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As a child, I was bullied for being plump, clever, foreign (Welsh) and from a broken home, suffering for my differences through no fault of my own. Miserable but angry, I eventually took the war into the enemy's camp and, in front of a full class and a teacher, floored the ringleader.

However, the broken home issue, when an eight-year-old girl slung the barb "Your father doesn't love you enough to live with you" before admitting that she was only repeating her mother's words, proved how often adults make the bullets that children fire.


Bullied children wish away their childhood, wrongly believing everything will be fine when they grow up. But adult bullies, with more weapons to hand and an aptitude for painting their nasty habits with the gloss of socialisation, arguably have greater power to do real damage. I have personal experience of being forced out of a job because I refused to ignore the plight of children in its care.

In one respect, bullying reflects our innate fear of the stranger: someone not quite like us and therefore a possible threat, but how that distinction is made is often a mystery. It is also a primitive tool to determine who climbs the human hierarchy, a trial of strength in life's proving ground. Inevitably, neither victim nor bully learn anything noble; for both it can forge the early links in a chain of violence that characterises their later conduct.

Sadly, bullying among children is sure to happen, but is usually easy to recognise. Unfortunately, in residential child care, normal frames of reference are ever vulnerable to the institutional setting, and a child's oppressive and intimidating behaviour may, in context, be reclassified as indicative of a disturbance beyond the expertise of residential staff.

I once dealt with a vicious 16 year old who was a blatant risk to other children. Management refused to transfer him; more damagingly, all sanctions were banned on the basis that he had "problems". Indeed he did, but they paled in comparison with those he created for others.

Evidence to the North Wales Child Abuse Tribunal demonstrated how staff may allow bullying as a group control mechanism, actively encouraging older or more dominant children to rule, by fear and force, on their behalf. Less obviously, staff may use peer government to manage those children of whom they are themselves afraid.

The human element in staff-child interactions is equally problematic. Bullying does not occur in isolation and adults may be complacent if not complicit. Moreover, adults may identify a victim either unwittingly or deliberately. Children are quick to pick up on adult antipathies and, where children and staff unconsciously bond into exclusive groups, victimisation of the "outsider" - the ready-made scapegoat - is tacitly approved by staff. Training for residential staff bypasses the study of institutions, their internal dynamics, their intense, claustrophobic inner relationships and their potential to distort psychological and social perspectives. Nonetheless, staff must constantly balance a group of personalities in flux and conflict, absorbing and neutralising high staff turnover, admissions and discharges in the children's group, and the natural fear of change that affects everyone.


For children bullied at school the torment is to an extent time-limited. Those in residential or foster care are at the mercy of their persecutors day and night. Some schoolchildren avoid the bullies by truanting; others take the last resort of suicide. In the residential setting, those coping mechanisms translate into absconding, self-harm, substance abuse and, possibly, deliberate offending intended to transform an indeterminate "sentence" in care to a fixed term in custody. Children in care also kill themselves, but their number and motivation remain under-researched.

Children who bully their in-care peers often have an existing reputation for intimidation and may come from a background where physical and psychological violence are the preferred problem-solvers. While low-level fear-mongering is a part of the give and take of children's interactions, that alone may be too much for some.

Dr Emma Renold at Cardiff University recently concluded that children entering care from abusive or profoundly demoralising backgrounds are incapable of defending themselves and unable to weather further threat, particularly in a so-called place of safety.

Social work training must address the complexity of institutional interactions and relationships and develop a greater understanding of peer group dynamics. Bullied children, like abuse victims, rarely tell tales - they live in fear of greater reprisal. Properly trained and vigilant staff can make the difference between individual success and failure or, even, life and death.

Alison Taylor is a novelist and former senior child care worker.