Resources On How To Handle Bullying
The APA defines bullying as “aggressive physical contact, words or actions to cause another person injury or discomfort.” Psychology Today goes further, describing it as a “pattern of deliberately harming and humiliating others. And Stopbullying.gov adds that it “involves a real or perceived power imbalance.”
In our popular consciousness, bullying used to mean Nelson and his gang of thugs on The Simpsons rolling Bart home in a trashcan. Or the countless incarnations most of us have seen in movies and television of anyone small being closed inside their locker. Almost always, the bullying was done by a single individual or a small group (typically male), and as bad as it was, the victim could escape his or her tormentors by running home or at least getting away from school.
Real kids in today’s world, though, don’t have the same luxury. With the technological advancements of the last 20 years, bullies are able to continue harassing their prey 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Kids are bullied via text message and through nasty posts on their social media profiles. Bullies can send emails and harass them in chat rooms. Some even go so far as to upload embarrassing photos or videos or create entire websites devoted to making fun of someone.
It’s important to know how far-reaching bullying can become because far too often adults can feel like kids are “safe” when they’re home or engaged in certain activities, but it’s just not true. Severe instances of bullying touch practically every part of a victim’s life, and he or she can end up feeling like there’s no escape.
Types of Bullying
Experts at bullying organizations divide bullying into four different types: physical bullying, verbal bullying, covert or social bullying, and cyber bullying.
Physical bullying is exactly what it sounds like, and it’s probably the type that we’re most familiar with. It involves any kind of aggressive contact, including hitting, kicking, pushing, and pinching, as well as property damage and stealing personal items from another person.
Verbal bullying, too, is fairly self-explanatory. Taunting, name-calling, threatening, and just generally using words to make someone else feel bad are all ways that someone can be verbally abused. Racial slurs and homophobic remarks are also included under this type of bullying.
Covert or social bullying. This kind of bullying occurs when a group of people work together to make someone feel like an outsider. They might be made the butt of unflattering rumors, feel like everyone is deliberately ignoring them, laughing at them, or making rude or menacing gestures, or find themselves excluded from games and other important events. Bullying such as this is sometimes called covert because the person or people instigating the behavior won’t necessarily harass their victim directly, but instead encourage others to engage in ostracizing behavior.
Cyber bullying has already largely been defined above, and depends more on the medium than the specific kinds of actions taken against a victim. It involves any kind of harassment or bullying that takes place using digital technologies such as mobile phones or the internet, and can be overt, covert, social, verbal, written, and more. Probably the worst thing about cyber bullying is that it can feel like there is nowhere to go to escape it, and if someone posts something embarrassing about you to the world, there’s little you can do to get rid of it.
Read more about how educators can handle cyberbullying in this article.
How to Handle Being Bullied
The National Education Association’s website has a number of horrifying statistics about bullying in America, including the fact that 79 percent of boys and 83 percent of girls say that they’ve had to deal with harassment in school, and 60 percent of teens report that they see some kind of bullying going on at least once a day.
Bullied kids say that they’re afraid of riding the bus, going to the bathroom, and even going to school at all. In fact, the National PTA website says that every day 160,000 ch