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Bullying - how tough are you?

IF YOU SEE SOME POOR SOUL being sat upon but do nothing - that‘s apparently what keeps bullying going. What's up for debate is: if you do something, what is that something?

'The culture of the bystander' is the theme for this year's Anti-Bullying Week. Stop this culture and bullying will stop too - according to The Anti-Bullying Alliance, a lobbying group of 63 organisations including several well-known charities.

The Alliance is filling the airwaves with the bystander message. It regards bullies as boys and girls (and adults) with complex needs who aren't bad people underneath. It suggests that the rest of us should intervene wherever appropriate, effectively humbling the bully into submission.

But not everyone shares this approach.

Bullying Online, which runs the popular bullying.co.uk website, takes a less compromising line. It thinks the Alliance puts too much emphasis on helping the bully at the expense of the bullied, and it wants schools to get tough.

Homophobic bullies should be reported to the hate-crimes division of the local police - and Bullying Online's 'Help for bullies' page asks, "Do you really want to be responsible for another person having a mental breakdown?"

This hard-hitting approach raised eyebrows here at Intelligent Giving Towers. And the Anti-Bullying Alliance certainly doesn't follow this line. Turn to its website, or those of its member organizations - which include the NSPCC and beatbullying - and you enter a more tolerant world. It doesn't want you to call the police, and it's got a lot more confidence in schools' ability to solve the problem.

But the Alliance's optimism could be seen as naïve. Bullying Online infers that while the Alliance's approach has been popular for a long time, there's not much to show for it.

Is it time to get tough? Decide which side deserves your support:

Anti-Bullying Alliance website | Bullying Online website

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