Well-off child a new breed of school bully

Middle-class parents who spoil their children have created a new breed of playground bullies who are tormenting their classmates, British MPs have been warned.

The youngsters - dubbed "the brat bullies" - come from "nice" homes but have been brought up to always get what they want, said Michele Elliott, director of children's charity Kidscape.

Many parents refuse to believe that their "perfect child" is capable of bad behaviour when schools confront them over the problem.

Some children were arriving at school believing that they were "little gods" because their over-indulgent parents had never been able to say "no" to them, she said.

Ms Elliott's remarks follow warnings from British head teachers this month that parents who can't say no to their children are guilty of "loving neglect".

She told the House of Commons' education select committee: "In addition to children coming from homes where bullying is basically fostered, we found a whole other group of bullies who come from homes where they are so indulged that they go to school and they are little gods.

"They think that everything just revolves around them.

"We call them the 'brat bullies'."

Speaking after the committee hearing, she said it was a new phenomenon for children from educated, caring, middle-class homes to be responsible for such an upsurge in bullying.

"They are spoilt by their parents and feel that the world basically owes them, and that the other children should be as in awe of them as their families," she said.

"They expect all the teachers and other kids to kow-tow to them. If they don't, they start to bully the other children.

"The parents of these children are pretty difficult to deal with because they do not see the children in that situation."

Ms Elliott added that "brat bullies" were more likely to be girls than boys arguing that boys tended to "sort each other out".

Ms Elliott, whose charity receives 16,000 calls about bullying to its helpline every year, suggested that the rise in "only" children was partly to blame.
The new breed of bullies are not made up of thugs "who go out mugging people - it is little Miss Sunshine or little Mr Wonderful".

This month, Mick Brookes, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said some children at primary school were falling asleep at their desks because their parents did not send them to bed at a reasonable time.

David Moore, a senior inspector at Ofsted, told the committee of MPs that girls often laid themselves open to bullying by being more open about their feelings than boys and giving their tormentors ammunition to use against them.

He told the committee that girls used "non-verbal communication" to bully each other. A group of girls would walk up to one of their classmates and deliberately turn away without speaking to her in order to isolate her.

Mr Moore called for the Government to commission long-term research into the issue, arguing that the short-term projects that had been conducted failed to reveal the true picture.

He suggested that one way of tackling the problem in schools would be for teachers to warn older bullies that they could face criminal prosecution for intimidating and threatening behaviour.

Ms Elliott agreed that children must know they will face punishment if they bullied their classmates.

She condemned a method of tackling bullying known as the "no blame" approach, where children were encouraged to discuss the problem among themselves without being punished.

"If you have got bullies, these kids are going to get the message that 'nothing is going to happen to me'."

- INDEPENDENT