Our Response to the Igbinedion School Bullying Case: It Is Our Work O, Soft Work
As someone who has spent the last three decades working with children and defending their rights in diverse capacities, as a family lawyer, family-strengthening and child safeguarding innovator, and parenting ideologue, I speak from long experience when I say this: our society must mature in the way it responds to bullying.
That is why, as I reflected on the recently reported bullying incident in Benin City, one phrase kept coming to mind, borrowed from Falz: “It is our work o, soft work.”
That phrase captures our pattern perfectly: easy work, easy responses, normal, predictable, and lame reactions that hardly put the children involved first. We respond, but we do not solve. We react, but we do not transform. We perform outrage, but we do not build culture and systems.
Our response has become painfully predictable.
First, we repost the video of the violent abuse. We circulate it endlessly across social media, from platform to platform, from chat group to chat group. But what does that achieve? As far as I am concerned, it does not solve the problem. It promotes the culture of violence. It amplifies harm. It turns the pain of a child into public spectacle.
Even where the children involved may have violated school rules or even the law, are we justified in broadcasting their identities and replaying violent moments repeatedly? How does that protect children? How does that restore order? How does that build a safer culture? It does not. It simply deepens the damage and normalises violence as content.
Second, we call for expulsion. We demand the heads of the children involved. We want swift punishment, public punishment, visible punishment. But punishment, by itself, is not a system. Expulsion, by itself, is not a culture. And outrage, by itself, is not reform.
Then we go even further: we begin to judge and publicly shame children who are only alleged to have perpetrated the bullying, sometimes displaying their photographs and identities as though they have forfeited every protection owed to them as children. That approach is deeply troubling. Children in conflict with the law, or alleged to be in conflict with the law, are not to be handled with a purely punitive mindset. The governing principle should be rehabilitative and redemptive, not destructive or vengeful. A society that claims to protect children cannot respond to children’s wrongdoing by stripping them of their dignity.
And when it takes a 91-year-old man, Chief Igbinedion, founder of the school, appearing with pomp and pageantry before there is even a semblance of institutional intervention, that raises an even deeper question: what was the school’s own safeguarding culture before public pressure began? Where were the adults? Where were the supervisors? Where were the systems? Where were the processes that should have prevented, detected, interrupted, and properly addressed such conduct?
These are the questions that matter.
And this is not an isolated pattern. We have seen similar public responses before. A disturbing video emerges. Society erupts. Social media goes into overdrive. The school reacts. Families sue. Public attention fades. Everybody goes to bed. And nothing fundamental changes.
That is the cycle.
We must stop pretending that this cycle is progress.
I have said it for three decades: those who bully are not born; they are made.
Bullying does not emerge in a vacuum. It is produced, tolerated, reinforced, and mishandled within environments. That is why any serious conversation about bullying must confront its three dimensions:
First, there is the child who bullies.
Second, there is the environment that enables bullying.
Third, there is the environment that responds to bullying.
Until we understand these three dimensions, we will keep treating symptoms and ignoring causes.
Our children are either beneficiaries or casualties of our examples.
Within the home and within the school, adults carry responsibility. Parents, school leaders, teachers, caregivers, and all those who work with children are not spectators. They are duty bearers. They owe children a duty of care. That duty is not optional. It is not cosmetic. It is not reactive. It is foundational.
A home exists to protect. A school exists first to protect before it can truly teach.
Safeguarding is not an extra duty added to education. It is the foundation that makes education legitimate. If a child is not safe, learning is already compromised. Safeguarding is not a side conversation; it is the first conversation.
Once that foundation is secure, the school can then pursue its second purpose: learning and behavioural formation. But today, too many schools focus almost exclusively on academic outcomes while neglecting behavioural outcomes. That is why many children may appear academically successful, yet remain disturbingly underdeveloped in character, empathy, self-regulation, and values.
We cannot continue to celebrate grades while ignoring broken behaviour.
What we tolerate, we teach.
What we model, children absorb.
What we excuse, they normalise.
Garbage in, garbage out.
If we want different children, we must build different systems.
That means schools must move beyond slogans and emergency reactions. They must build a culture. And culture does not appear by accident. It is built intentionally through systems. It is codified in policy. It is broken down into processes. It is reinforced through training. Adults are trained. Children are trained. Kindness is taught. Boundaries are taught. Accountability is taught. Reporting pathways are clear. Intervention pathways are clear. Consequences are clear. Support systems are clear.
That is what serious child protection looks like.
When schools and families fail to build these systems, they should not be surprised when cruelty thrives in the gaps.
We also need to move beyond purely punitive thinking. Discipline has its place, but punishment alone does not produce transformation. Societies that have made progress in dealing with youth behavioural issues have done so not merely by excluding young people, but by intentionally inculcating positive value systems, strengthening support systems, and creating environments that redirect behaviour instead of merely condemning it.
That is the maturity we need.
We must grow beyond the shallow ritual of circulating violent videos, demanding expulsions, staging outrage, and then returning to normal. That approach has not worked. It is not working. And it will not work.
We need depth, not drama.
We need systems, not spectacles.
We need responsibility, not mere reaction.
We need safeguarding cultures, not public relations responses.
If we are serious about protecting children, then we must stop doing “soft work” and start doing the hard, disciplined, sustained work of building homes, schools, and institutions where violence is neither incubated nor excused.
That is the work.
And until we do it, we will keep producing the very outcomes we claim to condemn.
Do have an INSPIRED weekend with the family.
