ABSTRACT
What is known about bullying? Everything, it would seem. From the earliest times of public schooling, ‘the bully’ has been a recognizable figure in popular culture and common knowledge. However, until the late 1980s there were no books available in English with ‘bullying’ in the title – now there are literally hundreds. Unfortunately, mostly these books offer the same things: a mixture of knowledge based on narrow research mixed with folk wisdom. This chapter takes a very different approach to the topic of bullying for the needs of school teachers, and is intended to provoke consideration of alternative thinking to help professionals as they develop their inclusive practice, rather than offering a quick fix for bullying. So, what do we really know about bullying? Everything, possibly, apart from how to actually stop it. We know that pupil-to-pupil aggression was common long before
researchers started investigating the issue. Tom Brown’s Schooldays (Hughes 1857 [1994]) and other literature about public schools in England featured bullies as typical characters. However, the original meaning of the word suggests someone to be admired for his (always a male) physical strength and fearless dominating behaviour. Shakespeare used the phrase ‘I love the lovely bully’ in Henry V, and the accompanying Arden notes interpret it as: ‘bully – a fine fellow’ (Craik 1995). These days, we might use the term ‘alpha male’ to the same effect, with a positive spin on qualities of informal leadership. The point of this digression into etymology is to underline that meanings and understandings are not set in stone – they vary over time and also shift between social groups and cultural settings. So if you hear someone state that a child is ‘just a bully’, think twice about their right to define the term. I once carried out a bullying questionnaire survey in a high school, where
I was shocked to see that one year 7 boy reported he was hit, kicked, pushed and spat upon on an almost daily basis. Despite having one of the highest frequencies of such aggressive acts against him, he ticked the ‘I don’t think I get bullied’ box! I knew which boy had completed that questionnaire, and spoke to him in an attempt to help him. He was very matter of fact with me,
and explained that the person doing all these things to him was his big brother, one of our year 10 boys. I asked him why he didn’t feel bullied. He replied ‘everyone gets it from their older brother, don’t they? I do it to my little brother too.’ This young boy’s toughness, and his idea of bullying, prevented him from
thinking of himself as a victim. He didn’t like the beatings, but accepted them as inevitable and not even unfair. On the other hand, in the same survey some pupils ticked none of the boxes for being attacked in any way, but then ticked the boxes that showed they worried all the time about being bullied, they changed their routes around school and avoided certain times and places in case they were attacked. Would you say these children suffered because of bullying even if it had not (yet) happened to them? If the presence and fear of bullying in their school made them permanently scared and miserable, couldn’t they be called victims of bullying more than the boy that was beaten up but wasn’t worried about it? All this is very complicated and depends more on social relationships and feelings rather than simple acts and behaviours. While we do need a consensus understanding of the key terms used in
bullying so that discussion is meaningful, we just need to avoid being too dogmatic that any single definition is correct. There is a variety of definitions of bullying, but no single definition gets it right in every case. One widely accepted example comes from pioneering work carried out in Sweden since the 1970s by Dan Olweus. Olweus (1993) states that bullying is an aggressive act with an imbalance of power, has some element of repetition, and can be physical or verbal, or indirect (for example, being sent hate texts, or socially shunned). One element often missed from formulations of bullying is the sense of intimate entrapment. There is something special about bullying that includes that element of being stuck in a relationship or situation with your aggressor or tormentor. This idea is very hard to include in a short definition, but one operational definition of bullying might be ‘an interpersonal abuse of power’.
