who educate in such a way as to avoid the possibility of the phenomena of packs, lynching, scapegoating, who teach children to discern, but also to be aware that they can arouse jealousy and rejection when they are atypical, very beautiful, very talented, vulnerable, sick, in short, different in one way or another.

Sentimentalism has no place in education, Winnicott said, because the parent teaches the child to control his jealousy, his anger, his impulses. If the adult himself is a teenager who does not tolerate frustration, it will be difficult. If the game and the imagination are absent "for lack of time" and only concrete action counts, the adolescent will be without resources in the face of impulsive emergences. And the law of the jungle will regain its rights, with recurring episodes of barbarism committed by minors as is the case, more and more often, more and more violently, the cruelty proper to human nature seeming to increase tenfold in a society that is disintegrating. These children too were abandoned, in the sense that they were not given the limits and prohibitions they needed to become social beings. Not to educate, not to punish, is to deliver the child, as Philippe Jamet said, to a freedom that has no meaning, to an illusion of omnipotence that will lead him to the worst.

The root causes of violence involving young people are also to be found in a total despiritualization of society. How in a model where anthropology defines man as a taxpaying consumer, could one find enthusiasm in the link?

Marie-Estelle Dupont

Opposite, adults who seem to have themselves been dissociated from any empathy, from any reflex of elementary protection. Pap Ndiaye announced more resources to fight against bullying. What is the relationship here with the character, the personality of the adults who let it happen and did not assist this young girl? Has money ever made it less loose? The means are the personality structure of those who supervise and instruct, it is the content of the programs, it is the quality of the intergenerational link, it is the exemplarity. Not surveillance cameras or security guards hereafter. The means are not to systematically despise the word of the victim's parent who cries out for help. The way is that if the parents have failed, then the settlement of the establishment and then the justice do their job.

" READ ALSO School bullying: in primary schools, town halls will now be able to exclude the harasser

Instead, the decline in educational attainment should be addressed. We know that violence increases as intellectual capacities decline. When a young person has a rich lexical stock, reads, develops his imagination and reasoning, especially through writing and essays, these are all tools at his disposal to develop his destructiveness. It's called intellectualization and it's an effective defense mechanism. The mission of the school is to protect and educate. And for this to ensure the maturity of the adults who work within it. The root causes of violence involving young people are also to be found in a total despiritualization of society. How in a model where anthropology defines man as a taxpaying consumer, could one find enthusiasm in the link? Where has healthy emulation gone, in a system that values doing, acting, material, to the detriment of feeling, thinking, imagining, creating?

" READ ALSO Harcèment: in the head of the executioners in short breeches

The current harassment is a symptom of a society marked by the psychic collapse of contemporary man, a "sieve" individual, who no longer metabolizes reality thanks to rich imaginary, emotional and cultural resources and who is therefore easily overwhelmed by the urgent need to "take action". We owe them protection, education and hope and this will come only through our own maturity and our own exemplarity, in other words through our own ability to manage frustration and use the forbidden as a point of support to create, far from the bestiality of enjoying doing harm, to feel strong by destroying. Hope consists in believing in something more powerful than oneself, to escape the deleterious vertigo of omnipotence. It is this spirituality, this sense of the sacred that we must rediscover, far from the prohibitions and infantilizing injunctions that block the horizon of thought.

Source: lefigaro

All news articles on 2023-06-07

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