ABSTRACT
The study of bullying is now a worldwide phenomenon, but it surprises many to hear that this is a fairly recent area for scientifi c and academic investigation. In 1978, Ludwig Lowenstein published his academic paper ‘Who is the bully?’, perhaps the fi rst text written in English (rather than translations) with that keyword, and it then took more than a decade for the fi rst books on bullying written in English to appear. Valerie Besag (1989), Delwyn Tattum, David Lane (Tattum and Lane, 1989), Yvette Ahmad and Peter Smith (Ahmad and Smith, 1994) were among the earliest wave of British researchers, developing and extending the pioneering work of Dan Olweus (1973), Anatol Pikas (1975), Kaj Björkqvist (Björkqvist et al., 1982), Erling Roland (1989) and the other Scandinavians. The original work on bullying was focused on overt pupil behaviour in schools as researchers struggled to defi ne it, measure it and, ultimately, reduce it in all its forms in order to improve the quality of life for the countless children it affected. The exponential production of research material really took off in the 1990s, and continues to this day with contributions from around the globe where studies of bat nat in Vietnam, ijime in Japan and mobbning in Scandinavia offer insight into the cultural distinctiveness of a world-wide school problem.
