ERIC Number: EJ1097305
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2016
Pages: 17
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1750-8487
EISSN: N/A
"It's the Parents": Re-Presenting Parents in School Bullying Research
Herne, Karen E.
Critical Studies in Education, v57 n2 p254-270 2016
Public discourse about school bullying is frequently underscored by debates about the relative roles and responsibilities of parents and schools in preventing bullying. Such debates are often characterised by a sense of recrimination, with blame apportioned according to perceived negligence. In this article, I provide a critique of ways in which parents have been represented in school bullying research, and consider how these representations inform public discourse about parents in relation to bullying. I argue that prevailing representations of parents in terms of responsibility and risk are a product of the dominance of psychological conceptualisations of bullying as individual pathological behaviour which stems from child development problems associated with poor parenting. As I show, this is but one of a number of ways in which bullying has been conceptualised in the research literature and provides a limited view of parents in relation to a complex social and cultural problem. I suggest that post-structural approaches to bullying research provide an important opportunity to broaden our understanding of how parents are positioned in the social and institutional systems of power in which bullying, and responses to it, takes place; and to move beyond current counter-productive discourses of responsibility and blame.
Descriptors: Bullying, Pathology, Prevention, Risk, Parent Responsibility, Child Development, Parenting Styles, Social Systems, Power Structure, Parent Attitudes, Parent Child Relationship, Victims, Foreign Countries, Personality Traits
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Evaluative
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Australia
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A