Canadian Lisa Dixon-Wells’ first experience with bullying was as a bystander in high school.She recalls watching as a particularly bright boy was punched, teased and taunted. The memory has stayed with her throughout her life.Today she is an expert in bullying and is one of the founders of an anti-bullying initiative called Dare to Care.The programme aims to eliminate bullying and other dangerous behaviours from schools and, in turn, create an atmosphere of tolerance and respect. Programme facilitators help parents, teachers and students from primary and secondary school create a common language which then allows for more consistent intervention and follow-through when dealing with challenging issues.Ms Dixon-Wells was on the Island this week with another programme facilitator, Dwayne Peace, to run workshops and assemblies about bullying in schools.“I was lucky that I was never really bullied,” she said, “and I never bullied anyone. However, if I saw someone being bullied I didn’t know we were supposed to do anything to stop it. There was one particular boy in grade eight who was bullied. There was a lot of physical bullying. There was a lot of name calling. They would take his glasses. He was very bright, which is one of many reasons kids are picked on. He was also very shy.“I carried some great guilt over what I saw. None of us helped him. He was forever scarred by the experience. Today, he is in his 40s but still lives at home with his parents. He has never been married and never had a job. I tell the story to all the middle school kids because I need them to understand the power of their words.”Ms Dixon-Wells was first a school counsellor but quickly realised there was no material available about how to effectively deal with bullies in schools. She went back to university and studied for a masters degree in educational psychology, focusing on creating a comprehensive programme on bullying. The result is Dare to Care.She applauded the recent expulsion of eight students from Saltus Grammar school for bullying, after one received a rib fracture when “birthday bumps”, a long-held tradition at the school, got out of hand.“I have heard all about what happened at Saltus,” said Ms Dixon-Wells. “I am in full agreement with what the principal, Ted Staunton, did. I talked to him about the whole incident. If people actually knew all of the details they would be in 100 percent agreement. The principal was very brave to do what he did, knowing there would be backlash.“I suspect these kids weren’t bad kids at all, they just got caught up in it. It is not like they didn’t know what they were doing was wrong. We had been there for a week working with the kids, three months before the incident. These kids knew what they were doing was wrong and they chose to do it anyway. They chose to do it and here are the consequences. The school, itself, has been working on bullying since the beginning of 2010. All of the kids involved were in an assembly about respect. Were these boys just not listening? Dwayne Peace will be talking with the students there this week.”Ms Dixon-Wells said bullies can be found in schools everywhere. And she said bullying has the potential to occur whenever any group of young people or adults are brought together, whether it be for activities like swim club or Girl Guides or at the workplace. “In every school, there are kids who don’t think it is a problem being mean,” she said.She said bullying was a learned behaviour 100 percent of the time.“We always tell the kids [that] no child when they are born, has stamped on their head ‘you shall be a bully’. Bullying is learned primarily at home. The school can play a part in encouraging bullying by ignoring bullying behaviour,” she said. “Schools are not to blame but play a huge role in recognising it and dealing with it.”Although bullying of one sort or another can happen at any age, Ms Dixon-Wells said children don’t really begin bullying before the age of eight or nine.“A lot of people will say the typical victim is smaller than the other children or shy,” she said. “But it is often their personality and their reaction to bullying that attracts bullies. If the child reacts as though they are scared, sad or frustrated, they will continue to be targetted. If they have positive self-esteem and are able to speak for themselves, the chances of being bullied are less. And sometimes it’s the kids who go against the grain, or do speak out who are bullied. We tell the students we work with, isn’t it unfair that the ones who are trying to make a difference are the ones who are targetted? We talk about shifting the balance of power away from the few who have it to the rest of us.”She said what Dare to Care does with students depends on their age. With very young children the group makes presentations and works on the skillsets they need to deal with bullies. With older primary school children, Dare to Care works on increasing awareness of bullying.“Many of them have become so used to it they see it as normal,” she said. “It is about giving them some solid skills to deal directly with the bullying. In the middle school and high school levels it is more of letting the kids understand that everyone has a story. If you knew their story you would have more compassion. If you get to know their story you will be less quick to judge. It is about letting kids understand that they are not alone. It is also about understanding that everyone has a role to play to stop bullying.”She said that the advent of the internet and proliferation of cell phones and other high-technology devices had added a whole new component to bullying.“The whole issue of cyber-bullying up until four or five years ago wasn’t on our radar,” she said. “Now, in almost every school we go to, the majority of kids including primary school children have access to computers, cell phones and to texting. Cyber-bullying is cowardly, easy to do and kids really don’t truly understand the impact it is having on the recipient. They think if they are hiding behind their cell phone when they do it, then there is nothing wrong with it.”But she said studies have found that the written word on computer or cell phone has a longer impact than the face-to-face bullying.She also said it was a myth that bullying was a male thing.“Only relatively recently have researchers looked at the possibility that girls bully,” she said. “After 1998, we started studying what girls were doing. We call it the hidden culture of aggression because it could be happening in front of your face. It is covert. It consists of gossip, rumour and whispering and leaving people out in a very hurtful way. We lump all of that under the hidden culture of aggression. Just like cyber-bullying, what girls are doing to each other has deeper emotional effects.”She said Dare to Care has been in all the private schools on the Island and are now going into public schools. So far, feedback from parents and students has been “phenomenal”.“Students are saying this is life changing,” she said. “Staff are saying they finally feel like they know what to do and how to deal with it. Parents are relieved that we are dealing with it. The feedback has been very positive. Things really have changed. There are still some incidents of bullying, but students are starting to get it and teachers are following through and being serious about it. That is all we can hope for.”For more information about Dare to Care visit www.daretocare.ca.