Skip to main content

Movie "Ondskan"

 

Ondskan (Evil) is a Swedish movie about a teenager called Erik Ponti who is abused by his stepfather. Because of this, he has a lot of repressed anger, sadness and frustration. But at school he is the one that bullies others and he channels his pain into violence getting into fights. After beating up a guy, he gets expelled from that high school. His mother, who is also abused by her husband and feels powerless against him, sends Erik to a boarding school hoping he gets away from the abuse at home and that he can continue studying without getting into fights.

When Erik arrives at his new school, he tries to control his violent tendencies and make his mother proud, however, at the boarding school there is a Student Council, a group of older students who hold significant power over their peers. They enforce strict control and subject disobedient students to physical and psychological punishment. The school knows this is happening, but they don’t do anything to stop it. They believe that students need to solve their problems on their own. So, when Erik discovers what is going on at the school and is bullied by the members of the Student Council, he has to decide between confronting them or trying to stop this cycle of violence that has always been present in his life.

I think one of the main points of the movie is how hard it is to break the cycle of violence and how you can be both a victim and a bully at the same time. In the movie you see how Erik is both of those things, but he tries to be better and learn from his past mistakes. In addition, at the boarding school there are a lot of students who are afraid of the Council members and they don’t agree with the violent actions, yet they are passive bystanders. They don’t do anything but with this silence they reinforce the cycle of bullying. They don’t fight against it because they feel powerless since the school doesn’t offer a safe space to speak up about these problems. Therefore, this movie also shows the important role schools have in order to prevent bullying and offer students a supportive environment. 


Finally, another thing that is well represented in the movie is the different roles in bullying like, for example, the victims (Erik and other students), bullies (the Student Council and Erik too in the past), the ringleader bully (the leader of the Student Council), the bully followers, the passive bystanders, etc.



Made by Diana Armeana Nicolaescu
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

New Definition of Bullying

 Hi everyone! The World Anti-Bullying Forum, together with UNESCO, created a Working group for establishing a new definition of school bullying. Its new definition keeps the idea that bullying requires unwanted repetitive aggressiveness and imbalance of power, and adds the idea that this power imbalance is supported by societal and institutional norms. The emphasis is now in the idea that bullying is not an affair among students but a social process. The new definition is this one: School bullying is a damaging social process that is characterized by an imbalance of power driven by social (societal) and institutional norms. It is often repeated and manifests as unwanted interpersonal behaviour among students or school personnel that causes physical, social, and emotional harm to the targeted individuals or groups, and the wider school community. You can find the document where it is explained  here . Fes
Post a Comment
Read more

Salutogenic approach and a personal opinion

  As I briefly mentioned in my previous post, on the website called PDA Bullying , among various resources, there is a section dedicated to explain the Salutogenic approach . After doing some research, it becomes clear that this approach gets its name because its main goal is to promote health and well-being . The platform aims to address bullying from this perspective, adopting a strength-based approach that focuses on individuals' potential and the creation of a cooperative community working toward a shared goal . It slightly reminds me of the No Blame Approach we studied in class, as it also refers to a method based on compassion and a solution-focused outlook , rather than assigning blame. Their aim is not simply to act against bullying, but rather to overcome it , moving beyond a simplistic understanding of bullying as just a dynamic between two individuals. Instead, they view it as a broader social process . For this reason, the protocol designed and implemented by...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Simpsons: Bull-E

  Bull-E - The Simpsons (Season 26, Episode 21) The Simpsons has reflected bullying as a complex issue through their episodes, whether through Bart’s pranks, Nelson’s struggles, or Springfield’s collective response, the show highlights the importance of addressing bullying thoughtfully and empathetically.  Many schools and communities have anti-bullying policies, but the debates arise about how to enforce them without oppressing free expression or over-penalizing minor infractions. The episode of The Simpsons reflects these concerns by showing the challenges of finding a balance. It highlights how good intentions, like preventing bullying (passing an Anti-Bullying law), can sometimes go way too far, leading to unintended consequences. Also, it brings up the difficulty of bullying’s definition, what feels like bullying to one person might seem harmless to another, that is Homer’s storyline, which reminds us that our words and actions, even if unintended, can impact on others d...
Post a Comment
Read more