School bullying is a type of bullying that occurs in any educational setting. The statistics below demonstrate how severe and widespread the problem of school bullying is in our society.
For an act to be considered bullying, it must meet certain criteria. This includes hostile intent, imbalance of power, repetition, distress, and provocation.
Bullying can have a wide spectrum of effects on a student including anger, depression, stress, and suicide. Additionally, the bully can develop different social disorders or have a higher chance of engaging in criminal activity.
If there is a suspicion that a child is being bullied or is a bully, there are warning signs in their behavior. There are many programs and organizations worldwide which provide bullying prevention services or information on how children can cope if they have been bullied.
There is no universal definition of school bullying; however, it is widely agreed that bullying is a subcategory of aggressive behavior characterized by the following three minimum criteria:
The following two additional criteria have been proposed to complement the above-mentioned criteria:
Some of these characteristics have been disputed (e.g., for power imbalance: bullies and victims often report that conflicts occur between two equals); nevertheless, they remain widely established in the scientific literature.
According to the American Psychological Association,
40% to 80% of school-age children experience bullying at some point during their school careers.
Various studies show that students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and students with disabilities experience bullying more often than other students. The following statistics help illustrate the severity of school bullying in our society:
Statistics referencing the prevalence of bullying in school may be inaccurate and tend to fluctuate. In a U.S. study of 5,621 students, ages 12–18, 64% of the students had experienced bullying and did not report it.
According to Tara Kuther, an associate professor of psychology at Western Connecticut State University,
“…bullying gets so much more sophisticated and subtle in high school. It’s more relational. It becomes more difficult for teens to know when to intervene; whereas, with younger kids, bullying is more physical and, therefore, more clear-cut.”
Proactive aggression is a behavior that expects a reward. With bullying, each individual has a role to defend.
Some children act proactively but will show aggression to defend themselves if provoked. These children will react aggressively but tend to never be the ones to attack first.
There have been two subtypes created in bully classification; popular aggressive and unpopular aggressive.
Popular aggressive bullies are social and do not encounter a great deal of social stigma from their aggression. Unpopular aggressive bullies, however, are most often rejected by other students and use aggression to seek attention.
In a survey by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), students were asked to complete a questionnaire.
A total of 10.6% of the children replied that they had sometimes bullied other children, a response category defined as moderate bullying. An additional 8.8% said they had bullied others once a week or more, defined as frequent bullying. Similarly, 8.5% said they had been targets of moderate bullying, and 8.4% said they were bullied frequently. Out of all the students, 13% said they had engaged in moderate or frequent bullying of others, while 10.6% said they had been bullied either moderately or frequently. Some students — 6.3% — had both bullied others and been bullied themselves. In all, 29% of the students who responded to the survey had been involved in some aspect of bullying, either as a bully, as the target of bullying or both.
As you have seen from the above, the phenomenon of school bullying is highly widespread in today’s society. When a child becomes a victim of bullying, it has long-lasting effects on their self-esteem and mental health. In severe cases, it can lead to suicide.
For this reason, we should not ignore this phenomenon. If you are a victim of bullying or know someone who is, don’t hesitate to talk to your parents or teachers. You could, in fact, save someone’s life!
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*This article uses material from the Wikipedia article “School bullying”, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0 (view authors).
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