Blanche Sosland wrote “Banishing Bullying Behavior: A Call to Action from Early Childhood through Senior Adulthood” for the general public and it truly is a “call to action” for all of us to help stop the growing epidemic of bullying in schools, the workplace, senior living environments and cyber-bullying.
Sosland has also co-authored two other books on bullying, with SuEllen Fried, that were more in the textbook genre.
“I feel very strongly about the subject because I see the pain that it inflicts across the board,” she said. “It’s just something that should not be and there are ways to intervene.”
Sosland said back in the early 2000s when she and Fried decided to collaborate, the first person she thought of interviewing was Judy Jacks Berman, director of Congregation Beth Shalom’s early childhood education center. At the time, Jacks Berman told her they didn’t have bullying; they taught kindness.
But times have changed. This year preschool teachers asked members of the Beth Shalom Sisterhood Banishing Bullying Behavior Project to conduct sessions for the preschool students and the staff to address the bullying behavior of their young students, Sosland said.
“The present political environment has contributed to a significant increase in bullying,” she said. “Research by the Southern Poverty Law Center during the (presidential) campaign found that 5,000 teachers responded to a survey as to the amount of increased bullying in their classrooms and increased fears of immigrant children. Children told their teachers they were afraid to leave home to come to school for fear that their parents would be picked up while they were at school.”
Sosland spent three years researching and writing this book and said she was amazed by the number of people, some in very prominent positions, who heard about it third-hand and asked to be connected with her so they could share their stories in order to spare others the pain they experienced.
Judge Howard Sachs, senior judge of the Western District of Missouri, provided her with material he had read and then passed on to her for the book.
“And then there’s Judge Howard A. Levine who received the highest honor in the state of New York that any judge can get. Why a man of his stature would take the time to read my textbooks I think speaks volumes,” she said. “Not only did he read the manuscript for this book, he even proofread it. In the acknowledgements you can see the really broad range of input in this book.”
She encourages readers to look over the acknowledgements in order to understand just how important so many people of various professional backgrounds found the message in her book.
For anonymity, she changed the names and places in the anecdotes. One person she interviewed had been bullied three times by three different bosses in 21 years. Sosland asked her why she stayed and the woman told her she felt her work was meaningful and that she was making a contribution to the community.
One of Sosland’s interviewees said he bullied because he felt that by inflicting pain on others he would alleviate his own pain.
Sosland said she interviewed dozens of lawyers, doctors and academicians and every one of them said bullying in their field was the worst. Three men, all published authors and businessmen who read Sosland and Fried’s textbooks, urged Sosland to write about workplace bullying.
In one of the anecdotes in her book, a young, single mother went to her doctor for medication and after several months the doctor told her she didn’t need more medicine; she needed to change her job, which she did.
“Eleven other people in her workplace left at the same time because of a bully, and it took the owners of the business six months to figure out what was going on,” Sosland said. “I found this doctor to have perceptive insight.”
Originally, the book was meant to be only about bullying in the workplace, but as she started to write it, she said she realized that about 50% of kids who bully in school are bullied at home by parents or siblings and that these parents go into the workplace, so they are not separate issues.
“That’s how I came to start with giving the context of early childhood and then into adulthood,” she said. “Thirty percent of the book is devoted to workplace bullying.”
Sosland said the goal is to work with children as well as adults, but the biggest hope is for children to see what they can do to stop bullying. All states are now required to have anti-bullying programs in the schools. She believes the most successful programs are the ones generated by students themselves.
“Early intervention is key and we stress this as soon as there are any signs because to me bullying is a call for help. That kid is hurting; you need to find out why and it needs to be effective, early intervention,” she said. “Kids are not born bullies; they may learn to bully because they are bullied. So if they learn to bully, they can also learn not to bully.”
Sosland also pointed out that 10-20% of senior citizens are being bullied. She gives an example in her book of an adult child being called by a social worker to intervene when it becomes apparent the child’s father is a bully in a senior residential setting.
The adult child said, “He bullied me all my life; you think I’m going to be able to change that now?”
Reviews of the book on Amazon give it five stars and an official OnlineBookClub.org review gives it four out of four stars, stating, “This book is intriguing and educative. It deals with an important subject and offers ways to solve a big problem in our society.”
“I’ve been very gratified by the reviews,” Sosland said. “I think people who have read the book have read it the way it was written and it was certainly worth the three years I devoted to it.”
“Banishing Bullying Behavior: A Call to Action” is available as a paperback through Amazon for $14.95.
Sosland, professor emerita of Park University, is a member of Congregation Beth Shalom.
