UNDERSTANDING BULLYING
- Secondary school and bullying
- What is bullying?
- Bullying myths and facts
- Should we be concerned about bullying?
- What do we know about bullying?
- Bystanders to bullying
Secondary school and bullying
There are many questions about the significance of the peer dynamics associated with bullying during the transition from primary school to secondary school. Some researchers speculate that the transition can cause stress that might promote bullying behavior, as students attempt to define their place in the new social structure.
We cannot assume bullying among young adolescents is a simple interaction between a bully and a victim. Instead, recent studies suggest that groups of students who support their peers bullying behaviour (bystanders) have a major impact on whether bullying situation continues and escalates. It is important for families and schools to help young adolescents learn how to manage, and potentially change, the pressure to hurt their schoolmates in order to "fit in."
The Child Health Promotion Research Centre at Edith Cowan University in Western Australia is currently conducting a Longitudinal Intervention Study Supportive Schools in Secondary Schools that looks specifically at bullying and the transition from primary schools to secondary school.
What is bullying?
Bullying means deliberately and repeatedly trying to make a person upset, angry, humiliated or afraid. Bullying is a behaviour used by a person or group who gain power over a less powerful person, who has difficulty stopping the situation.
Physical bullying
- Deliberately bumping, pulling, shoving or tripping someone again and again
- Throwing things at someone to hurt, annoy or upset them
- Hitting, punching or slapping, pinching, biting or scratching someone repeatedly
- Repeatedly touching someone who doesn’t want to be touched
Verbal bullying
Threatening
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Property abuse
- Damaging someone’s belongings
- Repeatedly stealing someone’s money
- Taking things away from someone
- Repeatedly taking or hiding someone’s belongs
Emotional bullying
- Ignoring someone or keeping them out of group conversations (known as exclusion)
- Leaving someone out by encouraging others not to have anything to do with them
- Spreading lies or stories about someone to try to get others to dislike them
- Making things up to get someone into trouble
- Stalking someone, by continually following them or giving unwanted attention, e.g. staring
Cyber bullying:
- Sending harassing, abusive or offensive emails, phone messages or SMS phone texts
- Making silent or abusive phone calls
- Spreading rumours via email or phone messages
Bullying myths and facts
Myth
Bullying is just a stage that kids go through at school. We all went through it and were fine.
Fact
Bullying is behaviour that is unacceptable and unnecessary. It can have lasting negative effects on everyone involved.
Myth
Bullying is a ‘kid’s problem’. Parents and teachers should just let kids sort it out themselves.
Fact
Bullying is not just a kid’s problem and can be very harmful. Teenagers often don’t have the skills or experience to work out how to effectively respond to bullying themselves, adults should get involved and it should be stopped immediately.
Myth
You should stand up for yourself and hit back when you are bullied.
Fact
Hitting back usually makes the bullying worse and increases the risk of serious harm. Students should ask an adult for help if they are bullied.
Myth
If a student tells someone they are being bullied, it will just make it worse.
Fact
Research shows the bullying will stop when adults and especially peers help the person being bullied.
Myth
The best way to deal with a student who bullies others is using punishment.
Fact
Research has found students who frequently bully others usually have serious mental, social and/or emotional problems themselves. These students always need to face the consequences for their actions but also need support to change their behaviour.
Should we be concerned about bullying?
To meet the academic goals of education, students must perceive their learning environment to be a safe and secure place.
Students who are bullied:
- feel unhappier at school;
- dislike school;
- view school as not a nice place to be;
- view school as an unsafe place;
- feel lonelier;
- want to avoid the school environment;
- demonstrate lower academic competence and
- have higher rates of absenteeism.
Furthermore, students who are bullied are more likely to suffer from a number of physical and mental health problems.
Students who are bullied have:
- more physical complaints;
- lower self-esteem;
- greater feelings of ineffectiveness and more interpersonal difficulties;
- higher levels of depression;
- suicidal thoughts; and
- higher levels of anxiety and worry.
Of further concern is research that suggests that these effects can be long lasting.
Students who bully others:
- feel unhappy at school;
- dislike school;
- view school as not a nice place to be;
- demonstrate lower academic competence;
- are more likely to have a criminal conviction by age 24;
- are more likely to engage in violent behaviour after leaving school than their peers; and
- are more likely to engage in behaviours such as wagging school, graffiti use, getting into trouble with police and shoplifting.
Furthermore, students who bully others:
- have a greater incidence of mental health problems;
- experience greater negative health symptoms; and
- experience higher levels of depression, suicidal thoughts and attempts to harm oneself.
Of further concern is the finding that:
- students who bullied at age fourteen tended to also bully others at age eighteen and at age thirty-two; and
- students who engaged in bullying at age fourteen tended, at age thirty-two, to have children who engaged in bullying.
What do we know about bullying?
Usually children who bully lack empathy for the child they are bullying. Teachers from the “Friendly Schools Project” reported that when they discussed bullying situations with the child bullying, the child usually had not considered how the child being bullied felt about it or how it affected his or her everyday life.
Children who frequently bully others often have high levels of anxiety, stress and depression and are more likely to experience physical and mental health problems.
Some of the factors contributing to the development of bullying include:
- Aggressive behaviour at home and elsewhere
Children who have significant role models who bully are more likely to imitate this behaviour.
- Harsh physical punishment at home
Children can bully smaller, weaker children to re-enact what happens to them at home.
- Peers that bully
Children may follow the lead of their peers if they bully or they feel they have to bully as well to fit in.
- Not enough supervision
Children who do not have enough supervision may get the idea it is all right to use bullying behaviour to get what you want. Children need to be taught that bullying is never acceptable behaviour.
- The behaviour works for them
When adults give in to children who use their power, aggression or bad behaviour to get what they want, the child learns to use this type of behaviour to get what they want.
- Pre-emptive behaviour
Some children feel they need to strike first for fear of being bullied. They feel if they use their power and assume a hostile stance it will discourage other children from bullying them.
- Getting attention
These children feel they need to use negative behaviour to attract attention. This behaviour makes them feel powerful and noticed by adults and their peers.
Bullying in the playground and the classroom
Observations in schools have found that verbal and physical bullying occur in the classroom as frequently as in the playground. However, the type of bullying differs across these contexts:
- Direct bullying occurs more frequently in the playground; and
- Indirect bullying occurs more frequently in the classroom.
Differences between boys and girls
Types of bullying
- Boys are most likely to experience direct physical bullying.
- Girls are more often the victim of indirect non-physical forms of bullying, such as exclusion and having rumours spread about them.
- Direct verbal bullying, such as cruel teasing and name calling, is most common, with boys and girls experiencing this about equally
Prevalence of bullying
- In general, girls are bullied about as often as boys.
- Boys report bullying others more often than girls.
Who bullies whom?
- Bullying is most often done by one boy or a group of boys.
- Girls are bullied by boys about as much as they are bullied by girls.
- Very few boys report being bullied by girls.
Bystanders to bullying
Bullying involves more than the students who are bullied and those who do the bullying. Most teenagers report having witnessed or seen bullying occurring. Bullying often continues because people who are involved do not talk about it and seek help. This includes people who observe bullying—the bystanders.
A bystander is someone who sees the bullying or knows that it is happening to someone else.
Bystanders who are part of the problem—those who encourage and support the person bullying or watch the bullying from the sidelines, but do nothing to intervene or help the person being bullied.
Bystanders who are part of the solution—those who seek to stop the bullying, protest it, provide support to the target or tell an adult.
We need more bystanders who are part of the solution, including adults.
Your teenager might ask you, “If I am just watching the bullying and I am not involved, how can I be part of the problem?”
The answer is: People bullying need attention so they need to have an audience. It makes them feel powerful and the centre of everyone’s attention. By paying attention to the person bullying you are giving them what they want and that encourages them to keep bullying.
What can bystanders do?
If a teenager sees another teenager being bullied he or she could:
- Ask a teacher or support person for help;
- Let the person doing the bullying know that what they are doing is bullying;
- Refuse to join in with his or her bullying and walk away;
- Support the student who is being bullied; and
- Support his or her friends and protect them from bullying by being there for them (teenagers who are alone are more likely to be the target of bullying, so encourage your teenagers to be aware of others who are left out or on their own in the school yard).
