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Romas Prakapas Jolanta Liubeckaitė

Abstract

Bullying is an aggressor’s behaviour when a person unable to resist is put at constant physical and psychological discomfort. Since this phenomenon is widely spread in different human communities, from pre-school educational institutions to academic communities and working associations, prevention of bullying is an urgent matter as a whole complex of actions seeking to prevent the risk of criminal behaviour and to guarantee a person’s psychological and physical security.
The subject of bullying and its prevention has been analysed by Lithuanian and foreign scientists. Although the greatest attention needs to be devoted to studying this phenomenon in the group of younger forms, bullying occurs among senior students as well.
The article deals with the issue of organisation and implementation of bullying prevention in the group of senior students (aged 15–19) at gymnasiums separated from basic schools located in municipality centres. The aim of this article is to reveal the peculiarities of bullying prevention at gymnasiums separated from basic schools. The subject of the research focuses on bullying prevention in gymnasiums separated from basic schools. The article is based on the findings of the empiric research which was carried out in a gymnasium located in the municipality centre in Eastern Lithuania and included 320 students and 23 form masters.
The article outlines the theoretical aspects of the phenomenon in terms of its conception, forms, causes and effects. It presents the situation in bullying prevention in Lithuania and discusses the main programmes implemented as well as the current practice. The article also analyses the main features of bullying prevention in gymnasiums separated from basic schools. Given the specific characteristics of bullying prevention at gymnasiums separated from basic schools, which were determined in the empiric research, the article concludes with the following findings of the empiric research: bullying on public and school transport used by schoolchildren from surrounding villages and small towns is a relevant problem to a gymnasium separated from the basic school located in a municipality centre, whose lower-form gymnasium students feel unsafe on such transport; this in turn is related to the adaptation of the gymnasium first-formers and their integration as full members of the community; rather high level of tolerance towards bullying encourages students to deal with their problems on their own—either by ignoring the occurrence of bullying or by learning to tolerate bullying taking place nearby; students are most impressed by bulling prevention events which are organised using non-traditional education forms; the majority of the adapted preventive programmes implemented on the national scale focus on schools with primary and basic education curricula, which in turn causes certain financial problems to gymnasiums separated from basic schools seeking to implement modified programmes meant for younger pupils due to absence of the target group.

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