INTRODUCTION

There are many ways to understand school bullying, including through political, cultural and educational lenses, and the harmful impact on everyone involved. Simply expressed, bullying is an abuse of power. Bullying can be subtle or forceful. Regardless of the types of bullying behaviours occurring, it’s the lived experience of the target, bully and bystanders that injures them. Ultimately, communities, schools, families and mental health professionals need to collaborate to make schools safe. This book is aimed at helping you understand and manage school bullying more effectively. 

Bullying involves hurtful physical, psychological, social and virtual behaviours. It’s a horrible part of school life. Kids can be bullied by peers, older or younger students or teachers. The type and amount of bullying varies from subtle to direct behaviours, from teasing to physical abuse, from ‘just having fun’ to criminal behaviours. It can occur once, like a bully posting something awful about a target online, which the whole world can see and remains online forever. It can occur occasionally or constantly, by the same bully or different groups of bullies. Sadly, some kids face bullies at many different schools. Bullying is more likely to occur from ages 8 to 16, but it also continues in sport, the community, tertiary studies and in the workplace. 

Like many animals, humans can mob another person. This happens when a student is bullied by most of their class. It can include teasing, excluding, rumours, cyberbullying and physical attacks. The mob gains power and status by sticking together and blaming the target, while pretending the target deserved it. The mob often has a leader or small group who control the bullying game. In some countries, such as Japan, bullying forces every student to conform to the group norms.

We are social beings. Social connection is our neurological ticket to survival. Like animals, we need to belong to a group, tribe or family to survive. It doesn’t matter whether we’re the target of subtle teasing, exclusion, social media attacks or physical assault – when we’re bullied we can lose belief in ourselves as worthy, valued members of our tribes. A child may laugh if their brother or sister calls them an idiot, but when a peer says the same they may feel attacked. Although some bullying behaviours don’t seem that bad to adults, it’s the student’s lived experience and what those bullying behaviours insinuate that harms them.

Some adults regard school bullying as harmless, but this is far from the case. Bullying interferes with a student’s normal progression through the main physical, psychological and social developmental stages of childhood and adolescence. Bullying represents humiliation – ‘You’re no good’ – and ostracism – ‘You’re not wanted here, get out.’ It makes children feel excluded from their tribe which, in turn, threatens their social survival. Bullying attacks the social connection parts of the human brain. It catapults the brain into survival mode, releasing stress hormones that become toxic over a prolonged period of time and can change the brain forever. School bullying injures students’ physical health, and their emotional and social wellbeing. It threatens their survival as human and social being.

We are currently seeing improved public and media awareness around bullying. There’s more academic research and informed clinical practice, anti-bullying policies, voluntary and government-funded school bullying programs and increased social media resources. Rates of bullying vary worldwide due to gender, culture, country, types of bullying and research methods. It’s difficult to obtain an accurate picture, but it seems clear to me that, worldwide, rates of bullying have increased in the past decades – despite the increased awareness and interventions. 

Bullying is a major issue facing kids today. My guesstimate, based on my research and experience, is that more than 15 to 20 per cent of all students have psychological symptoms caused by school bullying.

 

The frightening facts

• Approximately 32 per cent of school children aged between 9 and 15 across 71 countries were bullied for one or more days during the previous month (UNESCO 2019).
  
• More than one third of bullied students had scores within the clinical range for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms (Idsoe et al. 2012).
  
• An average of 57 per cent of bullying victims reported symptoms of PTSD (Nielsen et al. 2015).
  
• Evidence-based interventions in schools have been shown to reduce the prevalence of bullying by between 17 and 20 per cent (Rigby 2022). Thus, despite there being many excellent school bullying programs worldwide, four out of every five currently fail!

 

The trauma of being bullied

Some students block bullying behaviours and earn the respect of peers, while others are clueless and helpless. Worldwide, thousands of children arrive at school or online for lessons, filled with fear, frustration and helplessness, knowing that they’ll be bullied again. Despite the target’s attempts at being compliant or sucking up, they feel stuck and powerless when they’re bullied. The constant fear of being bullied again, today or another day, makes them feel even more defenceless, ashamed and alone. Then weak friends abandon them, and gutless friends betray them.

Some targets are too ashamed to ask for advice and support, while others try to employ ineffectual advice from well-meaning adults, such as ‘Do nothing, walk away, tell the bully to stop.’ But whenever I ask a kid, ‘Does this work?’, they shake their head sadly and say ‘No’. They intuitively know that whatever they’ve been told to do to protect themselves will fail. They probably feel more alone and worse when the advice they take on doesn’t help. No wonder many kids regard school as a painful and even traumatic experience and many refuse to attend school because of bullying. They realise that most teachers can’t stop the bullying, and some teachers are actually bullying perpetrators. More than half the student population believes schools respond poorly to reports of bullying and that some make it worse (Rigby and Johnson 2016). Many students know someone who switched to another school to feel safer.

Many schools accept bullying as a part of life. Some adopt superficial policies to reduce it, while other committed schools take action.

Many children don’t tell their parents about being bullied because they don’t want to upset them. They feel shame, embarrassment and guilt and bear their burden alone. Many only tell adults when they’re almost breaking down. They realise that adult sympathy and advice can validate and relieve their immediate pain but may be ineffectual in the long-term and even exacerbate the bullying. They’ll never regard school as the ‘best days of our lives’. Every year we read about students whose only solution to their trauma was to harm themselves or others. Many targets retreat to their own world, suffering untold personal, physical, academic and social losses along the way.

 

Why does bullying occur?

There are many different causes of school bullying. History has proven the power of the group or mob to alienate and abuse those who are vulnerable or different. Bullying occurs within a context of intertwining systems, which include the state system, local laws and culture, the school and the family system. Bullying is a game where some students systematically abuse their power. The bullying game may continue over a period of time, sometimes years, with the same players; sometimes targets confront a different bully each time. Bullies can go on a shopping spree every year looking for suitable targets. Some students are serial targets while some are serial bullies. Some children switch from target to bully and then back again, depending on the situation.

Bullying is often centred around the three main peer groups we see in schools: the popular, cool, sporty or tough group has a higher social status; the ‘reject’ group, including the ‘nerds’ and the quiet achievers, sits at the bottom; while the average group occupies the middle. The average group manipulates the popular group to create social status; they promote and demote, connect and exclude. Students use these groups to establish their own social status. The groups, gangs or cliques change constantly. Bullies use the groups to maintain their power and status. If members of a peer group giggle out of fear, embarrassment or amusement when they witness bullying, they reward the bully. Some students build the bully’s power by joining in like a pack of wolves.

The bully may be nice in class but exclude the target in the playground or socially. The bully may be a friend or someone within the target’s social group. A group can invite a kid to join them, alienate them from decent friends and then reject them.

At an unconscious level, bullies want to embarrass their target. Consciously, most haven’t a clue that they’re bullying, or that their bullying behaviours are harmful! They seldom intend to injure the student and many become mortified and ashamed when outed as a bully!

 

Regardless of their conscious or unconscious intent, bullies cause significant damage to the target, themselves and bystanders.

 

Sadly, humans are often two-faced. We prize and despise bullies; we protect them with a conspiracy of silence, and we’re too ashamed to admit our own bullying behaviours!

Bullying is antisocial behaviour. It will always exist. Our task as adult caregivers is to support the children in our care and work out how to prevent, reduce and manage it appropriately.

Where does bullying occur?

Bullying can happen in any school: poor or wealthy, private or state, coeducational or single sex, small or large, religious or non-religious, conservative, traditional or progressive, day or boarding, city or country, anywhere around the world. It occurs at preschool, primary and high school, technical colleges and university.

Bullying is more common between children aged 8 to 16, which aligns with their search for individual and social identity.

It occurs wherever students congregate in groups: in class, on the playground, at the canteen, in toilets, at lockers, at sporting faculties, in change rooms, in isolated corridors and on school camp. It occurs while students are walking to and from school, on school buses and public transport, at after-school care programs, at local shopping centres and playgrounds, and online.

Bullying escalates in stressful cultures where everyone competes to succeed, or where a higher status predominates.

Bullying varies worldwide: collectivistic societies (such as Japan, Korea, China, Portugal, Mexico, the Philippines, India and Turkey) utilise mobdirected bullying and select a single victim, whereas individualistic societies (such as Australia, the US and the UK) enable the serial bully to focus on a number of targets. Physical bullying, cyberbullying, harassment and discrimination are criminal in some countries.

Bullying is like a bomb that splinters in all directions. It damages the target, the bully and their families, their teachers, the school, onlookers and the community.

What’s in this book

This book explains what school bullying involves, the injuries it causes and why it happens. It provides you with tools and strategies you need to support students to manage bullying more effectively. Although bullying at school occurs between students, teachers and parents, this book will focus on student-to-student bullying. While as much as possible of the information is evidence-based, it’s been simplified for busy teachers, parents and
counsellors. You should also research reputable internet sites regularly to update your knowledge.

The simple skills and strategies I share in this book  can be incorporated into therapy by psychologists, psychiatrists, paediatricians, social workers, occupational therapists, speech therapists and school counsellors. They can be taught by older siblings or peers, parents and grandparents. Anyone who creates a good rapport with the bullied student can coach them in bully blocking skills.

Harper was bullied for years by a bunch of boys at his school. One day they followed him to the bus stop and physically attacked him. The bullies were expelled from school and charged in court. Harper required two operations and suffered extensive trauma. His whole life was affected, and he took years to move on. Although bullying begins with subtle teasing, it can lead to violence and criminal behaviour.

School bullying presents as a ‘doom and gloom’ story but, fortunately, understanding the current evidence provides many different options. I hope, as you read through this book , you’ll find many ideas to help a student manage bullying and move on, equipped with essential social life survival skills.

Evelyn M. Field OAM

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Buy Evelyn M. Field's book, Bully Blocking: Empowering student to manage bullying here.