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Broken Promises

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 23:15:46 +1300

In 2011 New Zealand was shocked by mobile phone footage of an attack on school girl Robin de Jong at Wanganui High School. Following that Prime Minister John Key promised a national conversation about bullying.

If you google it you’ll see that the press covered it royally. It’s apparently one thing to watch grisly rubber-neck video of violence, but important initiatives, like the one in this video to actually tackle bullying, that’s another story and serious press interest = zero.

We sent the video to all MPs in New Zealand with the following message:

We are the people who normally send you Beehave, and while we do think laughter is the best medicine, we hope you'll agree that bullying is no laughing matter.

We all know that New Zealand statistics on bullying are pretty bad and we've all learned the name of yet another young person who committed suicide as a result of bullying this weekend, Stephanie Garrett, 15 years old.

After the Wanganui video in 2011 John Key promised a National Conversation on bullying....

So where is it? And why aren't the press interested in reporting on important initiatives like the one in this video that needs investment to get the message out to New Zealand youth? All press outlets were contacted, but no national press would pick it up. Some conversation.

It's not good enough. Please help to spread this message so that young people in New Zealand can feel safe...

As the song says...

"We live to be loved, just learn my name...."

There are plenty of people with enough money in New Zealand to fund a grounded initiative such as this one, to really get among and make a difference, but they can’t invest if it’s not reported.

This video is our least watched video in a long time, which is really sad.

If people switch off from bullying are New Zealand’s concerning statistics any wonder?

ANM interview - Harry Fear

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 14:08:28 +1300

Harry Fear was in Auckland recently, and ANM went to meet him.

In his early twenties, Harry is very young to have taken himself off to Gaza as an independent journalist and what he calls a “people’s foreign correspondent”.

We found Harry to be inspirational, and hope you enjoy this personal interview.

Movie Review - “Recessitation - Bullying in the Waldorf School”

Sun, 10 Feb 2013 08:29:30 +1300

Eugene Schwartz's video, Recessitation, provides rich insight into the symbol laden world of Steiner, both in its style and execution as well as in its use of representation. It is also an astonishingly accurate illustration of one common method used to minimise and even totally obfuscate the realities of bullying, and one which I have had personal experience of within Steiner education itself.

This method, of inversion, centres on replacing the reality of bullying with the idea of play. This is the whole premise of the movie and it happens on many levels including the didactic as it begins with a statement that Waldorf schools are the worldwide guardians of play, extending play times while the whole of the rest of the world is shortening them.

The inversion between "play" and "bullying" in this video is like a sleight of hand, where the bullying disappears in front of your eyes, and some kittens are pulled out of a hat.

When I was a drama student at Exeter University we were taught something of play theory by the wonderful and challenging Les Reid. Huizinga and Callois after him are commonly recognised as significant play theorists. Huizinga saw play as being a central building block of civilisation. He went as far as to attribute civilisation itself to the human propensity for play.

“We have to conclude, therefore, that civilization is, in its earliest phases, played. It does not come from play like a baby detaching itself from the womb: it arises in and as play, and never leaves it.” Huizinga 1955, p173.
“In the absence of the play-spirit civilization is impossible.” Huizinga 1955, p101

Caillois likewise divided play into six identifiable characteristics, of which two will serve to highlight the problem with attempting to reframe of bullying behaviour as play:

“it is governed by rules that suspend ordinary laws and behaviours and that must be followed by players”

“it is unproductive in that it creates no wealth and ends as it begins”

Play as an activity with rules that players must agree to follow, does not allow for a definition whereby some (targets) are forced to comply with rules set by those more powerful or more numerous.

In the second case, bullying is certainly not unproductive and certainly does not end as it begins; the sole purpose of bullying is specifically to create unequal power relations in the real world in which there is an actual effect on the target that will continue to have consequences for them after any active bullying episode has finished.

Play and bullying clearly differ in many obvious characteristics.

Another of the two most simple things Les taught us was that in theatre you see something and you hear something, and this is a helpful starting point to examine this video.

What you see in the movie, is a man standing somewhere arbitrary from several different angles for the first five minutes, and then some kittens.

What you hear is Schwartz reading a letter from a mother, who earnestly talks about the worrying situation. The mother, actually a construct out of several testimonies, is presented as anxious, but sounds unable to entirely give in to her worry, or to leave it alone.

She goes into a lot of detail about the way boundaries are pushed, and feelings hurt, and she appears to be anxious that her concern over these matters will result in her being labelled as a "Nervous Nellie".

Then, after five minutes, the mother mentions that she also happened to get some video of this fracas she's described in the letter, and she would like you to look at it. When the visual changes, Schwartz himself commentates on the situation in his own voice as if the kittens were children. Following that there is another didactic bit of word play tacked onto the end.

Schwarz's structure is a basic set-up and a reveal, and it's worth noting that the description of the video is also a "seen" element and part of the set-up as it will usually be read before the movie is watched. The description describes bullying as a "pervasive problem," which the movie takes a "long and hard look" at.

Strangely, compared to other movies using similar structures, Schwartz’ video contains no evidence of any intention towards comic timing (there is a reason for this which I will return to a little later), nevertheless this form does require distraction during the set-up so it doesn’t become either boring, or transparent.

While I wouldn’t personally consider Schwarz much of a distraction, this long build up to the reveal, broken into several angles, shows that Schwarz has worked to create at least some distracting element to allow him to create a build up of expectation, echoing the promise of the description and using "harassment" "rough housing" "fighting" "crescendo of aggressive behaviour" among a litany of other words to express the perception of bullying as "non-play" in order to confound it at the reveal.

This means that the eventual joke is on you, the watcher/listener. You were the one who fell for the idea that bullying was being talked about. In fact, the whole thing, the letter and also the video, came from the fictitious mother. When she pretended to worry that others would label her as fussy, she (Schwarz) was taking the piss out of you. If this were not true we would be being asked to believe that the mother was keeping her revelation even from herself which is a step too far even for a movie as structurally flawed as this one.

What's left is only a representation of bullying, couched in a report, and the clear suggestion that if you see bullying, then there is something wrong with you. This is because the inversion is that bullying has been symbolically put into inverted commas.

Once you see the kittens playing, you know that what was being talked about all along was not in fact bullying at all, but “bullying”. Those two little speech marks (sometimes literally but often metaphorically applied) are all that is required to effectively invert bullying from a reality to something that only exists as a representation, or report. It's been effectively cloaked.

In other words, as long as you don’t look at the bullying, you won’t see it. And Schwarz isn’t showing you bullying, remember, just himself and the kittens.

It doesn’t matter, that kittens are not children, and that play-fighting is not bullying, because the movie isn't about any of that but about the act of appearing to make an acknowledging representation of bullying while in fact removing it entirely from view.

And this fits exactly with what I’ve observed of bullying in Steiner education.

The non-action of the school when severe bullying was reported (as per policy) relied on exactly the same technique of saying that bullying is taken seriously, but then representing actual bullying as something else, in our case “boisterousness”, and “wildness”.

And of course, under such circumstances concerned parents can be easily portrayed as making a fuss about nothing, justifying not listening to them, or in our case expelling all the children to shut us up.

In fact once bullying has been removed as a reality, encased in a representation, and put into inverted commas, it’s really game over.

Once it’s become “bullying”, then you can invert every other element associated with it and even project the whole situation onto whoever flags it up. If that sounds far-fetched just consider that if there’s no bullying, what is the target making such a noise about? They must be attention seeking etc., are they mad? They must have another agenda.

Even the concern for targets can be inverted as a worry about “separating the bully”, for cute reasons concerned with their well-being. This can then be used as a reason to leave other children in harms way.

This is exactly what happened to our daughter's reports of bullying at Steiner. They were put into inverted commas - allowing us as parents to be portrayed as "intruding" for even mentioning that the school policy stated that bullying would be taken seriously.

The Manager’s recent complete and thorough admission that there was bullying in this class of 17 boys, many two years older than the 5 girls, shows clearly how the inversion of symbolically putting the bullying into inverted commas at the time, allowed him to tell everyone including the press that what he has since acknowledged as parent’s "natural and dutiful concern", was "intrusion".

(In fact, in Schwartz’s movie the fictitious mother states that she was watching this "melee" during break time and it was precisely this, ours and other parents offers to boost low staffing levels to properly supervise break times, that were targeted as "intrusive" by the school. These issues of break time supervision appear again and again in accounts from parents.)

So powerful is the inversion demonstrated in this video and experienced in the testimonies of parents worldwide, that it even allows the target to be reframed as the perpetrator - in our case leading us to be framed as thugs for pursuing it, mad, bad and dangerous to know.

In Schwarz's video, of course, the predictable victory is that, in the end, it is the mother herself who shuns any notion of removing the inverted commas from the bullying. She knew you would see that video all through those long minutes of double-speak. She was playing with you.

So in spite of the description and script, this is really not a movie about bullying, and that is actually the whole point of it.

It's clunkiness is not, as I first thought, because it was simply a badly executed sleight of hand, but in fact the lack of comic timing is an intrinsic part of it, because bullying being seen only in representational form is the joke of the movie.

Only a Steiner movie could have the fact that it ends with a representation as the punch-line.

To use kittens to represent the serious consequences of bullying, is to turn away from the confrontation with bullying that is necessary. Co-incidentally it also destroys any Human Rights perspective on bullying, which begins with the experience of the target, because if there is no bullying, there is no target either, so voilà.

Eugene Schwarz is obviously not the only one to practise these evasive inversions. They’re common anywhere and everywhere it’s more important to bolster the status quo than to honestly address the issues.

Even self-styled “critics” of Steiner have been known to put Steiner bullying in inverted commas to suggest that it’s not real, even while simultaneously publicly castigating Steiner for the fact that unchecked bullying is the main complaint worldwide.

In conclusion I will just mention another great nugget from Les Reid that has stood me in good stead and provides another good yard stick for criticising this movie. It’s another deceptively simple rule: It’s got to be better than if it wasn’t there.

And as far as doing what it says on the tin goes, this little movie, slow as it is, and with it’s layers of obfuscatory inversions, is not better than if it wasn’t there. In spite of the mildly amusing but badly executed sleight of hand/joke of substituting playing kittens from bullying children, and the twee didactic wordplay at the end, the deliberately misleading action of prefacing the movie with a statement about the seriousness of bullying, without also labelling that as satire, only reveals the extent of the deception on offer.

And in an inverted way there lies its only usefulness because it does, presumably unintentionally, show a remarkably accurate picture of how bullying is not dealt with in this movement, reflecting almost exactly our documented experience - promise what you have no intention of delivering, and in spite of saying you'll take bullying seriously, make sure it stays between those inverted commas as, at worst, a probably bogus report.

Of course not everyone will fall for this obfuscation but for those who don't, or wouldn't, this this video certainly gives a true indication of just how ostracised they're going to be if they try to flag it up.

The High Cost of Whistleblowing in Education - A Dirty Story

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 10:58:52 +1300

Whistleblowing is at last gaining ground in the news, and whistleblowers of all stripes have stories to tell of targeting and mobbing. Would it shock you to learn, however, that simply standing up for your kid, who was following the behaviour policy of a school, could lead to a secret “non-criminal” file being held on you by the Police, the contents of which you are not allowed to see?

The Corruption Perception Index, a subjective index of how people view public services, was released by Transparency International at the end of 2012, New Zealand ranks 1st with Denmark and Finland with a score of 90, indicating that it’s perceived as very “clean”.

As a New Zealand immigrant of five years, and in a world which is seething with revolution, it has been fascinating to learn about the great mismatch between the perception of corruption in New Zealand, and how much corruption there actually is.

Although this is a story of personal experience, it’s actually not just me saying that. A glance at Wikipedia shows that I’m in good company, with the Head of the New Zealand Serious Fraud Office Adam Feeley, believing that there are fundamental misconceptions about New Zealand’s ranking as one of the world’s least corrupt countries.

“All that survey tells us is how people feel about life here. How they feel and what is actually happening are quite different things. The CPI is nothing more than a perception.” Feeley points to the results of a more recent survey conducted by the SFO which found only 37% of New Zealanders think we are ‘largely free’ of serious fraud and corruption. And 60% think those who commit financial crime are not held to account.

This fault line between the perception and reality of corruption is extremely telling about New Zealand, and one of the reasons why we’re returning to the UK.

Corruption is a global reality, but there are unique dangers where there is high corruption with a corresponding lack of awareness of it!

And that’s particularly true when considering the subject of whistleblowing, as I have unfortunately had cause to discover, having pursued a matter where a school expelled a child, and her sisters, who reported bullying as per the school’s own behaviour policy. The school maintained they’d done nothing wrong and the matter eventually went to Human Rights mediation and settled just before Christmas.

This action has given us a crash course into the kinds of abuse that whistleblowing incurs, as well as just how wide that gap between perceived and actual corruption is.

The final outcome of the Human Rights mediation were seven statements and NZ$9,000, roughly £4,500. This was mediated eventually by the Director of the Tribunal as a last step before considering issuing proceedings.

The statements were very hard to get, I’m talking blood and stone. The only reason the school agreed to them is because if they had not they would have become historically the first Steiner School in the world to have been taken to Human Rights Tribunal for discriminating against children, of whom one of them was reporting severe bullying as asked to do by school policy.

After all that time, and having used gaps in Private School Law to throw the children out of one of only two private Steiner Schools (most have been publicly funded in NZ for over two decades), the school actually then claimed they couldn’t pay until they received their annual Government hand-out; so much for independence!

My kids are pleased that we’ve got this result, and they can see the value in standing up for yourself using available process, not violence - in spite of the generous lashings of flak that we’ve received for following this through, unbelievably from both sides of the raging controversy over Steiner education.

Over the last year I’ve found both solace and support in following a lot of other people on Twitter who’ve been very active in whistleblowing, mainly in health. Some are doctors, many are patients who have become politicised about the issues through terrible personal loss, and all are taking a lot on the chin to bring issues of corruption, negligence and mismanagement to light.

Of course any reading about or by whistleblowers, highlights the fact that it does seem to always bring a lot of flak. There must be patterns in that flak, but that doesn’t stop aggressive attacks always subjectively feeling as if they come out of left field and I’m guessing that many whistleblowers have had that experience. I hope this story will show that, however gruelling whistlblowing in health is, doing it in education is certainly no soft option.

The main weapon used against whistleblowers seems to be smear campaigns of one sort or another. Again, I’m sure there are many variations but from my observation of others and my own experience they seem to come in three basic but adaptable shapes - “It’s all about you”, “you’re mad”, and “you’re a pedophile”.

So let’s get down to the dirt shall we? When this New Zealand Steiner school decided to expel a bullied child and her sisters in direct contravention of their own behaviour policy, we objected as loudly as we could given the immediate realisation that we were in a legal vacuum of private school law. We handed out leaflets to parents explaining what had happened, at the time feeling sure that this would sort the problem out, as there were many parents flagging up bullying at the school.

But the staff hosted a meeting at the school, to which we weren’t invited but which was all about us. Subjectively I really have no choice but to describe such a meeting as “secret”.

The purpose of the meeting was to give parents in the class (of 17 boys and 5 girls) an opportunity to vent about us - which they did. Myths were created at the meeting which we found out about through other parents who attended and sure enough more than one parent reported that someone said at that meeting that you should be careful not to let your child stay the night at our house and that the Police had been involved when someone did let their child stay over. That would appear to relate to no 3 above. The other two on my list were obviously mentioned at this meeting as well.

Meanwhile we soon discovered more about the legal vacuum regarding children’s welfare at private schools, including the Law Commission’s recommendations to close these loopholes. We published about it, and our publications drew others towards us with similar testimony about the school spanning four decades.

Following these expulsions and after a difficult six months, during which we tried home-schooling (a vibrant scene in Auckland), exhausted and with an eye to our immigration status, we re-enrolled at another local school about 3 or 4 miles away from the Steiner school.

It was a struggle for all of us to re-approach any school after such a nasty experience, and I thought we were doing quite well too, until one day rumours started to come to this school and things started to unravel. Charlie Kingston, a mother who I’d actually began a tentative association with because our middle daughter became firm friends with one of her daughters, suddenly vetoed our kid when she became party to these ‘rumours’. Some weeks after this ‘shift’ in her attitude we discovered that she’d been to the lower school Head, complained about us and stated that she did not want her child associating with ours, meaning that we had to involve our child in knowledge of her targeting for the second time. She was 6.

At the time, as I became progressively more fearful of going back into the playground, it seemed to me that the school was pretty powerless. The Head of lower school and the school Head felt sorry for me, and could see my distress, not necessarily because they had particular insight, but because tears would just embarrass me, however hard I tried to keep them in check.

But even though it seemed to me that the school could do nothing, from Charlie Kingston’s point of view it seems that the the school’s attempts to protect us from any targeting did work, too much for her anyway, apparently, as I can only judge by the fact that this mother decided to go to the police and filed a complaint that we were intimidating her.

We knew nothing of this of course, and never saw her again once we left to travel to Europe, where my mother was dying. We would never have found out about it if she hadn’t decided to boast about it online, on the blog of Alicia Hamberg, another person that we only came across because of Steiner education.

Charlie boasted on this blog that the policeman she’d talked to had commented on our mental health, that we were “mentally a little unstable”, in the course of his duty in taking her complaint of intimidation. She also wrote on the blog that “you need to take what they say with a pinch of salt”.

The Steiner critics’ severe attacks on our Human Rights stand on bullying, is certainly a story of contradictions. But suffice it to say here, that in approaching this blogger, Charlie had identified a fruitful source of smears and rumour and Alicia gleefully posted Ms Kingston’s statements on her blog to go with her other negative opinion of us and “hope they fail the mediation”, sentiments.

When we were tipped off about this we decided to investigate and looked for the policeman concerned, one Kevin Morgan. He turned out to be the same officer who had threatened to arrest my husband for peaceably leafletting outside the school regarding the expulsions, when he had hared up the road with his siren on, arriving seemingly before he’d even been called.

This officer declined to answer as to whether he’d made such a comment, neither were we allowed to see the original complaint of intimidation made by Charlie Kingston, so we went to the Independent Police complaints Association and asked again through them.

Eventually we were assigned to a Senior Sergeant, Kim Stewart, who looked at the case and paid Ms Kingston a visit. The upshot was, in his own words: “I note the Mrs Kingston advised me that there was no mention of your mental health in her meeting with S/Constable Morgan” and “I conclude that I did not find that the officer made reference to you as being “mentally a little unstable””.

That’s right, Charlie Kingston admitted that she defamed a policeman on Alicia Hamberg’s blog in order to try and destroy our reputation. That is the true state of affairs, here referred to by Ms Hamberg as our harassment of poor Ms Kingston: “Unfortunately, to protect a comment author from harassment and threats, I’ve removed three comments from this thread. I cannot even begin to explain what utter disrespect I feel for the thuggish behaviour displayed by the NZ/UK couple.”

And that brings me back to the corruption index, because in “settling” this matter, the police have made it very clear to the Privacy Commission that we are not to be allowed to see the contents of the original complaint of intimidation made against us. The physical file apparently “cannot be located”.

Subjectively, since it’s about us, but we’ve done nothing wrong, I’d have to describe this file as “secret”, just like the meeting at the school, as we’ve no idea what is in it. Still, as this is a whistleblowing situation, it’s a safe bet that it’s likely to be some version of the three things I mentioned above.

There’s a dirty irony that a complaint of ‘intimidation’, against us, turns out to be nothing more than a secret file, occasioned by someone who’s admittedly lied about the matter, and now held by the police, who will not allow us to know the contents, even though it is not a criminal matter, and the police are apparently very comfortable protecting a woman who admittedly slandered one of their own in a public forum. The likelihood that this file contains further slanderous reports is, on balance, fairly high, yet not knowing what it is, we can do nothing about that.

Intimidation? What intimidation?

So apart from all the other crap we’ve had thrown at us, this is the high cost to us of whistleblowing in education. It hasn’t been easy, but we’ve learned fast. As far as New Zealand’s perception of corruption versus the actual levels, we have clearly wasted no time in getting to the dirt because this is a propaganda bureau, surely.

In the information we have been allowed to see there is a paragraph called History,

“They have come to the attention of Police before when they were embroyled [sic] in a dispute with the Titirangi Rudolf Steiner School...They were protesting over what they called a “bullying” issue at the school. Steve Paris was handing out fliers and Angel Garden was filming this activity. Police [KMF734] [the same one Charlie complained to] attended and warned Paris about blocking traffic to the school on Helius [sic] Place. He was ordered off the road and told he could hand his fliers out from the footpath.”

Although no-one has put their name to it, this paragraph, written on the 23rd of September 2010, which must have been around the time the complaint was made, the use of inverted commas to describe our reports of “what we called “bullying”” at the school hardly seem without prejudice.

It also doesn’t mention the fact that Kevin Morgan not only ‘warned’ Steve, but also threatened to arrest him when he was already on the pavement which was obviously caught on camera.

Whistleblowing is never easy. If it was, there wouldn’t be a need for a Perception of Corruption Index at all, but where Police are prepared to collude to this extent, it’s hard, as the target, not to see corruption, whatever the general perception might be. I’ve thankfully got no other experience to weight it against, but I’d say that this level of harassment, just for exercising your democratic rights, is pretty high, so it would seem unlikely that it would be just us.

And in fact we know it’s not, because we have already documented David Mollet who was targeted at the Christchurch Steiner school, who tried to have him deported, and who has also been the subject of pedophile slurs.

Without breaking confidentiality I can share that there are two other very similar situations known to me in New Zealand at the moment. And that’s only referring to ones which have involved appeal to other agencies, not the many, less specific testimonials we’ve received which also tally with the many (mainly anonymous) testimonials of exactly the same sorts of unaddressed bullying in Steiner Schools worldwide.

In such a small country, it’s not an exaggeration to describe these cases as amounting to a tendency. There are only two Steiner schools in Auckland (smaller initiatives spring up around the place which may grow, but two actual schools), and they both have complaints about bullying, victimising behaviours towards others sitting in the Ministry of Education, the ERO (NZ equivalent to OFSTED), and the Privacy Commission, none of whom have shown any interest whatsoever.

Private schools in New Zealand still exist in a vacuum as far a children’s welfare is concerned, and the Bill that was meant to change that was simply commandeered by the National (Tory) Minister of Education, and used to funnel more unconditional grants to Private Schools instead - perhaps to help them pay off Human Rights settlements.

And whistleblowing in New Zealand can result in a secret non-criminal police file in a country where even the Serious Fraud Squad acknowledge that there is a stunning mismatch between the perceived level of corruption and what’s really going on.

On a personal level, I’m obviously pretty bloodied by all this, these kinds of experiences make you wary of people, and that’s probably the worst thing about them for outgoing friendly types.

Nevertheless we are all, as a family, proud to have stood up for ourselves in this most famously litigious educational movement. We hope our statements and more importantly, the fact that we politely stood our ground to get them, will encourage other families or individuals targeted in this manner, or similar ways, not to give up.

So what’s the point of a Perception Index for corruption, when it doesn’t reflect the reality at all? Below is a humorous highlight of the show we made to lobby MPs about private school law.

It appears that despite public perceptions, mowing through democratic rights in New Zealand is actually rather like taking candy from a baby.

The Tallest Order

Sat, 19 Jan 2013 14:07:19 +1300

Stephen J Dunn’s interview with Liz Crow, disability activist and artist, distills the effects of the British Government’s austerity ‘cuts’.

Chilling viewing.