In nursery, one little boy spent his day laying train tracks across the faces, arms, legs and even bottoms of his playmates. At her first school, two girls repeatedly smacked others. At her second, an almost all-white north London primary, kids followed my daughter, calling her “brown girl”.

Then came teasing for being a “swot” when the obsessive preparation for national tests revealed that she had a talent for test writing. Inexplicably, for someone coming from a very mixed school in the King’s Cross area of London, and with more than a touch of her parents’ South African accents, she was also mocked and mimicked for being “posh”.

When she moved on to secondary school, the “swot” tag followed. She was teased about riding a bike, about the clothes she wore and because her parents didn’t own a car.

Of course, at each of her schools we dealt with the bullying in the usual way. Say “no” loudly and firmly, we told her. Don’t call names or fight back, tell the teacher, tell the head. On each occasion, the most telling factor in the cessation or otherwise of the bullying, lay not so much in the school’s response to individual acts and forms of bullying, but in the ethos of the school. At the first “inner city” primary, there was an ethos of gentleness encouraged by both the headteacher and her staff.

Given the time and patience with which children were handled, and the non-bullying approach of the adults to the children, gentle intervention by the head was all that was required to stop the bullying, in spite of threats of violence from the bullies’ parents.

However, in schools where children were disciplined by being shouted at all the time, where teachers insisted that they were always right and refused to listen to children, where they refused to believe that certain forms of behaviour took place at their school, bullies could get away with almost anything.

There’s been a lot of avoidance and concession. Asking the teacher not to read her marks aloud in class. Learning to speak two forms of English. Aband-oning the much-ridiculed bike rain suit, despite poor weather.

The thing is, neither reporting bullying nor making concessions to avoid the teasing tackles the root cause of the problem. Girls and boys don’t start life being mean to others. They learn it.

The biter in our daughter’s nursery took his cue from parents who bullied the victims’ parents by insisting they were making a fuss, their little darling was provoked, he didn’t mean it. The smackers took their cue from parents whose solution to the problem was to offer to fight the victims’

parents.

Racism is learned at home, in the playground, on the streets and through the media.

Children see adults bullying and they see them get away with it. On a global level, they’ve learned that rich and powerful countries can bully poor and powerless ones to the point of destruction. No one learns as fast as a child does.

We’ve taught our daughter to ignore abusive adults on the odd occasion when she takes public transport on her own, and to ignore the racist raving whenever it comes.

But I’m beginning to think that in a racially intolerant society, she needs a bit of what we grew up with in the townships of Cape Town - a loud mouth, quickly retaliatory fists and even faster feet - with an inborn sense of when discretion is the better part of valour.

We’ve breached the principles we acquired with muesli-eating and yoghurt-drinking to let our daughter take up karate.

The next racist who spits on my olive-skinned, dark-eyed, long-haired daughter, or calls her a “Paki bastard” might get, not a firm “no”, but a bloodcurdling battle cry and maybe even a broken bone. As a back-up, she can run even harder than she can hit. The problem now is to teach her to tackle global bullying. Anti-war marches is as far as we’ve got.

Shereen Pandit is a short story writer and poet