Banter and Bullying

I personally hate banter! I really struggle with it, there has always been something that didn’t sit right about it with me. Banter is defined as the playful and friendly exchange of teasing remarks and banter is everywhere, it is in our locker rooms, in our homes and our pubs and clubs, at our barbeque lunches and it is in our schools. It is very often normalised by adults and mimicked by our children.

Yet do we consider what banter really is? It is teasing. 2-way teasing, low level teasing, but teasing. It often points out a personal trait around physical appearance, personal traits, and cultural and racial identity. In reality this low-level banter attacks another individuals personhood under the guise of being a joke.

While often dismissed as a joke and not harmful, the reality of banter is that it has an impact on people and how they view themselves. Often people will pre-empt banter by making fun of themselves to mitigate or minimise perception that they may take it personally. Banter so often leads to, or is a cover for bullying type behaviours. What begins in fun, ends in tears.

Adults, it might be argued have the maturity and social understanding to say banter is no big deal (though I have seen enough examples where this is not the case). Children and adolescents really do not yet have these skills, so very often what begins as a joke end in high levels of emotional dysregulation, fights and hurt. I think as a culture we need to re-evaluate our attachment to banter, and we certainly need to encourage our children to avoid hearing and speaking in these ways.

As we see our students make great strides forward in their skill of emotional regulation and interpersonal conflict management, we are noticing that conflicts related to banter and personal or racially motivated comments are persistent and not reducing at the same rate as other behaviours.

This is something we are looking to continue to address as a College and would love your continued partnership in.

At Green Point Christian College we believe that every student is a precious image bearer of our creator God. As I look across our College one of the things that is a great strength is the melting pot of diversity here. It is an amazing representation of the incredible creativity of our creator God.

Every student also has an amazing array of gifts and abilities, strengths and areas of growth. Every student also has a name. A name given by their family and known by God. So instead of using banter to identify a person or point out a trait, we should simply honour people with their name.

Can I encourage families to speak to your children about the nature of banter, that they do not need to be a receiver of it, and they should not be a giver of it.

As a staff we will be working to always pull up banter when we hear it in our classrooms in order to help students understand the impact of their words and the value and power of their name.

Joel van Bentum
Principal