Trauma-informed approaches can help address bullying in higher education

The theme for this year’s national anti-bullying week is to “make a noise about bullying”. But what sort of noise should we be making, especially in higher education? Here, I review recent research on bullying in tertiary education before considering the need for institutions to become trauma-informed and steps they can take to do so, arguing that rather than making noise, we should be learning to listen.

A review by Malcolm Tight revealed that bullying was “rife” in higher education, highlighting the extent to which there is no agreed definition. This lack of an agreed definition and the widespread reluctance to officialise complaints that accompany precarious employment practices obscure the fact that this, fundamentally, is an issue of relational health. To address bullying we need to nurture our relational practices, but to do this, we need to become trauma-informed.

What is trauma?

Psychiatrist and author Bessel van der Kolk defines trauma as “any event or ongoing experience with a significant impact on the survival…part of the brain”. When trauma occurs, our “automatic danger signals are disturbed, and we become hyper- or hypo-active: aroused or numbed out. As a result, we may regress into primal states of fear or aggression (i.e. resorting to our survival instincts of fight or flight), or we may become paralysed (i.e. survival instinct to freeze), unable to rationally gauge the level of threat or use reason to defend ourselves against future persecution.”

Trauma is not, therefore, the story of what happened a long time ago, but a residue taking up critical space because of the way it continues to “live inside the sufferer, fragmenting memory, distorting perception, and blocking embodiment”, according to Thomas Hübl and Julie Jordan Avritt. This fragmentation is something we need to be concerned with as educators, much as an IT specialist is concerned with fragmentation in a computer system. Trauma interferes with relationality, affecting our capacity for trust, connection and mutuality and therefore the way we function.  Trauma is a fundamental barrier to learning and development.

Trauma-informed approaches

Recognition of the ubiquity of trauma and of the need to avoid re-traumatising has led many organisations, especially in the healthcare sector, to develop trauma-informed approaches.

Trauma-informed practice promotes understanding of the ways in which present behaviours and difficulties can be understood in the context of past trauma, offering  a framework of common values, knowledge and language across services, including social care, health and education.

Trauma-informed practitioners recognise individuals’ emotional vulnerability and incorporate into their practice a set of core principles that seek to avoid inadvertently re-traumatising individuals. All of us working in HE should consider how we might apply these to teaching:

• safety
• trustworthiness and transparency
• peer support
• collaboration and mutuality
• empowerment, voice and choice
• cultural, historical and gender issues.

Perhaps most importantly, recognition is growing that such approaches are invaluable to people in supervisory or management roles. Trauma-informed practice has wider relevance and represents a whole-organisational approach to prioritising well-being and supporting everyone throughout higher education.

• Resource collection: Looking after well-being in higher education
• How to prevent cyberbullying from rearing its ugly head in universities
• The key knowledge and approaches needed for trauma-informed teaching

Championing a compassionate approach

Understanding and tackling bullying is not as simple as investigating the so-called facts and fixing “the problem”. Fundamentally, it is about changing the way we view the world. It is about changing the helping paradigm from “What is wrong with you?” to “What happened to you?”

This involves a compassionate turn to the individual(s) concerned and learning to listen with an open heart. Deep listening involves a shift from factual to empathic and compassionate listening. To do this, we must listen non-judgmentally without seeking to fix the person. This will allow us to move away from being a society based on and organised around trauma and towards one that is trauma-informed and eventually healing centred. Having compassion for ourselves while listening to people open up about bullying allows us to be more fully present in these conversations,  meeting what lives in and between us and operating from a deeper sense of who we are.

If we are to address bullying within and beyond higher education institutions, we need to create safe spaces, such as coaching circles, small discussion or working groups and peer support workshops, where it is possible to be vulnerable and view the trauma associated with bullying with kindness and compassion. We must also be able to hold ourselves accountable. This will help free up valuable energy and resources to invest in the development of non-violent communication skills that, in turn, allow us to specify what behaviours are problematic and explain how bullying impacts us and makes us feel, along with what we need to see change. 

We need universities to listen, be compassionate and prioritise relational health. Becoming a listening university starts by being unwaveringly honest and aware of what needs to change and how to get there. Just as the body keeps the score and tells us whether we are safe and healthy, the behaviours and problems that appear in the ecosystem of an organisation indicate its health. 

Glen Cousquer is lecturer and MSc programme co-ordinator in conservation medicine and One Health at the University of Edinburgh. 

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