Illustration from the Internationally Acclaimed, Award Winning Book Why Is Everybody Always Picking On Us? Understanding the Roots of Prejudice
PROGRAMS: PRACTICAL
Level Two: Prejudice Awareness - MAP S.T.A.R.S. Youth-At-Risk™ Bully/Victim Cycle Training Program
This training encompasses the full spectrum of the bully/victim cycle – from the playground to the battlefield. It can be used after the crisis support work is successfully completed with youth-at-risk or with any group of young people in an after school or a summer program (see link below). This holistic program is necessary for all youth in understanding the relationship between their individual behavior and what occurs in society. In other words, we are the world and the world is us. Too often young people do not see this connection, seeing only the effects of what they do in their own limited perspective. Teaching them this all-inclusive and far-reaching program allows them to see the effect that they have on society as a whole and therefore can bring about a mature understanding of one’s relationship to the whole, to the world-at-large.
This unique comprehensive program is vitally important to comprehend if we want to understand how the factors that create bullying on the playground can lead to the extreme of war. The nature and structure of conflict is essentially one whole movement whether it is with a bully terrorizing children at school or a terrorist bullying people through acts of violence in their cities. Realizing this one sees the urgency to teach this holistic perspective to young people before they have been conditioned to act in ways that create conflict. Once one has been conditioned to behavior that engenders conflict it is all too often an inevitable step to carry that violent behavior into adult hood in domestic and other forms of individual and social violence. In other words, this all-inclusive program not only demonstrates how the initial bullying behavior starting in childhood can lead to adult bullying but also how they are all related to a single fundamental root cause – conditioned thinking – and how this type of thinking stimulates the emotional and fight or flight centers of the brain thus compounding the initial impulse instigated by thought that is based on a self-defeating, self-destructive understanding of how to relate to others.
