As a child who was badly bullied at school, the whole question of 'what is bullying?' and 'how should we treat bullies?' is always something close to my heart.
I was interested to read two recent reports on the subject. The first suggested that we may have reached a stage where we cannot discern the difference between bullying and boisterous behaviour, and so interfere unnecessarily with normal child development patterns. The import of the second was simply that certain types of behaviour are always out of bounds.
A few weeks ago, I was travelling on the London Underground just as a local school was closing. A group of seven or eight teenage boys were standing by the doors being slightly boisterous, but in no way causing a nuisance of themselves. What struck me about the group, was the disparity in size of boys, obviously in the same year group, with two in particular being much smaller, and one of those being seriously overweight.
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