Bullying

• 1. Introduction

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  Bullying is the use of force, coercion, hurtful teasing, comments, or threats to abuse, aggressively dominate, or intimidate others. What makes it distinct from ordinary conflict is a single defining ingredient: a perceived imbalance of power. Without that imbalance, two people clashing is just a dispute. With it, something darker takes shape. The word itself has a surprisingly tender origin. In the 1530s, "bully" meant "sweetheart," applied to either sex. By the 17th century that warmth had drained away, shifting through "fine fellow" and "blusterer" before arriving at "harasser of the weak." The verb "to bully" was not formally recorded until 1710. How a term of endearment became a name for cruelty is itself a story about power. This documentary traces what bullying actually is, who carries it out and why, how it spreads from schoolyards to offices to screens, and what happens to the people caught inside it.

• 2. A Taxonomy of Harm

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  Physical bullying is rarely the first form a victim encounters. Bullying typically begins verbally, then escalates. Verbal bullying, conducted through speech, tone, or body language, is among the most common forms. Girls are more likely to perform verbal bullying than boys, and tend to be more subtle with insults. Girls also use social exclusion to dominate others, aiming to impress those they idolize. Boys, for their part, sometimes use verbal tactics deliberately to avoid the consequences that physical bullying can bring.

  Relational bullying targets a person's reputation or social standing rather than their body. It is not overt, which means it can continue for a long time without being noticed. Social exclusion, the act of making someone feel "left out," is one of its most common expressions. Bullies use relational tactics both to raise their own social standing and to control others.

  Cyberbullying emerges when technology, typically the internet, is the vehicle. A 2019 study by The Lancet Child and Adolescent Health showed a relationship between social media use by girls and increased exposure to bullying. When an adult engages in this behavior, it may meet legal definitions of cyber-harassment or cyberstalking, offenses that can carry jail time. The internet's "online disinhibition effect" makes the behavior feel easier and less restrictive to the person doing it. Material published online often remains there indefinitely unless removed, meaning digital harm can follow a person into future job searches and relationships.

  When a group targets a single individual, the practice is called mobbing. In the workplace, mobbing can take the form of rumor, innuendo, intimidation, and isolation designed to force someone out entirely.

• 3. Inside the Bully

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  Psychologist Roy Baumeister argues that people prone to abusive behavior tend to have inflated but fragile egos. Because they think too highly of themselves, criticism and a lack of deference provoke them into violence and insults. Envy and resentment are also documented motives. Some bullies use the behavior to conceal shame or anxiety; by demeaning others, they feel empowered.

  Brain studies have shown that the region associated with reward becomes active when bullies are shown a video of someone inflicting pain on another. This is a physiological observation, not a moral judgment, but it points to something important about how gratification is wired in certain individuals.

  Researchers have also found a consistent link between bullying and the dark triad of personality traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. Of the three, psychopathy correlates most strongly with bullying, in both traditional and cyber forms. Researchers believe this is because aggression rooted in psychopathy is more likely to be unprovoked. Narcissism, the weakest of the three correlations, appears more in indirect bullying than in physical forms.

  Not every bully fits a single profile. Research on self-esteem has produced contradictory results. Some bullies are psychologically strong and enjoy high social standing; others are anxious and performing poorly academically. A combination of antisocial traits and depression was found to be the strongest predictor of youth violence in one study, while exposure to violent video games and television did not predict these behaviors.

• 4. The Bystander Problem

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  Bullying almost always has an audience. In many cases, the bully's power rests less on personal strength than on the illusion that the majority present supports them. That illusion is enough to silence witnesses. The bystander effect compounds this: the more people who are present, the less individual responsibility each one feels to act.

  Unless the bully mentality is challenged early in a group, it tends to become an accepted norm. A culture of bullying can persist for months, years, or longer when no one intervenes. Bystanders who have established their own friendship group, however, are far more likely to speak out against what they observe than those who have not. Having a social anchor makes intervention feel possible.

  Among adults, simply witnessing workplace bullying, without being its direct target, has been linked to depression. The damage is not confined to the person in the center of the situation.

  In school settings, teachers who set clear boundaries, communicate that bullying will not be tolerated, and involve administrators have been shown to reduce its incidence. Discussing bullying and its consequences with an entire class also encourages students to intervene before situations escalate. In 2016, in Canada, a mother and her son won a court case against the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board, establishing the first North American legal precedent in which a school board was found negligent for failing to protect a student from bullying. A similar case had been won in Australia in 2013.

• 5. Consequences and the Suicide Link

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  Mona O'Moore of the Anti-Bullying Centre at Trinity College in Dublin has written that individuals, whether child or adult, who are persistently subjected to abusive behavior are at risk of stress-related illness that can sometimes lead to suicide. Long-term targets of bullying can develop loneliness, depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, increased susceptibility to illness, and eating disorders. A mental health report also linked bullying to body dysmorphia and other negative psychological effects.

  Bullying alone does not cause suicide; depression is identified as one of the main reasons why bullied children die by suicide. It is estimated that between 15 and 25 children die by suicide every year in the United Kingdom because they are being bullied. Certain groups carry a higher risk, including Native Americans, Alaskan Natives, Asian Americans, and LGBT people. Feeling unsupported by family or friends makes the situation significantly worse.

  A self-report study completed in New York with students in grades 9 through 12 found that victims of bullying reported more depressive symptoms and psychological distress than those who had not been bullied. A Dutch longitudinal study on elementary students found that boys who occupy both roles, victim and bully simultaneously, were more likely to experience serious suicidal ideation than those who were only victims or only bullies. Girls with any involvement in bullying showed a higher level of risk for depression. A national survey of American students in grades 6 through 10 found that cyberbullying victims experience higher levels of depression than victims of other forms of bullying, which researchers link to the anonymity of social media.

  A Danish study found that children who talked to parents and teachers about being bullied reported a decrease in bullying, or a stop altogether, after an adult intervened. The study underscored the value of school-based programs and direct conversations between adults and the children doing the bullying.

• 6. Workplace and Professional Settings

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  The first documented use of the phrase "workplace bullying" appeared in 1992, in a book by Andrea Adams titled Bullying at Work: How to Confront and Overcome It. Workplace bullying differs from school bullying in one important respect: bullies in professional settings often operate within the established rules and policies of their organization. They are rarely breaking rules. They are working the system. Bullying is most commonly reported as coming from someone in authority over the target, though peers and even subordinates can be perpetrators.

  Certain professional fields appear to carry elevated risk. A culture of bullying is common in information technology, contributing to high rates of sick leave, low morale, poor productivity, and high staff turnover. Deadline-driven project environments and stressed managers are cited as contributing factors.

  In the legal profession, its adversarial and hierarchical traditions are thought to play a role. Women, trainees, and solicitors with fewer than five years of experience are more affected, as are ethnic minority lawyers and lesbian, gay and bisexual lawyers.

  In medicine, bullying is common, particularly toward student or trainee doctors and nurses. The American Nurses Association holds that all nursing personnel have the right to work in safe, non-abusive environments, yet bullying has been identified as especially prevalent in nursing. Conservative hierarchical structures and traditional teaching methods in medicine are thought to perpetuate a bullying cycle from one generation to the next.

• 7. Prevention and Response

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  Anti-bullying laws have been enacted in 23 of the 50 states in the United States. Prevention campaigns include Anti-Bullying Week, International Day of Pink, International STAND UP to Bullying Day, and National Bullying Prevention Month. A 2019 study by McCallion and Feder found that school-based anti-bullying programs may lower the incidence of bullying by 25%.

  One program called "Media Heroes" demonstrated that educating teachers on online bullying behaviors helped them in turn educate and stop students from engaging in it. Having trusted adults who understand what happens online is named as a key element of cyberbullying prevention. Prevention methods in schools are targeted mainly at middle schoolers, where bullying is most prevalent.

  Ignoring bullying, research shows, does not make it stop. It allows it to worsen. The teaching of anti-bullying coping skills to children, caregivers, and teachers has been found to be an effective long-term method for reducing incidence rates. Emotional intelligence is a related variable: lower emotional intelligence appears to be associated with involvement in bullying on both sides, as the bully and as the victim. Because emotional intelligence is described in research as malleable, programs that build it could improve both prevention and intervention.

  The Swedish-Norwegian researcher Dan Olweus defined bullying as exposure, repeatedly and over time, to negative actions on the part of one or more other persons. That definition, grounded in repetition and intent, is still the foundation most researchers work from. Robert W. Fuller has examined bullying specifically through the lens of rankism, the idea that the abuse of rank or position is the organizing principle behind much of what we call bullying.