School bullying


School bullying, like bullying outside the school context, refers to one or more perpetrators who have greater physical strength or more social power than their victim and who repeatedly act aggressively toward their victim. Bullying can be verbal or physical. Bullying, with its ongoing character, is distinct from one-off types of peer conflict. Different types of school bullying include ongoing physical, emotional, and/or verbal aggression. Cyberbullying and sexual bullying are also types of bullying. Bullying even exists in higher education. There are warning signs that suggest that a child is being bullied, a child is acting as a bully, or a child has witnessed bullying at school.
The cost of school violence is significant across many nations but there are educational leaders who have had success in reducing school bullying by implementing certain strategies. Some strategies used to reduce or prevent school bullying include educating the students about bullying, restricting of recording devices in the classroom, employing security technology, and hiring school safety officers. How schools respond to bullying, however, varies widely. Effects on the victims of school bullying include feelings of depression, anxiety, anger, stress, helplessness, and reduced school performance Empirical research by Sameer Hinduja and Justin Patchin involving a national sample of US youth have found that some victims of school bullying have attempted to commit suicide, and suicides do occur.
This behavior is not a one-off episode; it must be repetitive and habitual to be considered bullying. Students who are LGBTQIA+, have parents of lower educational levels, are thought to be provocative, are perceived to be vulnerable, or are atypical or considered outsiders are at higher risk of being victimized by bullies. Baron defined such "aggressive behaviour as behaviour that is directed towards the goal of harming or injuring another living being who is motivated to avoid such treatment".
Historically, Thomas Hughes's 1857 novel Tom Brown's School Days details intensive school bullying, but the first major scholarly journal article to address school bullying appears to have been written in 1897. Research in school bullying has dramatically expanded over time, rising from 62 citations in the 90 years between 1900 and 1990, to 562 in the 4 years between 2000 and 2004. Since 2004, research on school bullying has mushroomed.

Criteria

Bullying is a subcategory of aggressive behavior that is characterised by hostile intent, imbalance of power, and repetition over a period of time. More ordinary types of student-student conflicts, which are sometimes part of everyday school life, are not associated with an imbalance of power. In contrast to more ordinary conflicts, school bullying can severely harm victimized students.

Power imbalance

By definition, bullying involves an imbalance of power. A bully has power over another student because of factors such as size, gender, age, standing among peers, and/or assistance by other students. Among boys, bullying tends to involve differences in strength; among girls bullying is more focused on differences in physical appearance, emotional life, and/or academic status.
Some bullies target peers with physical impairments, such as speech impediments. Many stutterers experience some degree of bullying, harassment, or ridicule from peers and, sometimes, teachers.

Warning signs

Signs that a child is being bullied may include:
  • unexplainable injuries,
  • symptoms of anxiety and post-traumatic stress,
  • lost or destroyed clothing or other objects,
  • changes in eating habits,
  • declining grades,
  • continual school absences,
  • self-harm,
  • suicidal ideations, and
  • becoming overly apologetic.
Signs that a child is bullying others may include:
  • getting into physical or verbal fights,
  • getting sent to the principal's office frequently
  • having friends who bully others, and being problematic, and
  • becoming increasingly aggressive in normal activities.
Signs that a child has witnessed bullying include:
  • poor school behavior,
  • emotional disturbance,
  • depression,
  • post-traumatic stress,
  • drug and alcohol abuse, and
  • suicidal ideation.

    Control of bullying

There are two main methods employed in controlling bullying: Prevention or reaction.
Preventative solutions may include:
  • Education: The education of students, parents, and teachers as to what constitutes bullying may help people understand the harmful nature of bullying. Teachers, school bus drivers, and other school professionals are taught how and when to intervene. Examples of activities used to teach students about bullying include: presentations, role-play, discussions about identifying and reporting bullying, teaching bystanders how and when to help, use of arts and crafts to build understanding of the effects of bullying, and classroom meetings to talk about peer relations. Furthermore, there are some actions such as dialogic conflict prevention and resolution that have been demonstrated to be effective in reducing violence rates and improving convivence in different scholar contexts. It involves all community, including not only the aggressor and the victim but also spectators, as it has been proved that they have an important role in this violent situation.  
  • Restrictions on recording devices: It has been suggested that the use of mobile phones can lead to an increase in cyberbullying, which is why some schools have banned them throughout the school day.
  • Security technologies: Schools may opt to install video cameras to monitor behaviour. However, skeptics argue that cameras may invade the students' privacy, especially if lax restrictions on the longevity of, and access to, the recordings leads to their misuse.
  • Guards in the school: Schools may choose to employ internal security guards or watchmen to ensure the students' safety. Experts believe that the use of security guards inside the schools may assist in reducing incidents of bullying as the guards get to know the students and who may then be able to predict and prevent issues before they arise.

    Types of bullying

There are a number of ways in which school bullying takes place. These include verbal, physical, psychological, cyber, and sexual bullying. Direct bullying refers to an open physical or verbal attack on a victim. Indirect bullying is more subtle and harder to detect, but involves one or more forms of relational aggression, including social isolation via intentional exclusion, spreading rumors to defame the target's character or reputation, making faces or obscene gestures behind the target's back, and manipulating friendships or other relationships. Pack bullying is bullying undertaken by a group. There is evidence that pack bullying was more common in high schools than in lower grades and lasts longer than bullying undertaken by individuals.

Physical

Physical bullying is any unwanted physical contact between the bully and the victim. This is one of the most easily identifiable forms of bullying. Examples include: fighting, hazing, headlocks, inappropriate touching, kicking, pinching, poking, hair pulling, punching, pushing, slapping, spitting, stalking, or making unwanted and persistent eye contact with a victim, spilling liquids onto a victim, throwing small and lightweight objects at a victim, teasing, threatening, tickling, using weapons including improvised ones, theft and/or damaging of personal belongings.

Emotional

Emotional bullying is any form of bullying that causes damage to a victim's psyche and/or emotional well-being. Examples include: spreading malicious rumors about people, "ganging up" on others, ignoring people, provoking others, belittling or saying hurtful things.

Verbal

Verbal bullying are slanderous statements or accusations that cause the victim undue emotional distress. Examples include: foul language or directed at the victim; using derogatory terms or deriding the person's name; commenting negatively on someone's looks, clothes, body, etc., ; tormenting, harassing, mocking and belittling, threatening to cause harm, taunting, teasing, and making inappropriate sexual comments.

Cyberbullying

Coupled with the increasing use of computers and the internet, the use of such technology and social media has moved some bullying from the schoolyard to the internet. According to the website Stop Cyberbullying, schools experience difficulties in controlling off-campus bullying due to the perception that their role stops at the gates of the schoolyard. Schools are under pressure to not exceed their authority and to avoid violating students' right to free speech. Suggestions have been made that principals act to include cyberbullying in their code of ethics, allowing disciplining of bullying outside of school facilities and according to Professor Bernard James, "the timidity of educators in this context of emerging technology is working in the advantage of the bullies". Educators do appear to have support from the students. For example, three high school students from Melville, New York, organized a Bullying Awareness Walk, where several hundred people turned out to show their support.
Researcher Charisse Nixon found that students do not reach out for help with cyberbullying for four main reasons:
  • They do not feel connected to the adults around them
  • The students do not see cyberbullying as an issue that is worth bringing forward
  • They do not feel the surrounding adults have the ability to properly deal with the cyberbullying
  • The teenagers have increased feelings of shame and humiliation regarding the cyberbullying.
Research suggests that cyberbullying is sometimes an extension of bullying already taking place elsewhere.
Students who are cyberbullied have, in many cases, also been bullied in other ways before. There are few students who are bullied exclusively over the Internet. Some cyber victims are physically stronger than cyber bullies, which leads these bullies to prefer online confrontations to face-to-face contact.
Cyberbullying is defined as aggressive, intentional act of harm by a group or individual using electronic forms of contact, and it is done repeatedly and over time, against a victim who cannot easily defend themselves. Cyberbullying is a relatively complex and relevant phenomenon during the adolescent age period with serious negative consequences for both victims and aggressors. Research demonstrates that learning experiences of cyberbullying are significantly associated with maladaptive behaviors in school, a general increase in aggression, and maladaptive personality traits.