John Walsh: Tales of the City

This week is Anti-Bullying Week, and if you think that's just one more hopelessly ineffectual initiative against something which can't be fought or eradicated – like having an Anti-Catching a Cold Week – I might be tempted to agree with you. The instinct of some human beings to seek control over weaker ones is too ingrained to be curbed by positive thinking and consciousness raising. Isn't it? Bullying is the scaled-down human face of animal-kingdom predation, in which one species feeds on another. It's little comfort to the victim to be told that being called insulting names, having your maths homework rubbed out in your exercise book, and suffering a Chinese burn beside the chemistry lab are merely signs that you're part of the natural world, but kids are made stronger by being roughed up a little, aren't they?

Actually no, they're probably not. It seems to me that bullying, and the measures that can be taken against it, is going to become a hot subject in political circles. You can feel a distinct urgency in the air. There was Ed Balls, the new Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, cosying up to the Anti-Bullying Alliance last week, and Gordon Brown inviting young things from the ABA's junior management round to No 10 to brief him about kid-on-kid predation. Any minute now, David Cameron will announce that the Tories will wipe out bullying by the end of their first term in office. But they're right to take it seriously. I've heard enough experiences, from my friends' children and my own, to know that bullying is becoming a worse blight than it was 150 years ago.

In the time of Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857,) at least you knew where you were – the bully was Harry Flashman, he was roasting the backs of your legs as he held you over the study fire, and he was a complete 18-carat bastard. Today it's not so simple. The bully is often nowhere to be seen. He or she has just sent your child a text which has made her cry in her bedroom. And she's just been informed that lots of her supposed friends hate her as well. Or else the bully has spread some nasty rumour about her and suddenly she hadn't been invited to a birthday party to which everyone else is going. Or she's been rung up by an apparently sympathetic friend who encourages her to explain her sorrow, and then, in the middle of her tearful rant, she hears an odd noise and realises that the call has been switched to speakerphone, and she can now hear a whole roomful of horrible faceless people laughing at her.

Technology has made things worse because, as communication becomes more streamlined, the more it can intrude into your private life, sneaking its way into your study or bedroom, past your defences, like an assassin. The phenomenon of the untraceable poison-text message is just one more refinement. It's a shiny, glossy new accompaniment to lots of good, old traditional bullying stuff – the belittling, the mockery of differences, the collective victimising, the shunning and excluding and sending-to-Coventry, which have, in their charming way, been around since ancient Greek boys, in the playground of their academy, started calling one of their number a big poof. I remember being bullied at my Jesuit grammar school in the early 1960s, and recall my bewilderment at how quickly it spread: one minute, I was being laughed at because of my vestigial Irish accent and my passion for classical music (it was a phase), the next I was being chased across the playground by a mob including several supposed friends, caught up in God-knows-what collective hunt mentality. A sympathetic history teacher dealt with it by assigning me a minder, a dim but robust individual called Dominic, who radiated a hum of feral menace. The result was that I wasn't bullied any more, but my only intimate chum was a psychotic 13-year-old with a reading age of three and a verruca.

I got over it in time (and I know how bullying victims can hug their poor-little-me status to themselves, rather than trying to deal with it) but I know it's worse for the average 11 to 17-year-old today. The pressure to look a certain way, and walk and talk and think a certain way, to live in a little box of attitudes and behaviour patterns as laid down by some invisible dictator, is worse than ever, and the punishment for being different is death by exclusion. The capacity of pubescent schoolgirls to colonise each other's friends like medieval robber barons is astounding. And the rise of the bitchy, late-night text message is an unhappy marriage of electronics and evil. Any initiative that confronts this complex web of human predation is absolutely a Good Thing.

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According to the Today programme, there's a shortage of "skilled cleaners" in the UK (I hadn't realised that applying a squirt of Mr Muscle to a damp cloth and wiping the bath with it required extensive research and an M Phil). One enterprising chap has signed up a platoon of ex-criminals from offenders' institutions, and is trying to find them work in middle-class households. I can't see anything wrong with the idea in theory, provided you feel OK about having those footling bits of 9am small-talk about cleaning utensils ("Do you need any more, ah, scrubbers?") with a former armed robber called Nobby. It's hard enough to visualise a former inmate of Her Majesty's Prison Belmarsh in a pinny, flicking a duster over your china figurines, without imagining him, shortly afterwards, flicking through Millers' Antiques 2007 to see if they're worth liberating. And could you keep a straight face while asking him if he's any good at laundering?

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