Matt Purcell, the founder of Social Kung Fu, has his own personal story of being bullied as a young person and has since developed a method of verbal self-defense students can use against playground bullies.
Category
đź“ş
TVTranscript
00:00 When I was six years old, I was severely bullied on school buses for my size and for my race.
00:07 And I was outnumbered by several U6 kids and I had witnesses all around me that didn't
00:11 do anything about it. And I was adopted from Korea too. So in the background, my family
00:16 broke up, lots of things are happening at home. And it made me not want to wake up in
00:20 the morning. And we just saw Sammy Tursh, who just has the world just been absolutely
00:26 in mourning. This 10-year-old boy took his own life recently because he was picked on
00:30 a school bus for his teeth and for his glasses. And they snapped his glasses and he took his
00:36 own life. And that's why I'm on a mission right now to help as many students as I can.
00:41 So obviously there's physical bullying, but there's also many other forms of bullying,
00:45 including verbal abuse. And there's that saying, "Sticks and stones can break my bones, but
00:50 words will never hurt me." And for anyone who's experienced verbal abuse, they will
00:54 know that to be very not untrue. What power do words have in your experience, but also
01:00 in the words that in the work that you do?
01:03 Yeah, life and death is in the power of the tongue and the thumbs. So words create worlds.
01:09 They get you hired, they get you fired, they can cause wars, they can create peace. And
01:13 we have like boxing and karate and MMA, these sports to physically defend ourselves. But
01:19 what's a verbal block when someone's picking on you through text? So what's a verbal block
01:24 when they're calling your name? You can't just hit them with your fist. It's not encouraged.
01:30 So that's why I started Social Kung Fu, which is Australia's first verbal self-defence training.
01:35 And yeah, so we do have verbal blocks. And the best way to be able to begin verbal blocking
01:41 is to question all the claims that are made against you.
01:44 Just expand on that for us, because obviously words can be used for really negative reasons,
01:52 but how can they be used positively in that way?
01:57 In classes, we have maths, English and science, but there isn't one on communication. And
02:03 one of the things we can do is we can teach kids, if they're being accused of something,
02:08 there's only really two modes of transport there. There is fight mode or flight mode,
02:12 but there's other modes, which is curiosity mode. So when you're accused of something
02:17 or there's gossip, which is one of the number one forms of verbal abuse or bullying is gossip,
02:22 you simply ask three questions. Three questions could be, what do you mean by that? That's
02:27 not a fight or flight response, that's curiosity. What do you mean by that? The second question
02:31 is, how do you know that's true? How do you personally know that's true? And third question
02:36 could be, can you give me some proof of that? And then we give our person that we're asking
02:43 this question a multiple choice selection. So option one, if you don't know the truth,
02:48 we should stop talking about it. Option two, I'll have to tell the teacher about this.
02:52 Option three, and that helps guide the conversation toward a positive outcome. We can teach this,
02:57 I'm teaching this around Australia and it's working.
03:00 What role can adults play in this, whether they are parents or carers or teachers, either
03:05 to help their kids if they are being bullied or if their kid is the bully?
03:11 Yeah, that's a great question. I think I want to encourage parents to do a few things. One
03:17 is be a good historian of your own personal story. I find that parents somewhat think
03:24 that they might have been like a relic to their parent, their kid to connect with them.
03:28 But kids need to connect with you in order to have great communication and to make change.
03:34 So be a good historian, find stories from your own life or things that you remember
03:38 of how bad bullying was when you were around. Two, encourage role play. So if you're in
03:43 the car, or if you're around the table, have verbal sparring sessions. So what's the situation
03:49 that someone could pick on you about something? Now you're in a sport at the moment, what
03:53 if someone said this, what would you say back? That's a really good thing. And three, anything
03:57 that happens like an event at work or at school or anything you see that your kid's being
04:02 targeted with, you need to be able to work as a team, bring the family together. We're
04:07 all together. We're like the Avengers. We're like the defenders here. Let's document this.
04:11 Let's report this. Let's find out what the process is to be able to go through to be
04:15 able to make a change.
04:15 [BLANK_AUDIO]