Sharjah holds 12 workshops on bullying
SHARJAH: The Child Safety Department (CSD), a subsidiary of the supreme council for family affairs (SCFA), conducted 12 educational workshops for children and youth at various schools and centres in Sharjah on bullying and how to prevent it.
The workshops were held in conjunction with the UAE’S second National Bullying Prevention Week, which is organised by the Ministry of Education (MOE), in collaboration with the Supreme Council for Motherhood and Childhood, and in partnership with 25 local and federal entities under the theme ‘Flourish Together’.
Conducted by nahla hamdan al saadi, Director of Events and Activities at CSD, the workshops targeted 590 students from eight schools, and various ‘Sharjah Children’ centres in Al Khalidiya, Al Riqqa, and Mughaider. The workshops saw great engagement from children, families and teachers.
The workshops enabled children to better understand the concept of bullying, the characteristics and behaviour of bullies and the key strategies that victims should adopt when facing bullying, which is simply defined as a deliberate and repeated aggressive behaviour by a student or group of students, with the intention of causing harm to victims, involving an observed or perceived power imbalance, with victims’ inability to react or defend themselves.
Nahla Hamdan Al Saadi said: “Bullying in schools has become one of the key issues of concern worldwide, given its devastating negative impact on children, their academic performance and sometimes their decisions to drop out of school. Unesco’s new Global Status Report on School Violence and Bullying indicates that more than one billion children around the world attend school and an estimated 246 million children and adolescents experience school violence and bullying in some form every year.