D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
December 2010
Understanding Bullying
With bullying-related suicides in the headlines, what's behind bullying and how can it be stopped?
By Joanie Connors
Bullying made the national news again this past September when the bullying of gay teens led to a number of tragic suicides — Tyler Clementi, Seth Walsh, Raymond Chase and Asher Brown. In 2010 there have also been other bullying-related suicides, including one caused by the online harassment of a girl (Alexis Skye Pilkington), another of a 15-year-old girl harassed by nine classmates (Phoebe Prince) and one that involved the bullying of a short boy (Jon Carmichael).
Despite 40-plus years of attention to the damage it causes, the harmful cycle of bullying continues undiminished, and it is no longer limited to boys in schoolyards and alleys. In just the last year, news reports have highlighted bullying by groups of five-year-old girls, college-dormitory residents, soldiers, workplace colleagues, drivers, media pundits and national/international politicians.
"Bullying" means to intimidate, humiliate and cause harm to another, usually someone who has less power or ability to defend themselves. We tend to think bullying is simple and wrong — bad people hurting good people — and that bullying can be stopped by catching and punishing the bad perpetrators. Our movies and television programs are packed full of superheroes fighting villainous bullies, while news programs report how our real legal and educational systems are failing to make a dent in the problem.
Bullying is complex because real people are not purely "bad" or "good." Though we are born with many innate weaknesses, these can be modified by decent parenting, resources, education or individual will. Situational and relational pressures can turn a good child into a monster, or a weak child into a Gandhi or an Einstein.
One way to understand the complexity of bullying is to see how many forms it takes in our current age. Bullying has traditionally included physical abuse, psychological abuse and verbal abuse, but new forms have evolved, including cyberbullying and sexual harassment.
Physical bullying includes physical actions of abuse, including physical violence and threats of physical violence, in addition to chasing, grabbing, tripping, spitting at, stealing from and destroying property.
Psychological bullying includes spreading malicious gossip or lies about someone, excluding someone from social connections, or making them do something they don't want to do in order to shame them, show power over them and/or reduce their social standing.
Verbal bullying includes intentionally insulting, demeaning, humiliating or offending someone in order to damage their self-esteem or tease them.
Cyberbullying is verbal and psychological bullying that is carried over an electronic medium, including email, cell phones, social media, video postings, email or texting.
Hazing and sexual harassment are also forms of bullying, though they are different enough from other bulling to not be included in most lists. Hazing is an abusive initiation ritual or set of activities used for some exclusive groups such as fraternities, gangs, athletes and military units. Sexual harassment is bullying that uses sexual themes, images and messages to humiliate someone.
Bullying involves an interaction of power and disrespect. Bullying is not the linear result of a good person being confronted by a bad person; it is an interaction process. The process of bullying involves a complex layering of two dynamics, power and respect. Without power, the disrespect of bullying has little impact; without disrespect, power differences provoke little or no damage.
Power, whether psychological, social or physical, is a necessary precondition to abuse. Most bullies are either larger in size or strength, or are in positions of authority or privilege. Some bullies are simply more popular and use their social status to manipulate or humiliate social underlings or newcomers to a school or group.
We are gaining some insight into the dynamics of power in situations of abuse. People with power easily fall prey to a kind of egotism that gives less importance to the needs of others in the lower rungs of power and takes for granted their right to fulfill their own wishes at the cost of others. Psychological research in the 1960s by Phillip Zimbardo showed that just the presence of labels and symbols of authority led half or more of normal subjects to become abusive to others, or to accept abuse from those who wore those symbols.
Disrespect is the core weapon of bully abuse. Bullies commit verbal, physical or psychological actions that deny the humanity of their targets and try to bring them down. Bullying treats targeted people as lesser — less worthy of happiness, regard or freedom — and this causes emotional pain and often trauma.
Disadvantaged groups (poor people, the elderly, women) and despised/discriminated groups (gays, overweight people, Muslims) are more frequently targeted for bullying because they are more accustomed to disrespect and less likely to question or defy it. They also often have less support from others, so their abuse is more accepted, or they are less likely to be believed if they complain.
The damage from bullying includes a tremendous amount of emotional stress that can make victims prone to illness and depression, regardless of whether there was any physical attack. Bullying is often traumatic psychologically, leading to neurological changes and negative psychological symptoms such as waves of terror and numbness, despair and low self-esteem. These help explain the persistent link between bullying and suicide that has been noted for decades.
Anti-Bullying Resources
Bullying Facts by the National Association of School Psychologists — www.naspcenter.org/factsheets/bullying_fs.html Bullying Online — www.bullying.co.uk; has advice for parents, students, legal advice, school projects and sample complaint letters. Bullying in Schools, by Bully Online — www.bullyonline.org/schoolbully/school.htm Bullying in Schools from the Center for Problem Oriented Policing — www.popcenter.org/problems/problem-bullying.htm Stop Bullying Now —www.stopbullyingnow.hrsa.gov/kids Preventing and Countering School-Based Harassment: A Resource Guide for K-12 Educators, Revised Edition — educationnorthwest.org/resource/563 Bullied — www.tolerance.org/bullied; free video for grades 6 to 8 or grades 9 to 12 Cyber Safety for Children — www.tolerance.org/bullied Committee for Children — www.cfchildren.org/nonprofit offers Second Step — A Violence Prevention Curriculum and Steps To Respect — A Bullying Prevention Program Workplace Bullying Institute — wwww.workplacebullying.org |
The core damage that is done to victims of bullying is when that loss of respect is taken internally and becomes lack of self-respect. Victims often lose their sense of equalness, and internalize a damaged-victim identity. This can persist for decades, far beyond the wounds or even the memories of the abuse.
Victim identity: Research shows that people who are abused early in life can become identified with being victims. Early shaping by an abuser or an abusive culture can create a type of learned helplessness, the belief that it does no good to fight back. Young people who constantly hear abusive messages may come to believe that they are unworthy of respect and even come to hate themselves.
People who suffer repeated victimizations throughout their lives become at risk of becoming chronic victims. They seldom report even severe abuse and may easily accept harmful treatment and verbal harassment because they believe they cannot expect any better.
Criminals and abusers often target people who carry themselves with a submissive posture (stooped posture, eyes down, a tentative way of walking) for further acts of disrespect and abuse. Somehow the criminals in this research knew that people with such postures were less likely to fight back or report their abuse. In effect, they accept abuse and may even choose abusers for longterm friends and spouses because they reinforce the negative image they have grown up with.
Who becomes a bully? There seem to be two distinct paths to aggression. The first path involves early experience of overrestrictive, controlling parenting and serious abuse (psychological abuse if not physical). Psychologist David Lisak believes that bullies who received abusive treatment early in life simply choose the higher power role as a defense. Rather than let in the realization that the process itself is harmful, these abusers decide to become too mean to be hurt again.