Individual factors: Children who are active and impulsive in temperament may be more inclined to develop into bullies. With boys, physical strength compared to age peers also seems to be a characteristic, which is associated with bullying.
School factors: The social context and supervision at school have been shown to play a major part in the frequency and severity of bullying problems.
The effects of bullying can be serious and even fatal. Victims of bullying typically are very unhappy children who suffer from fear, anxiety, and low self-esteem as a result of they bullying. They may try to avoid school, and to avoid social interaction, in an effort to escape the bullying. Victims of bullying can suffer from long-term emotional and behavioural problems. Bullies tend to become aggressive adults who stand a much higher chance than average of obtaining multiple criminal convictions (Olweus, 1979).
Bullying in school sometimes consists of a group of students taking advantage of, or isolating one student in particular and gaining the loyalty of bystanders who want to avoid becoming the next victim. Teachers and the school system itself can also perpetrate bullying.
Some cases of school bullying are mentioned hereafter:
- In November 2000, Dawn-Marie Wesley, 14, of Mission, British Columbia, Canada, hanged herself shortly after three teenage girls called her. Wesley's suicide note said that bullies had threatened her and she believed death was her only escape.
- An excerpt from a Norwegian newspaper article (cited in Olweus, 1993), states the following: “For two years, Johnny, a quiet 13-year-old, was a human plaything for some of his classmates. The teenagers badgered Johnny for money, forced him to swallow weeds and drink milk mixed with detergent, beat him up in the restroom and tied a string around his neck, leading him around as a ‘pet’. When Johnny’s torturers were interrogated about the bullying, they said they pursued their victim because it was fun.”
- Another example is Hudson school bullying case, which is as follows: In March 2005, unknown students broke into a boy’s (referred to only by the initials DP) gym locker, removed his clothes and urinated on them, and threw his tennis shoes in the toilet. The locker was also “covered with shaving cream spelling out sexually oriented words.” Later that spring, two students … hung a “Mr. Clean” poster on DP’s locker in the main hallway. In one incident cited by the court, a teacher joined in on the abuse.
School violence cases - including the Columbine school shooting tragedy - highlight the serious and sometime deadly consequences of bullying behaviour. There are thousands of school bullies, and even if they are not as serious as the Columbine school bullying case, they consist a serious threat, that nobody should ignore.
