Bullying : Bullying And Stress

According to the American Psychological Association, “Bullying is a form of aggressive behavior in which someone intentionally and repeatedly causes another person injury or discomfort. Bullying can take the form of physical contact, words or more subtle actions” (Bullying, 2013). People bully each other for several reasons and there are different outcomes that are a result of those reasons. People can be bullied physically, emotionally, or verbally. Bullying can take place at school or online. Bullying should be a considered a crime, but kids get away with it all the time; furthermore prevention can be used in order to keep kids safe from bullying.

Bullying is unwanted, aggressive behavior among people of all ages, but mostly school-age children. Society has been aware of bullying since around 1693, but it was not viewed as a real problem until the 1970s. “While overall incidents of school violence, such as assault and theft, have declined in the last decade, bullying is on the rise.” (qtd in Tyre) The percentage of middle and high school students that have been victimized by bullying went up from 14 percent in 2001 to 32 percent in 2009. (Tyre)

Bullying is defined as “verbal, physical, or psychological abuse or teasing accompanied by real or perceived imbalance of power” and is usually targets what children perceive as different (Olweus, 1993). Bullying is prevalent across the nation. It has devastating effects on students each day. Bullying is a problem for all students, regardless of race, gender or class. The National Education Association reports that 160,000 children are absent intentionally from school each day because they fear being bullied whether it is an attack or just intimidation by other students. This accounts for 15% of all school absenteeism (Hunter, 2012). Dan Olweus (1993) from the National School Safety Center tells us that bullying includes three parts: (1)

Bullying is a form of repetitive proactive aggression in which the bullying is unprovoked and the bully initiates the bullying behaviour. (Dodge and Cole – 1987)

Bullying is a problem that is on the rise in society; however, many individuals have a distorted view of what bullying entails. Usually when someone thinks of bullying, they assume that it is a standard part of a child’s life. This view, on the contrary, is erroneous. Bullying is actually abnormal behavior, many times, leaving victims with a dismantled self identity. Since some people do not understand the consequences of bullying, the actions of the bully often go unnoticed and are perceived as “kids being kids”. The issue of bullying goes deeper than that nevertheless. Despite the erroneous views that many individuals hold towards bullying, it is still a distortion of normal behavior in children.

An important subject that is affecting a broader amount of people today, especially our youth, is bullying. Bullying is a continuous growing field that is being examined constantly due to its complexity. An important and well known website named stopbullying.com unleashed factual information that helps, as well educates families on this topic: “In 2014, the Centers for Disease Control and Department of Education released the first federal uniform definition of bullying for research and surveillance … there are many different modes and types of bullying. The current definition acknowledges two modes and four types by which youth can be bullied or can bully others. The two modes of bullying include direct (e.g., bullying that occurs in the presence of a targeted youth) and indirect (e.g., bullying not directly communicated to a targeted youth such as spreading rumors) … the four types of bullying include broad categories of physical, verbal, relational (e.g., efforts to harm the reputation or relationships of the targeted youth), and damage to property.”

Bullying can be describes as an aggressive behavior from an individual that feels the need to overpower, and control others, whether physically or mentally. The term “bullying” is thrown around a bit excessively these days that we go to extremes when we hear the word, we either ignore it completely or we go off the handle and want to stamp everyone as a bully. As a society we have become desensitized to term while at the same time trying to stay politically correct, in other words we tend to look the other way, but when approached by others about it we try to save face. At times we even try to avoid explaining Darwins Theory of Evolution or in other words “natural selection” and label it as bullying. At the end of the day we need to address

Bullying is the act of intentionally injuring a person’s mental or physical well-being through words, emotions and physicality. Bullies at school are always in the group that those students are not properly educated by parents or psychologically affected by their parents at a young, they may have been

Understanding the notion of bullying is undermined by an individual’s point of view, life experience, and personality. What some people declare as bullying others shake off as a typical behavior of kids. Whether the bias also has a base in gender or age the issue that needs to be dealt with is the damage done to the victim and the mental health needs of the perpetrator. The question regarding bullying is about norms and responses to violations of the norms. How students and adults interpret the actions, reactions, and feelings are tied to the level of open communications that exist. Adults often believe it when the student says ‘I’m fine’ because they want to believe it. Students are quite skillful about saying what they think adults want to hear. This lack of communication at home and school leaves a student who is being bullied isolated and vulnerable.

Olweus (1993) defined bullying as a behavior that leaves a child “exposed, repeatedly and over time, to negative actions on the part one or more other students” (p.9). He furthered explained a “negative action” as a behavior that “intentionally inflicts, or attempts to afflict, injury or discomfort upon another” (p.9). A negative action can be carried out verbally, as in teasing, name calling, or in physical forms such as pushing, hitting and making gestures. The behaviors listed above have been distinguished into two separate types of bullying, direct and indirect bullying. Direct bullying consists of open and physical attacks on a victim, while indirect bullying includes social isolation and intentional exclusion from groups. The three characteristics that must be present to label bullying, according to Olweus (1993) are harmful intent, imbalanced of power of strength, and repetition of negative actions.

Bullying is said to occur when a child is the target of any behaviour that is (1) harmful or done with intent to harm; (2) repeated or occurs over time; and (3) characterized by an imbalance of power, such that the victim does not feel that he or she can stop the interaction (Raskaukas et al. 2010). Bullying is also defined as using superior strength or influence to intimidate (someone), typically to force them to do something (oxforddictionaries.com). Bullying has many characteristics but usually comes in the form of verbal abuse, physical aggression or relational victimization. The first two forms of bullying have sometimes been called “direct bullying” as they include directly aggressive behaviour. Relational victimization is the manipulation of peer relationships in order to exclude someone (Rothon et al. 579-588). There are other forms of bullying such as cyberbullying. Cyber bullying is the use of technology to harass, threaten, embarrass, or target another person (kidshealth.org/en/parents/cyberbullying.html)

Many kids all around the world are abused by their parents, peers or even by complete strangers. One of these types of abuse is bullying. At a first glance, we might think that it is an older kid beating/teasing a younger classmate however; bullying consists of much more than this. The basic definition of bullying is when your behavior hurts or harms another person physically or emotionally. There are many different types of bullying, which may lead to a victim becoming violent later on. There is teasing and name calling, there is also picking and shoving the kid. However, the most extreme one would be beating up the child, hurting them physically and mainly, emotionally.

The general definition of bullying is, “… [This] states that a person is being bullied when he or she is exposed repeatedly and over time, to negative actions on the part of one or more other persons” (Aluede et al. 3). There are two different variations in bullying type such as direct and

What is bullying actually? "Bullying is the general term applied to a pattern of behavior whereby one person with a lot of internal anger, resentment and aggression and lacking interpersonal skills chooses to displace their aggression onto another person or a person who is habitually cruel or overbearing, especially to smaller or weaker people" ( Craft, 2006, para.2 ). It is usually regularly repeating action which can take many forms, such as assault, tripping, intimidation, rumor-spreading and

Bullying is a repeated aggressive behavior where one person is in a position of power to harm or abuse someone else. There are three main characteristics when incidents occur with bullying. One of the characteristics of bullying is intentional; behavior is an aggressive and deliberate attempt to hurt someone. A second characteristic involves the repeated aggressive actions, which occur over time to the same target or group of targets. The third characteristic involves a power-imbalance where the person bullying has more power over the target being bullied (“What is bullying?” 1).