Big Bad Bully

How kids—and parents—can wrestle with a bully. Eventually, the one most hurt by bullying is the bully himself.

By Hara Estroff Marano, published on September 01, 1995 - last reviewed on October 10, 2009

That's how Toronto psychologist Debra Pepler, Ph.D., sees it. "There is a relationship. There is a repeatedness over time. Then a glance or comment can work, setting up a whole terrifying sequence of emotions, such as anxiety," where once there was the verbal threat of aggression, or even the real thing. Then the submissiveness signals to the bully that his aggression is working. Once selected for aggression, victims seem to reward their attackers with submission.

Other researchers describe victims who actually pester the bully. There is, for example, the kid who runs after the bully: "Aren't you going to tease me today? I won't get mad." Both bullies and victims are disliked by their peers. They may be seeking each other for social contact—just because no one else will.

An Underground Activity

Bullying inhabits a covert kids-only world—right under the noses of adults. "Teachers tell us it doesn't happen in their school or classroom," reports Ladd, "when in fact it does,"—a point he teases out by giving separate questionnaires to students and teachers. "To some degree the teachers simply don't want to admit it. But there is also evidence that kids know just how antisocial their behavior is and often choose corners out of the ken of their teachers."

Nor do most parents know about it when their kids are victimized. Like Curtis Taylor, kids often think it is their own fault. So there is deep shame and humiliation. Moreover, the fear of reprisals keeps kids from saying a word. And tragically, says Ladd, the pace of parenting today doesn't leave a whole lot of room for parents to sit down every evening with their children and find out how their day went, to talk about how they are being treated by their peers.

He wishes they would, because when he asks, he hears. "We ask kids to tell us something fun that happened at school. Then we ask, 'Tell us about something that happened that was nasty.' Out pour stories about harassment, exclusion, rejection, victimization. A lot of the parents look like they're hearing about it for the first time."

When Toronto's Debra Pepler wanted to get a detailed glimpse into the world of bullies, she planted a video camera in schools and trained it on the playground, where the kids were monitored by remote microphones. In 52 hours of tape, Pepler, of York University, documented over 400 episodes of bullying, from brushes of mild teasing to 37 solid minutes of kicking and punching. The average episode, however, lasted 37 seconds. Teachers noticed and intervened in only one out of 25 episodes. The child in the 37-minute incident, says Pepler, is repeatedly kicked and thrown around by two kids (although in the vast majority of instances, bullying is one-on-one). "What's so strange to me is that he stays in it. There are lots of opportunities for him to get away. At one point a teacher even tries to break it up, and all three of them say, 'Oh no, we're just having fun.' "

"In showing other kids the tapes, I confirmed what I felt—it's so important for children to be members of a social group that to receive negative attention is better than to receive no attention at all. It's actually self-confirming. There's a sense of who I am; I am at least somebody with a role in the group. I have no way of identifying myself if nobody pays attention to me."

Or as one seventh-grade boy said to her about the victim, "It's just like he's getting paid for it to stay a part of that group. It's like being a prostitute. You do something you don't want to do and you get paid a lot of money for it." Some victims "really do silly things that feed into their victimization," she agrees. Olweus sharply disagrees. He contends that the way kids were selected for the study renders the findings "atypical." "In my experience," he insists, "the overwhelming majority of victims derive no satisfaction from victimization."

Nevertheless, Pepler's studies suggest bullying is far more common among kids than most adults either observe or admit. In a mid-sized school it happens once every seven minutes. And 4 percent of bullies are armed, at least in Toronto, an ethnically balanced city. Probably because bullying is such a covert activity, schools seem to have a hard time figuring out what to do about it. There are only scattered efforts in U.S. schools to institute any anti-bully programs, and, unlike in Scandinavia, rarely have they been tested for effectiveness.

Bullying may thrive underground, but it is a psychologically distinctive experience. It's painful. It's scary. Victims feel a great loss of control. Ask anyone who's ever been victimized even once—the memory tends to survive well into adulthood.

Not All Bullies Are Alike

Until recently, a bully was just a bully. But researchers are turning up differences among them that provide strong clues as to how the behavior takes shape. There seem to be two distinct types of bully, distinguished by how often they themselves are bullied.

To make matters slightly more complex, different researchers have different names for them and draw slightly different boundary lines. There are those bullies who are out-and-out aggressive and don't need situations of conflict to set them off, called "proactive aggressors" in some studies, "effectual aggressors" in others. Classic playground bullies fall into this camp. Their behavior is motivated by future reward—like "get me something." It's goal oriented, instrumental. Or perhaps these bullies have high thresholds of arousal and need some increase in arousal level. Hard as it is to believe, these bullies have friends—primarily other bullies. What they don't have at all is empathy; cooperation is a foreign word. They are missing prosocial feelings.