PTSD and Bullying

When I left University I joined local Theatre in Education company Theatre Alibi, and toured around Devon with a show called "No Heroes No Cowards", about a soldier in the First World War, shot for desertion.  That was in the 80s but it took until 2008 for soldiers shot for "desertion" in WW1 were given a full pardon in recognition of the fact that they were, in fact, suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Even once there was an understanding that traumatic events can effect people in this way, the term PTSD was still used exclusively to refer to a single traumatising event evoking “intense fear, helplessness, or horror”, and which continues to cause distress, flashbacks and other symptoms.


Now we need to reclassify the effects of bullying away from a “character building” experience, which we must all learn to live with to “prepare us for life in the real world” and to understand that PTSD can be cumulative and result from exactly the sort of feelings of captivity, helplessness and terror that bullying can easily engender in any person, not specifically children.

Now there is a developing understanding of what is called “complex PTSD”, arising out of many concurrent or following events which evoke the same types of feelings, resulting in the same over stimulated fight or flight response.

Thanks to the internet there is no shortage of information designed to help sufferers to gain back some control of their lives and to raise awareness of the difficulties for those living with someone who is suffering from PTSD.

As a parent, I can testify that if your child suffers from symptoms of PTSD, life can become very difficult, with normal routines, expectations, family relationships and simple everyday pleasures severely disrupted.

I have a child who developed symptoms of PTSD through being bullied at school.  The bullying was severe involving both physical and verbal/emotional assault, and humiliation.  The school compounded this experience, when we continued to follow their own advice to work with them, by expelling all of our children.

We are still living with the effects of this years after the events.  The symptoms did begin to go off during last year when we home-educated our children whilst visiting the UK to tend to my mum who was very ill with lung cancer and who subsequently died last October.

During this stressful time, including travel, being without a proper ‘home’ environment (we camped largely in a caravan in a wonderful friend’s garden), my daughter’s symptoms continued to abate and I do have to admit that I'm proud of the way I kept some real educational routine going during that very difficult and sad time.

Having returned to New Zealand however, I became ill myself and my husband took the decision to place all the children in schools again.  My oldest daughter went into the second year of a local intermediate school, not the posh one round the corner which is enormous, but a smaller one a bit further away.

She likes her teacher there, and he’s got a good reputation, and yet, the symptoms that we know so well, and were so happy to say goodbye to, have all returned - sleeplessness, loss if interest in food and in life generally, and what’s termed ‘increased arousal’, which term does nothing to describe the difficultly of being unable to predict or control exaggerated responses to ordinary events and speech.

Our family has had to adjust to this situation, which means that my other children have also had to adjust their responses to life to make room for the symptoms of PTSD.  The effects of the unchecked bullying at that school are still largely able to dominate our daily life.

Here is a list of symptoms associated with PTSD, and the criterion is that at least three of them need to be evident.

1. efforts to avoid thoughts, feelings or conversations associated with the trauma;
2. efforts to avoid activities, places or people that arouse recollections of this trauma;

3. inability to recall an important aspect of the trauma;

4. markedly diminished interest or participation in significant activities;
5. feeling of detachment or estrangement from others;
6. restricted range of affect (eg unable to have loving feelings);

7. sense of a foreshortened future (eg does not expect to have a career, marriage, children or a normal life span).

We are dealing with 1,2,3,5,7

And here’s a list of persistent symptoms of increased arousal (not present before the trauma) as indicated by at least two of the following:
1. difficulty falling or staying asleep;
2. irritability or outbursts of anger;
3. difficulty concentrating;

4. hyper vigilance;
5. exaggerated startle response.
The symptoms last for more than one month.
The disturbance causes clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational or other important areas of functioning.

My daughter suffers from 1,2,3,4,5,
Information from http://www.bullyonline.org

These are the effects that are still with us from her short (four month) attendence at our local Steiner School, where she was placed in a class with 17 boys and 5 girls, where there was insufficient supervision, and a gang that had been allowed to run amok since Kindy.  Our questions about why the school did not follow its own stated behaviour policy, but seemed to be operating another, unspoken one, which allowed bullying to continue unchecked, have still not been answered. The school still advertises itself as a "safe and natural, peaceful learning haven".

In their actions of constantly reassuring us that they took this very seriously, the school in fact persuaded us to leave our daughter in harms way, culminating in an incident so frightening, that the school suddenly, rather than honour their commitment to try and address the bullying, expelled all our children just to get rid of ‘the problem’, which, in the classic time-honoured switcheroo, became us, our whole family.

Although the school’s behviour policy stated that bullied children would be separated into a safe space, my child was actually left unsupervised with her aggressors in the bush, where they were building huts, and one of the bigger boys threatened her with an axe.

The teacher tried to lie to me that he had been present the whole time, but backed down quickly when I assertively stated that I knew that to be false, and he admitted that he hadn’t been there.

The school has now, three years later, been persuaded to attend Human Rights mediation.

This is the background to the questions we are asking in this movie.

So far so awful.  But if you think all that sounds bad, now comes the really surprising part.

Because this story is also the background to the attacks that the Steiner ‘critics’ have mounted on us.  Melanie Byng, who is active as a Steiner ‘critic’, tweets as @ThetisMercurio.  She has personally met me and is absolutely aware of these facts regarding my daughter, including how she has been put off education by her experiences.  It was this that persuaded Melanie to encourage us to look at the Democratic school in Newton Abbott, Sands, which we did last year whilst in the UK.  She also invited my daughter personally to stay for a week while she did a 'tryout'.

Melanie's decision to angrily dump us, (including my daughter) due to her son suddenly pulling out of a committment he’d made (all initiatives between us came from her family), could and really should be seen as simple bad manners, especially since she was claiming to try and support me due to my mother's illness.

Yet she did not take responsibility for that, and since then the Steiner critics, in rushing to her defence, have made it their business to ADD to our problems by roundly decrying us, flaming, blocking, slandering, censoring and banning us, whereas before this event, we were ‘brave’ and ‘funny’.

Andy Lewis was somehow persuaded to censor us in a dishonest manner even though the discussion on his blog was asking for exactly the evidence we can provide.

Melanie Byng now tells people that I'm “mad as cheese”

Alicia Hamberg has even gone so far as to say that expelling the children was an ‘elegant solution’. and Diana Winters denies that there is any problem with such a statement but says that it should be repeated far and wide. She sees no contradiction in saying that she is not making a comment about the situation at the school by saying this, neither is she apparently making any comment whatsoever about the children by agreeing that expelling them from the school for flagging up bullying was an 'elegant solution'.  In fact, according to her, this whole situation doesn't seem to have anything to do with the children at all.  Go figure.

Melanie Byng is also now happy to spread lies on Twitter about us, not stopping short of disseminating suggestions that those who talk to us are pedophiles.  Melanie Byng's husband Richard, who, believe it or not, lectures on mental health at Plymouth University, and who wrote recently in the Guardian about some dangers of Steiner education, does not see a problem with such behaviour, or with mobbing a family dealing with these symptoms, arising from just such a school as he is publicly criticising.

These are the people who would like you to believe that they care about children, and about education.

These are the people who drag up articles from decades ago rather than use the current evidence from a Human Rights initiative, which is, at this point in time, unique.

These are the people who constantly decry the dishonesty of the Steiner Waldorf movement.

According to this very vocal group, of whom I've met only Melanie, our daughter apparently does NOT have these symptoms at all.  

It's hard to explain just how mind-bendingly awful it has been to deal with their onslaughts and denial, whilst also dealing with the effects of the PTSD on our daughter and in our family.

In fact, they’ve even gone so far as to say that by advocating through Human Rights for our daughter, while our family is still struggling with the effects of these symptoms, that we are ourselves abusing children by taking away the resources of the Human Rights from ‘real abuse’.  Please bear in mind that these comments are on a blog post named after me, but where I am banned from defending myself in any way.  The fact that I then try to set the record straight is then seen as further proof of my awful "methods", in classic time-honoured bullying fashion.

The ‘critics’ find no problem with telling others that we are liars, and we are blocked from all critics accounts on Twitter and from all ‘critics’ websites, including the Waldorf critics, where we have also been mobbed, then banned, (then discussed without being allowed to comment).

If we thought the Steiner School ethos, of saying they took bullying seriously but actually doing nothing about it was crazy, the critics' behaviour in flagging up bullying in Steiner schools whilst publicly mobbing our family in this manner really beggars belief.  And the shocking fact is that nobody has had the good conscience, or the courage, to say so, thereby becoming bystanders to the mobbing.

The critics themselves are bullying a family, whose children were expelled from a Steiner school, for flagging up exactly the type of bullying that they talk about but can produce no concrete evidence of.  How bizarre is that?

Whatever their real aims, the 'critics’ actions prove without a shadow of doubt that they are not genuine in simply wanting to debunk the problems in Steiner education.  There is no need to target families who are prepared to do what most are not - i.e. stand up and be counted, in order to debunk the education.

Their reasons for doing that are a lot more complex and I’m suggesting have to do with ordinary bullying, clique politics, and personal ambition or simple spite.

Anyone doubting this can read our account of what went on at the school and compare it with other anonymous accounts (for example here) and you will find that it is remarkably similar.  There is no reason, in what actually happened, for any Steiner critic to single us out as dishonest - especially since we are almost alone in having actual corroborating evidence of our story.  Yet, by leaving our story out of their 'collections' of stories, the 'critics' are deliberately and collectively painting our account as false even though none of them was present, and none bar Melanie has ever met any of us.

The difference I can see is that, having taken such a stand against bullying, we continue to object to it wherever it appears and that as we are documentarians and film makers, we have been quite creative with the material we have collected after the fact.

For some reason our different approach, and our refusal to be bullied by them either, has made the critics very angry with us and their anger has actually blinded them to the fact that we are parenting a child who left that Steiner school with PTSD symptoms, which necessitated counseling for a long time, and which are still apparent today.

If anyone who knows about whistle blowing, and bullying can explain to me why they are doing this, even in direct opposition to their stated aims, and why nobody within the ‘critics’, not one person out of all those who claim to wish to debunk Steiner education, including the ‘unchecked bullying’, which they have identified as the main problem for parents, has the guts to stand up and point out that they are behaving in exactly the same way that the school behaved, i.e. sanctioning and practicing bullying themselves, I would be very grateful to know.



Further reading about these events:

How do you know when you've been mobbed by Steiner Critics?   September 2011

How do you know when you've been censored by Steiner Critics?  September 2011

How do you know when you've been misquoted by Steiner Critics?  November 2011