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The panel presented a global effort to create peaceful learning environments for schools, using a framework based on psychoanalytic social systems theory. The presentations began with certain known facts about world-wide efforts to manage bullying. These have resulted in hundreds of programs which should in themselves be effective but in general are not; or, if effective, in a particular town when crossing cultural lines or even within a culture are often ineffective.
The presentation by Stuart Twemlow began with a study entitled Making schools safe again, a report on USA trials. For this presentation he redefined bullying from what he called a trielectic perspective. This shifts the focus on who needs to change from the individual victim and victimizer to the school as a whole, particularly the audience of bystanders who are generally not obviously involved or certainly not highlighted by the trouble caused by the bully-victim interaction. In shifting the focus to the bystander, they become active participants in the bullying process. Members of the community may become abdicating bystanders using rationalizations such as ‘I pay my taxes and teachers and police should keep schools safe and academically strong’ … In our studies the focus is on two elements. One is to improve mentalizing in the school community as a whole, and the other is to improve children's grasp of individual power dynamics that can cause power struggles, including bullying within the school system. We hypothesized that there is an inverse relationship between mentalizing and power dynamics so that a school in which power dynamics are managed in a friendly and helpful way, rather than acted out in power struggles, is a school in which mentalization can occur.
The Peaceful Schools Project of the Menninger Clinic and the Baylor College of Medicine, a three-year cluster randomized controlled trial, involved between 3000 and 4000 students in nine mid-Western elementary schools, K- 5, and some 300 teac