SOCIOLOGY

Bullying

Bullying

Introduction

At high school many people have horrible memories in high school; this is because they had experienced bullying. Currently, all over the world teen age bullying is one of the most fundamental problems faced by students in school. This type of bullying has a more significant impact on teenagers than physical bulling, which they may carry throughout their lives. In addition, with the immense increase in use of Internet among teens, that has increased the cases of cyber bullying. With the development of modern technology, children have more directions to socialize, interact in addition to communicate with each other than ever before. Actually, it has been reported that more than 13,000,000 children, and teenagers aged between 6 and 23, in the U.S, are victims of bullying.

Additionally, if one student harasses many other students, but only one time each, this may be excluded from this definition of bullying. Accordingly, I abandon the relative power aspect of the definition, or rather, accept the circular logic of victimization implying power inequity, and focus instead on victimization itself. I also relax the requirement of repeated victimization, acknowledging that a student may pick on her peers regularly, but no single student on a frequent basis. Therefore, I define bullying as a situation, however brief, where a perpetrator harms a victim who is a peer, using physical (hitting, tripping, etc.), direct verbal (name-calling, threats of violence), or indirect (rumor-mongering, ostracism, etc.) aggression, and in a context of a continued relationship (Coy, 2001).

Bullying

Due in large part to the pioneering work of Dan Olweus, research on bullying has tended to define it as “engaging in negative actions against a less powerful person repeatedly and over time”. However, observing and measuring the relative power of schoolchildren is complicated, and in practice, the definition is circular: if someone is being repeatedly victimized, they are less powerful.

It would appear difficult, then, to distinguish this definition of bullying from run of the mill aggression, and with more serious forms, such as homicide. The definition is intentionally broad, and has extensive overlap with standard definitions of aggression. However, it is important to note that there are forms of aggression—such as vigorous arguments and fistfights that do not have clearly discernable perpetrator and victim relations.

This definition of bullying also distinguishes it from other aggressive relations where there are clear perpetrators and victims such as homicide or armed robbery—by virtue of the continued relationship. They also found that victims can sometimes provoke bullying behaviour through their actions and only sometimes consider bullies to be stronger and more powerful than their victims. Further, prisoners do not believe that bullying must persist over a period of time or involve a power imbalance. Rather, most of the men feel that a single act can be considered bullying and that bullying can sometimes occur accidentally. This understanding of bullying differs from how bullying has been conceptualized in the literature.

Research also highlights some of the ambiguities inherent in the definition of ...