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What are the long-term consequences of being bullied as a child?
Though there is no clear consensus about how bullying should be defined, experts agree that bullying can occur in a variety of ways that make it extremely difficult for victims to fight back. Whether the bullying involves emotional, verbal, or physical abuse (not to mention cyberbullying), numerous research studies have linked being bullied to mental health problems such as depression, substance abuse, social anxiety, trauma, and suicidal behaviour. But a new research study published in the journal Social Psychology of Education suggests that the effects of bullying can linger far longer than you might expect.
Carried out by three researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the study examined 480 female college students ranging in age from freshmen to seniors. As part of the research, participants were questioned about the different traumatic experiences they had from their earliest memories up to the age of seventeen. This included experience with physical and sexual abuse, being victims of crime, and experiences with bullying or cyberbullying. They were also questioned about their current psychological functioning and whether they were experiencing symptoms of depression, anxiety, and posttraumatic stress disorder.
The results showed that students reporting being bullied as children were far more likely to have mental health problems than their non-bullied peers. Experiencing bullying was also the strongest predictor of lingering post-traumatic symptoms. In fact, the results showed that childhood bullying inflicts the same degree of psychological damage as childhood physical or sexual abuse. Lead researcher Dorothy Espelage argues that females seem especially vulnerable to the emotional damage caused by childhood bullying. When compared to their male counterparts, females reported significantly higher levels of depression, anxiety, and posttraumatic stress.
“Bullying victimization significantly predicted students’ current levels of depression and anxiety – over and above other childhood victimization experiences,” Espelage said. “The prevalence of psychological distress in children who have been bullied is well-documented, and this research suggests that college students’ psychological distress may be connected in part to their perceptions of past childhood bullying victimization experiences.”
She also suggests that the psychological impact of being bullied as a child is often neglected by counselors at college treatment centres. While treatment programs are in place to provide help for college students suffering from depression and other mental health problems, they usually focus on problems students are facing in college directly and not what happened in the past. By paying more attention to the long-term impact of bullying and other types of childhood trauma, adult survivors can get the kind of help they need to learn better ways of coping.
“Practitioners, in collaboration with school officials, need to make all efforts to develop and implement programs that increase traumatized students’ sense of empowerment and control as they navigate through college,” Espelage said. “This would be possible in a campus climate that fosters supportive ties among students, and between students and the campus community."
With better training and more diverse programs, these students may well learn to overcome their previous experiences as victims and really move on with their lives.
