 Hello, everybody, and welcome back to the Think Tech Hawaii Studios. This is Security Matters Hawaii. I'm Andrew, your host. Today, we're talking about a topic that we've been kicking around just a little bit. It's National Cyber Security Awareness Month. But October is also Anti-Bullying Month. And we've got a real industry professional to talk with us today. Alana Williams is with us. She's out of the East Coast, and Alana, I really appreciate you taking time today to join us. Let's talk about this problem. It seems widespread to me, and it doesn't seem to be shrinking. So thank you for joining us. Where is she? I know she's coming in here shortly. There we are. Hey, Alana, hi. Oh, hi. How are you? Great, aloha. So I'll tell you what I'd like to start off. Let's just get some of your background for our audience who may not know your work. As much as you'd care to share your history and then what you brought you up to this sort of topic that really resonates for us in the month of October. Well, great. Again, my name is Alana Williams. I'm born and raised in Sanadio, Ohio, but I live here in Montgomery. Montgomery is now my new home or second home. Through going to college here in Alabama, through being a police officer of 10 years, I just started to transition in the last two years of wanting and having the desire to teach more of law enforcement or criminal justice classes, because that's what my background is in with a bachelor and master's in criminal justice. And so I transitioned a couple years ago to teach full-time at Alabama State University instructor of criminal justice. And immediately, I saw that, yes, I had that fulfillment in what I want to do, but I didn't feel complete. And so I had to just analyzing what is it that I want to do. I realized that it was time for me to branch out on my own and to start my own business. And with that being said, I started JA Investigative Services, which is a licensed entity in the state of Alabama. And initially, I started doing what you consider the typical PR work surveillance and process serving and helping attorneys. And I said, you know what? This is still kind of not what I want to do. And so I kind of just transformed my business into doing workplace harassment investigations. And so I became a certified EEO investigator. And so this allows me to be a third party, a neutral party for any type of business organization to come in and to investigate any complaint of workplace harassment, sexual harassment, discrimination, or retaliation. And so with that being said, just being on LinkedIn and having a network connection, people started to reach out to me. And then it started to be school guidance counselors and school principals. And they said, hey, I see your credentials. I see what you're doing. Workplace harassment can be very similar to school bullying and cyberbullying and other safety concerns that we had, which you might put together a program for us. And so my first student engagement program that I put together was actually through student sexual violence. And then with that, the school wanted me to come back and do bullying and cyberbullying. And so of course, the reason why we're here today is that October is recognized as the National Bullying Prevention Month. And so what I do is I go into schools. I go with youth groups, YMCA churches. I even did a church this past Wednesday. And basically what I do, I offer engagement activities. And these engagement activities specifically for your show is going to be your bullying, your cyberbullying, and also bullying your special needs students. And so I come in and I've developed my own curriculum engagement activity with students and they range anywhere between 30 minutes and two hours, excuse me. And then what I would like to teach people is that when you're talking about deterred bullying, it takes more than just engaging students. So through my company, I do offer the prevention training with students, but I also offer the prevention training and awareness for educators, being our superintendents, being our school nurses, our teachers. And then it's very crucial to bring the parents involved. And so I can also do trainings for parents that typically is fostered by the school. I've heard that it seems a lot of the kids when this stuff's going on, whether they're on the bully or maybe the victim, let's use that word, a lot of times they're pretty adept with their devices and they'll hide their activity from adults or from, they don't really trust maybe the school administrator or they trust, don't trust their parents or they, if they're the victim, maybe they just think they'll handle it themselves. Is that a topic that comes up in the trainings that you're giving to these youth? Oh, most definitely, most definitely. Through my training, we basically, we're gonna start at the top, we're talking about what bullying is and what it looks like. And then give the specific examples. Then we also wanna definitely tell people why bullying occurs and how do we respond to it? And so when we get into that and then you start talking about how do we deter or the effects it has, it's very important to understand that your bullies tend to do these aggressive acts when adults are not around. So if they're going to do it when a teacher is not looking, a teacher stepped out the room or they're gonna do it in certain parts of the school where it's no visible adult in a hallway or on the bus, even on the bus because normally our adult is primarily concerned with driving the bus and safe transportation. And so these bullies are basically trying to get away with it. They know it, a lot of times they do know it's wrong. And so they want adults not to know about it because they know that there are consequences. What's the, in your investigations, what's sort of a motivation for the bully? Are they, is it jealousy, is it all the above? I guess what are the range of motivations? Let me ask you that, that's maybe a better question. No, it definitely, I mean from just being jealous of another person, border. They have nothing else to do at the moment, but they want attention on themselves. No self-esteem. Bullies tend to have lack self-confidence themselves or have low self-esteem. Some researchers also have said that sibling rivalry has contributed to bullying, especially when the younger sibling is being bullied and they know that they can't quote unquote beat their older sibling. They tend to wanna take it out, their frustration and anger. They tend to want to take it out on other people and then you start to look at your classmates. You start to look at your classmates and so they wanna take it out on people that's their size and their age group. And so sibling rivalry, power, most definitely power. It's an imbalance of power. It could be a real or perceived power, excuse me, power imbalance. And so again, this bully wants to feel more empowered, above, more than the person that they are bullying. And so it's so many different factors and it definitely upbringing has a lot to do with why we bully because if we haven't been, it's very important for our parents to teach our kids to be nice. That's simple to be respectful of others, to be kind, to be helpful. And so if you're upbringing and that's what you know and that's how you used to, and so there's a lot of judgmental things that's going on. There's a lot of criticism things going on. There's a lot of inequity, whether it's being race or gender that you see within your household. And then that individual is going to grow up through their youth years, just thinking that there's some type of judgment, there's some type of I'm better than you. And so yes, we definitely have just so many things. And then also we can't forget that people actually bully because they might be bullied by someone else. And so again, it's kind of similar with the sibling rivalry, but yeah, a person that's being bullied will turn around and bully someone else to make them feel better, to make them feel more empowered because someone else is making them feel like that they don't have control over themselves or power over themselves. Wow. Are these bullies, when you get to talking to them in the course of an investigation, are they aware of the pain they cause or are they surprised? Is it like, I didn't think it was that bad or what are their reactions when this is brought to them? Does it happen like all of a sudden they go, wow, I get it, I didn't understand, or is it a learning process? It sounds like it could take a while to learn that type of behavior. So maybe the unlearning of it also could take a while. Yeah, I would say is definitely a mixture there because you want to understand that a lot of kids don't understand or recognize what bullying is. As you and I talk pre-show, is that nationally, the statistics are showing about anywhere between 20 and 22% of students report that they have been bullied. I actually believe that that number is much higher and I'm actually within the last several months starting to do actual just assessments in data myself because what we find out is that students, the name calling, the teasing, the things that they feel that are being, they're harmless. The things that they feel that are just funny, it's just a joke to them, it's not serious. And so a lot of times our students are not recognizing that their actions, their acts, their behavior is actually considered to be bullying. And so when you're looking at an average rate of 20%, I think it's really important to understand what type of foundation or what type of definition are we giving these students to identify, to get them to identify if they have been a part of these statistics or not. So definitely I think it's been just a matter of students feeling like, and parents, don't forget about parents, feeling like, oh, it's just harmful, it's what kids do, that's what teenagers do, that's what best friends do. And so we tend to minimize the behavior because we're looking at it from the bully perspective and we're not looking at it from the victim perspective because how the victim is perceiving the behavior. So just because, I mean, just because it was a joke to you just because it was just meant to be funny or you were just teasing, if that person perceived it or took it as something that was harmful, that was embarrassing, that was intimidating, we have to look at how the victim received it. In your experience, are these bullies, is this their sort of the way they operate, where one bully, one guy or a person is bullying lots of people, that's just like the way they function or are they, is it, like you said, I know you talk some, maybe I got bullied so then I'm bullying someone else. Am I likely to just operate that way? What have you come across in your investigations? What I am seeing is that, yes, you do have what we call or what we've seen in the past years, the typical bully that goes around and bully other students because especially when you're talking about your different, bullying is bullying and it's wrong but you definitely have your different types of bully, bullying behavior, it could be non-verbal, it could be verbal, but when you're talking about your most dangerous, when there's some type of physical contact, whether there's, you know, push and shove and sticking your feet out to trip someone. Right, we definitely see that those that have physical contact with students tend to be, tend to have more aggressive issues and they tend to be bullying towards multiple people. But then you just have a widespread of bullying that's among the name calling. It just also just the teasing and things like that. So there are so many things, I do apologize. No worries. Okay. I thought I turned everything out. I definitely, we definitely just see that widespread to where it's just that, it's just kind of widespread because a lot of times you see bullying with the infreients, with the infrengths. It doesn't necessarily have to be with the person that is not, you know, a relation. And also you see that actually girls, girls versus guys, boys, girls tend to be at the higher number of bullying incidents when it comes to, because when you're talking about, when you're talking about name calling, isolation, ignoring people, or I'm not being your friend anymore. And so we actually are seeing a higher number of bullying among female to female, as opposed to male to male and vice versa with the two tenders. Just amazing. We're gonna take a break and pay a few bills. But with Alana Williams, do not miss the next piece. We'll be back in one minute. Aloha, my name is Victoria and I'm a host at the Adventures in Small Business. This is a collaboration between U.S. Small Business Administration, Hawaii District Office, and its partners, where we showcase the stories of local entrepreneurs and small businesses. Talk about how to start a business, talk about great tips for small business owners. Please join us every Thursday, 11 a.m. at Think Tech, Hawaii. See you soon. Mahalo. Hello, I'm Mufi Hanomet. I wanna tell you about a great show that appears on Think Tech, Hawaii. It's all about tourism. In fact, we call it Tourism 101, where we talk about the issues and challenges that faces our number one industry throughout the state. We'll have some interesting guests, very informative dialogue, and allow you an opportunity to maybe learn a little bit more about why this industry is so important for our state. It's been great for us in the past. We need it today, and especially going forward. That's Tourism 101 on Think Tech, Hawaii. Mahalo. Hey, Aloha, and welcome back to this episode of Security Matters Hawaii. We're with Alana Williams from JA Investigative Services. We're talking about bullying. We're talking about cyberbullying. This is Bullying Awareness Month. Alana, thanks so much for joining us today. Thank you. Thank you for having me. No worries. Before we went to the break, you were talking a little bit about the differences in gender and that maybe some of the females bullying other females is a worse problem than the males bullying the males. Can you tell us, expand on that a little bit for us? Again, dealing with the females, the number 10, the statistic and bullying tends to be a little bit higher because when you're looking at the certain acts of name calling, calling someone out of their name, name shaming, isolation, intentionally not speaking to them and intentionally telling your friends not to speak to this friend. Don't sit with this friend at lunch. And the hate is, of course, it's just a generalization, but those are your typical types of behavior that tend to be among your females. As opposed to the guys, they're gonna do the slap on the back of the head. They're gonna do the shoulder bump. They're gonna do the more of your physical contact. They're gonna do more of the knocking your books out of their hands and things like that. And so again, all of those acts are definitely bullying. They're definitely considered to be aggressive behavior. But again, you see it among your females and again, a lot of your female students thinks they think that is harmless. They just think that a while was mad at them in the moment and so it was okay. Or this is the way I felt in the moment, it's okay. And it's really not because you addressed it earlier that a lot of these behaviors, if it's not corrected, especially with your more aggressive behavior, then we start to see that in our workplaces. And so then we start to see these behaviors on the jobs where co-workers can't get along. Or your supervisor, your manager, your boss, they don't have good leadership skills. Or they're bullying. Their leadership style is bullying, is intimidation. And so you definitely just starts to see that when it's not addressed properly. Wow, are these patterns that show up like that? I mean, can you start with just kind of being a smart alec and then you start to become a bully or online cyberbullying somebody and then it gets escalates itself actually to become physical? Is that a typical sort of pathway? It's, I wouldn't say necessarily typical, but it could happen because one of the things that I try to make students understand is that once you start to bully someone, whether it's a bullying incident as opposed to a cyber incident, and of course when we talk about cyberbullying, we're talking about anything that's done by email over the phone, social media, chat rooms, video, videography, any of those things. And so what I try to make students understand is that once you commit to an action, once you do something, once you act on something, you cannot control the reaction, okay? Very true. And so that is so important for them to understand that when you initiate this, you do not understand or do not know how it can start as a joke and then leads to more bullying, more bullying, bringing other people involved, physical. Like you said, it could be a progression of, it could be, it turns into a fight, a physical fight between two students. And so I make them understand, again, we're talking about the perception of the individual, of the person that's being bullied. So you do not know what that person is going through at the moment. And you do not, and you cannot control the reaction of someone else. Yeah, that's such an important part. In EEO law, we teach that even to adults today because they're not aware that that other person might not be in a space to accept your joke today or whatever it is, right there. You have no way of understanding what they're feeling, what they're going through. And that's a, I think it's amazing to me when we have to teach that to adults, you know, we do EEO classes, I'm sure you've had those investigations as well. But when we get back to these kids, the, I don't wanna say they're more fragile, but I think they're growing, you know, they're learning and they're trying to figure out the world. And if the world's treating them this way, you know, what are you, what do you find that they're feeling about themselves? What do they report to you in these investigations as, you know, victims of this type of behavior? Yeah, so what, so the effects of bullying can range from very mild to dramatic. And so you're talking about effects, you're talking about social effects, you're talking about emotional effects and physical effects. And so your social effects are gonna be your withdrawal, not wanting to be around your friends anymore, not wanting to go to school activities. Their grades may start to fall. They start becoming helpless and they start feeling insecure. And so those are some of the effects socially, emotionally, loss of sleep, loss of eat, negative thoughts. So your negative thoughts and you start to believe, oh, well, I am stupid, why I am ugly, I can't, you know? And so all of these negative things, they start to internalize these negative things that are bought upon them. And like you said that, you know, youth are so much fragile. And so they have not yet learned how to deflect and deal with some of these negative things as we tend to learn the older and older we get. And then of course you have your physical effects and that's gonna be your extreme where students can self-mutilate themselves. They can start cutting on themselves. They can start burning themselves with cigarettes. And then definitely we're talking about suicide because that's a topic that needs to be discussed. Again, you don't know what that person is going through. You don't know how, even though you think is just playful, you don't understand the effect that that person is, that it has on that person having to endure that two and three times a day for five days a week and not having any peace because in this environment, you're having to deal with it. And then when you go home, when they go home, you can't just turn it off because they're internalizing. They're trying to realize or just think, well, why me? Why is it happening to me? I must be student. I must be done. And all of these things and so it's something that we definitely, it's not an on or off switch for our victims. And so again, and even with adults, we all have different levels of emotional and mental stability. And so you don't know what that child is going through. You don't know what that student is going through to feel like that, okay, this is something that they need to stop doing or feel like that their life will be so much better if they were just gone from this earth. And so I try to actually leave on that note when I engage students to make them understand it may be innocent to you, but it's having a tremendous and negative effect on the person that you bully. Are bullying victims often bullied by like more than one person or is it, have they just come across someone that just keeps pushing them and pushing them down and down or are they, do they get a victim mentality and like there's a lot of people treating them badly? Have you come across scenarios like that? Definitely and I have not seen yet today any statistics among that particular, but I can tell you that the students that are being, the students that are being bullied, they tend to identify one to two people. Okay. Then, and I will honestly say, I would say I haven't seen or even noticed a big difference of whether these two people are related friends, they run in the same circle or it's two different people. And so I'm thinking that, yeah, because I haven't, and thank you, that was a great question. I haven't noticed any one that's higher than the other. Okay. As far as the accounts of it. Okay. Well, we've got about a minute left. What would you share with the audience? What's the takeaway, your final message from your experience in this industry? Well, what can we do to help? One of the things that I try to teach all of my potential clients when we're talking about how do we deter William? Yes, I could come in and I could do student engagement with your students, but it takes a collaborated effort. And in order to keep our students safe, in order to reduce these numbers of bullying, we have to one, we have to engage our students. Two, we have to involve our parents, which means that we have to, and not many, but I actually have known a couple of school districts that they mandate, that they require that parents do one to two hours of anti-bullying training a year before school starts. And then your school officials. So we have to develop, like you, we have to develop assessments. We need to figure out how often is occurring, what location, who are the people, how are we responding to it? We need to implement policies and we need to stick by our policies. So it's a collaborative effort between the student, the parents, and your school officials or your youth groups or any way to decrease these numbers. And once you be able to put all of these entities, and it's great to come in and do one training, whatever helps because if I could come in and at least that prevents one person from being bullied and that helps great. But when you're talking about a significant number, you're talking about changing the culture, you're talking about changing the lifestyle. Yeah. Awesome. Milana, thank you very much for joining us today. Out there in the world, you got some great advice. Please take care of these kids. They need your help and they need continuing support. It's gotta be a constant process. Parents, school teachers, trusted adults. This is a problem we can work on and we can hopefully resolve. Thanks so much for joining us today. Aloha and take care.