Use your words

LITTLE ROCK — Nuanced solutions to school-age bullying are a recent trend. Back in the day, advice from mom went, “Ignore it. Bullies hate to be ignored,” and from dad, “Toughen up. Bullies only understand force.”

Today, news stories, television shows such as Glee and lawsuits have spurred increasingly institutional attention. One of the more dynamic approaches is an offshoot of law enforcement consultant and speaker George Thompson’s set of principles, “verbal judo.”

Unlike jujitsu or karate, judo — loosely translated “the gentle way” — is a defensive martial art. Its core tenet is that assailants bring energy to a fight; its tactics then redirect that energy against them.

The basic premise of verbal judo is that all assaults begin with verbal violence, and that martial arts, with its range of offensive and defensive punches, kicks and maneuvers, is a likely place to consider tactical communication. Unfortunately, it often doesn’t.

In law enforcement, verbal judo (or the broader practice, “tactical communication”) is the art of de-escalating altercations with words and negotiations. Thompson’s specific practice has been offering certification training around the nation for several years now. At the North Little Rock police and courts, Robin Sisson was one of the first to try it.

Sisson, chief probation officer for the North Little Rock District Court, took verbal judo certification courses at the Institute of Police Technology and Management in Florida some years ago. She says she was fortunate enough to train directly under Thompson, who died last year.

Verbal judo applies to a range of occupations and stations. “We had girls that were cocktail waitresses from Reno,” she says.

In Thompson’s seminal tome, Verbal Judo: Redirecting Behavior With Words, a series of occupations are mined for their verbal judo mastery. For instance, a police officer makes an arrest after convincing an enormous, enraged man that, though he could beat the cop up, there’d be other cops behind him and worse consequences. A flight attendant bullied by a drunken passenger illustrates a basic tenet of hostage negotiations — that in order to get something, something else may have to be given up. A salesman provides a lesson in interaction when he finagles a follow-up conversation from a hostile listener, thus lengthening the term of their relationship, bettering the odds for a sale.

In 2009, Chan Lee, an acolyte of Thompson’s, began repurposing Thompson’s body of work for application in the schools. Specifically, bullying.

It has since gone nationwide on the website ManageBullying.com, and martial arts instructors like Randy Edwards and Cole Bailey, both in Fayetteville, are implementing it in their studios and taking it to classrooms in their communities.

EMPOWERMENT PRINCIPLES

Like the practice of judo itself, the basic assumption of verbal judo is that aggression is energy; to disarm aggression, one must accept its energy. The word that comes up frequently is empathy.

That doesn’t mean accepting the reasons why a bully bullies, but being able to paraphrase, mirror or mimic his charges. In any argument, telling another person “you’re being unreasonable” or “you’re wrong” is tactically ineffective. So an early lesson in Verbal Judo: Redirecting Behavior With Words is to avoid conclusions; instead, track back toward reasoning.

Imagine a bully has picked a fight over some issue. The fact that he has picked a fight is the conclusion — and wrong, of course — but to tell him he’s wrong for wanting to fight likely won’t convince him. On the other hand, asking him to justify his animosity is defusing.

For instance, a bully might say, “Hey, know-it-all, at recess you’re going to see you don’t know everything.”

The intuitive response is to lock onto the future threat of violence, but what if the student walks right up to the bully and responds, “Knowit-all? I can barely make C’s!” or “Why do you think I know it all?” The first response is self-effacing and the second inquisitive, but either prompts the bully to justify his accusation, not retract his plan of action.

Lee refutes the timeworn course of ignoring the bully and hoping he tires and stops. There are many reasons, but chief among them is that it ignores the victim’s own ability to topple a challenge.

Of course, all of verbal judo’s lessons are predicated on a child’s ability to speak up, be unintimidated — or at least unafraid enough to act — and think clearly. Edwards, who teaches such verbal negotiation at Impact Martial Arts in Fayetteville, says that’s a lot to expect in the abstract.

“I know if a bully were to harass one of my students, or even me, I know your heart rate goes up, you get that adrenaline. You’re thinking with the limbic system,” he says. “If you don’t practice verbal judo in that hyper state you won’t execute.”

Lee is candid on one key point — there may come a time when verbal negotiations break down. The bully may shove, or worse, hit. For this reason, the full verbal judo curriculum will likely stay inside martial arts academies and studios for the time being, where physical blocking and maneuvering can be practiced.

“Verbal martial arts gives you a chance to learn how to use your words first, but then, know when words aren’t working. It’s all up to the martial arts school, but there is force intervention — blocking,” he said. “Kind of like police officers. Once they begin firing at you, that’s when words have stopped working.”

BULLIES DON’T GO TO JAIL

Of course, childhood bullying is a special case of negotiation. For one, police are taught they have several “force options,” also called “steps” or a “force ladder.” The first is verbal, but the rest are physical — empty-handed control (arm lock), chemical (pepper spray), blunt instrument (a baton) and firearm. Children, and most adults, aren’t empowered with the same choice of weapons.

For another, bullies don’t typically get pulled out of school or society permanently. They are not perpetrators in the legal sense.

For a third, unlike law enforcement officers, bullied kids didn’t sign up for this duty. For that, Lee says schools can implement an “I Got Your Back” pledge that commissions all students to be more than unwitting bystanders but stand up and say, “Stop.”

Kristen Gould, the staff attorney for the nonprofit Arkansas School Boards Association, says all of this strategy ignores a fact of school-age bullying that she sees frequently — that is, the putative victim bullying back while the one thought to be the bully quietly suffers.

Verbal judo “actually sounds highly problematic ... considering how subjective an individual child’s views might be, his defense that he has been bullied might itself be bullying. I’ve found in many cases that the first one to throw the B-word is sometimes the bully, and that a false allegation that others have bullied can itself be a form of bullying.”

Lee says he experienced just such a situation with his daughter. She complained of being harassed, so Lee brought it up to the putative bully’s parents. They were shocked and told him that their daughter considers his daughter a close friend, but that his daughter was excluding theirs, pushing her outside the friend circle, and as a result, she was acting out.

“Both the Bible and Stephen Covey have this saying, seek first to understand so that you can be understood.”

EMPATHY

“I was a victim of bullying for about three years,” says Bailey, a teacher at Mid-American Karate in Fayetteville and Rogers. “Had I had verbal judo, it would have been night and day. I didn’t know how to do a proper apology.”

Did he say, a proper apology?

Bailey teaches his students that there’s more to an apology than a begrudging “I’m sorry.” What he means by an apology is something like the investigative procedure often a part of character-development programs like Outward Bound, the expeditionary education program that takes kids into the wilderness for survival skills training, teambuilding exercises and selfdiscovery.

Not all, but many Outward Bound groups implement the W.O.M.P. dispute resolution protocol:

What’s up?

Ownership: What’s my responsibility in this?

Mirror (sometimes Moccasins): Can I mirror how he’s feeling, or walk a mile in his shoes?

Plan: What’s the plan to avoid future hard feelings?

Usually, the negotiationapology ends with a fist bump or handshake.

There are two effective elements to this apology. The first is that it ends on a tacit pledge — both parties will avoid active antagonism. The second, more subtle advantage, is that it simply draws out the interaction. The longer two people face each other and seriously negotiate, the less comfortable they get as open adversaries.

This better comports with the fallacious quality of so much contemporary messaging on bullying — that it’s a clear dichotomy between meek and peace-loving victims and their overstuffed, sadistic bullies.

“What you don’t often find is a very clear situation. What you don’t often find is large, overweight, blond child with a ‘B’ on his shirt and his victims physically fragile. I don’t find a lot of classical bullying.”

More information about defusing interpersonal conflict can be found at Manage-Bullying.com and VerbalJudo. com.