- Bullies are a special breed of children. The vast majority of children (60 to 70 percent) are never involved in bullying, either as perpetrators or victims. Early in development, most children acquire internal restraints against such behavior. But those who bully do it consistently.
- Their aggression starts at an early age.
- It takes a very specific set of conditions to produce a child who can start fights, threaten or intimidate a peer ("Give me the jump rope or I'll kill you"), and actively inflict pain upon others.
- Bullying causes a great deal of misery to others, and its effects on victims last for decades, perhaps even a lifetime.
- The person hurt most by bullying is the bully himself, though that's not at first obvious, and the negative effects increase over time.
- Most bullies have a downwardly spiraling course through life, their behavior interfering with learning, friendships, work, intimate relationships, income, and mental health.
- Bullies turn into antisocial adults, and are far more likely than non aggressive kids to commit crimes, batter their wives, abuse their children—and produce another generation of bullies.
- Oh yes, girls can be bullies too. The aggression of girls has been vastly underestimated because it takes a different form. It is a far more subtle and complex means of meanness than the overt physical aggression boys engage in.
To understand the behavior of bullies is to see how aggression is learned and how well the lesson is taken to heart. The existence of bullies tells us that the social needs of human beings are vastly undervalued, at least in Western culture. For the social life of kids, often thought as an accessory to childhood, turns out to be crucial to healthy development. In the long run, bullying can be a way—a desperate and damaging way—for some people to maintain a circle of human contacts.
And bullying always has a very long run. Bullying may begin in childhood, but it continues into adulthood; it is among the most stable of human behavior styles.
What's a Bully and Who Is It.
There is no standard definition of a bully, but Dan Olweus has honed the definition to three core elements—bullying involves a pattern of repeated aggressive behavior with negative intent directed from one child to another where there is a power difference. There's either a larger child or several children picking on one, or a child who is clearly more dominant (as opposed to garden-variety aggression, where there may be similar acts but between two people of equal status). By definition, the bully's target has difficulty defending him- or herself, and the bully's aggressive behavior is intended to cause distress, observes Olweus, professor of psychology at the University of Bergen.
The chronicity of bullying is one of its more intriguing features. It is the most obvious clue that there comes to be some kind of a social relationship between a bully and his victims—and most bullies are boys, while victims are equally girls and boys. And it suggests that, contrary to parents' beliefs, bullying is not a problem that sorts itself out naturally.
The aggression can be physical—pushes and shoves and hitting, kicking, and punching. Or it can be verbal—name-calling, taunts, threats, ridicule, and insults. Bullies not only say mean things to you, they say mean things about you to others. Often enough, the intimidation that starts with a fist is later accomplished with no more than a nasty glance. The older bullies get, the more their aggression takes the form of verbal threats and abuse.
Figures differ from study to study, from country to country, and especially from school to school, but from 15 to 20 percent of children are involved in bullying more than once or twice a term, either as bullies or victims. In one Canadian study, 15 percent of students reported that they bullied others more than once or twice during the term. According to large-scale studies Olweus conducted in Norway in 1983, 7 percent of students bullied others "with some regularity" But since then, bully problems have increased. By 1991, they had gone up a whopping 30 percent.
Bullies, for the most part, are different from you and me. Studies reliably show that they have a distinctive cognitive make-up—a hostile attributional bias, a kind of paranoia. They perpetually attribute hostile intentions to others. The trouble is, they perceive provocation where it does not exist. That comes to justify their aggressive behavior. Say someone bumps them and they drop a book. Bullies don't see it as an accident; they see it as a call to arms. These children act aggressively because they process social information inaccurately. They endorse revenge.
That allows them a favorable attitude toward violence and the use of violence to solve problems. Whether they start out there or get there along the way, bullies come to believe that aggression is the best solution to conflicts. They also have a strong need to dominate, and derive satisfaction from injuring others. Bullies lack what psychologists call prosocial behavior—they do not know how to relate to others. No prosocial attitudes hold them in check; they do not understand the feelings of others and thus come to deny others' suffering.
Bullies are also untroubled by anxiety, an emotion disabling in its extreme form but in milder form the root of human restraint. What may be most surprising is that bullies see themselves quite positively—which may be because they are so little aware of what others truly think of them. Indeed, a blindness to the feelings of others permeates their behavioral style and outlook.
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