The on-line opinion forum has an article headed Home Education can help prevent bullying http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=3977
I have commented a number of times on the article and when I wrote, I wondered how long it would take before somebody tried to blame me for our situation. I didn't have long to wait. In a post by sajo on 1 January 2005 he states: "One word of advice - this will all work much better if it is presented reasonably and accurately without unnecessary anger and blame and with the confidence that you expect something to be done. I do however wonder if there is not a lot more to your problem than you are letting on if, as you say, there is no support among the parent community. Parents at my own children's school stick together when they want something changed. This is also why a class action is more likely to succeed and make headlines than individual lawsuits".
One of the annoying things about Online Opinion is that you can only post 2 posts on one subject every 24 hours so now I have to wait until tomorrow to reply as I have already posted twice but sajo's post really bothered me because he has just assumed that I haven't done things by the book and that I didn't take it to the P & C first and that I wasn't part of the P & C and that if I was different and did things differenlty things would have been different. People dont realise that it doesn't matter how you present it, the system is set up to cover up. The post seems to indicate that if you are bullied and targeted and you get upset and/or angry and put blame on the culprits that it is unneccesarry reaction. In essense he cant help but believe that somehwere, somehow I caused the problems by the way I dealt with it.
This is how the system protects itself. If they don't deal with an issue properly people automatically assume that there is no problem and it must be the complainant that is the problem. Parents did not ostracize me because they didn't like me, they were scared, scared that if they were seen with my family that they system might think that they were supporting us and they would also become victims. When a victim is being bullied usually there is a crowd of onlookers. Just because the onlookers turn their back on the victim of the bully doesn't mean that the victim deserved what they got, or even caused the problem and it certainly doesn't mean that the onlookers all resent and hate the victim. Its fear, fear of becoming a victim that causes others to not support the victims of bullying and that is exactly what has happened in our case.
For the benefit of people like sajo I would say that I followed Policy and Procedure to the letter and in writing. I didn't try to place blame initially, I tried to address the issues, which were issues in relation to the treatment of children and the neglect of the educational, emotional and social needs of gifted children. I presented it as a school/system problem and not necessarily and individual problem. For that the system turned on my family and systemically bullied, vicitmised, vilified and discredited us. I tried dealing with it nicely and it doesn't work. It doesn't actually matter how you present it, it appears that you have to resort to drastic measures in order to get anything to happen.
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