Bullying Across the Lifespan

Further connecting the various forms of violence is the fact that different forms of violence have similar risk factors for perpetrators and similar consequences for victims. Perpetrator risk factors for violence span the entire ecology and include individual, family, peer, school, community, and cultural factors. For example, individual temperament (e.g., anger, poor impulse control, substance use, viewing the world as hostile), family relationships (e.g., high levels of conflict, poor parent-child relationships, economic stress), deviant peer behavior, community characteristics (e.g., disadvantaged neighborhood, neighborhood violence, low neighborhood cohesion), and societal stressors (e.g., income inequality, high rates of poverty; Foshee et al., 2015; Sumner et al., 2015) are all risk factors for violence.

In terms of consequences, violent victimization, regardless of the form, can result in multiple negative outcomes including injury, anxiety, depression, mental health disorders (e.g., post-traumatic stress disorder, conduct disorder), eating disorders, substance use, suicidality, and death (Division of violence Prevention, 2016; See Sumner et al, 2015 for a review). 

Power Imbalance: The Key to the Bullying Dynamic

Power imbalance is the second part of the definition of bullying that requires additional explanation as this concept is quite complex and difficult to define. For example, sources of power might not align: “If a stronger but less popular girl repeatedly intimidates a weaker but popular boy, is the controlling dimension popularity, gender, or physical strength?”. To further complicate issues, if the girl is from a high socioeconomic status (SES) family and is dressed in trendy and desirable clothing and the boy comes from a low SES family and is wearing worn out hand-me-down clothing, income becomes another dimension of power.

The difficulty with the concept of power imbalance is that the significance depends upon the victims’ perceptions. If the girl’s physical strength and high SES status cause the boy to feel powerless and afraid, then he might perceive the girl to have more power and could view her repeated harassment as bullying. However, if the boy is sufficiently popular among his classmates and is supported by a group of friends and/or feels more powerful than the girl due to being a male, than he might not be intimidated by the girl’s physical strength and flashy clothing; in this case, the boy would perceive his social power and gender to be more salient than the girl’s physical strength and SES and he might view her taunting as harmless and not define it as bullying. Further, once an act of aggression has begun, the act itself can create a power differential where the perpetrator has more power than the victim. However, the aggressive act could have created this power differential or exacerbated an existing power differential. There is not an easy solution for the complexities inherent in defining and recognizing a power differential.

Forms of Bullying

Bullying includes direct aggressive behaviors that occur in the presence of the victim and indirect aggressive behaviors that occur when the victim is not present, but are still intended to cause harm. Direct and indirect bullying behaviors are classified into four types:

1. Physical bullying is physical force intended to harm the victim such as hitting, kicking, or pushing;
2. Verbal bullying is oral or written communication like name calling, teasing, or threatening;
3. Relational bullying is any action intended to harm the victims’ reputation and social relationships such as spreading rumors, excluding, or making embarrassing images of the victim public through the internet, cellphones, or other means; and
4. Bullying by property damage includes stealing and/or destroying the victim’s property

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) consider electronic bullying to be a form of verbal and relational bullying executed using electronic means (e.g., e-mail, instant messaging, chat rooms, web sites [e.g., Facebook, Twitter], gaming sites, cell phones [e.g., applications such as Instagram, Snapchat, text messages]) to harass, insult, exclude, and/or ostracize victims. Electronic bullying includes behaviors ranging from harassing text messages or pictures sent via cellphone to creating defamatory websites intended to embarrass or humiliate the victim.