Dr. Paul Downes:

I will come in with regard to the Genesis programme. I served on its committee for a while so I know it pretty well. The area-based childhood programmes present a great opportunity. They represent a key underutilised lens for a community vision on bullying, as do the local area partnerships. I firmly encourage the committee to make some recommendation in this regard. Many of these have already been developing social and emotional education initiatives. They tend to focus on the younger years while a lot is also needed for adolescents. The scope of some of these groups does not stretch to the adolescents in their remit. It is certainly a structure. There are the area-based childhood, ABC, initiatives. That is a community-based structure which has great potential.

With particular regard to KiVa, in our formal submission to the committee we raised concern with particular regard to the peer defenders aspect of KiVa. It is questionable both legally and psychologically. Those are aspects to be considered.

With regard to the point on resilience, Professor Cefai may disagree with me but I am concerned about some of the discourse around resilience because it risks blaming children who are suffering for supposedly not being sufficiently resilient. I do not believe we need to make Teflon children or children who are superheroes in the midst of adversity. I personally prefer the term "agency". We want to enable children to respond actively to situations. We need to create inclusive systems around them to facilitate their agency. One part of resilience, if I was to be committed to use the term, is stopping the cycles of self-hate. International research shows that victims blame themselves. They internalise the logic of the perpetrator, feel hopeless and engage in patterns of fatalism, which is associated with risk behaviour. Stopping those cycles of despair, self-blame and self-hate is a key dimension. Intensive supports are needed to do that but universal competences may also be involved.