Bullying

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I have a thread on PPR about defining bullying, and I'm hoping that it turns into an interesting discussion. I did want to ask the question here too though, because a lot of people who post on the parents forum don't usually post in the others and I wanted some feedback from parents as well.

My question is how do you define bullying? If someone were mean or rude to your child would you automatically go with "bullying" or would you think it might be something else? Is intent to bully needed, and is there a level of seriousness that needs to be there for it to be bullying or can someone be bullied in a very trivial way? Can we define it as anytime you feel bullied you are, or should we have conditions that have to be met?

I ask this because I see so much on WP and also in the news about people being bullied, and I know that there are policies in place to stop it but what I'm wondering is how we can know when it's bullying so we can stop it? What criteria do we use to judge it? If we make a kid write sentences and stay in at recess for being mean or rude or name calling and we suspend a kid for three days for bullying, how do we know which thing it is? Is exclusion bullying too? If Billy has a birthday party and hands out his invitations at school because that's where he sees his friends and doesn't see them outside of school and he doesn't invite Patty because he doesn't like her, then is he bullying her or does he simply not like her? Should the school forbid him passing out the invitations or should they insist that he invite her or be suspended for three days or should they stay out of that?

If your co-workers are stuck up snotty girls who talk about everybody and you hear them talking about you, are they bullying you or are they just being b*tches? Should you go to your boss about it and insist that they be punished or should you ignore them?

My point is, what do you think defines bullying and what criteria should there be for it. Also, how should it be dealt with in school? Should kids be forced to play with others they don't like or should they be allowed to choose who they play with at school? Would the bullied kid feel better or worse if the school did force them? I know I would probably feel horribly self conscious if the school had forced the kids to play with me in school. As much as I wanted to be included I think that I would have felt worse if they were forced to include me.

Also, how do you think it's best to stop bullying? Should punishment be the answer or could we prevent it by educating kids and making bullying seem uncool? Should we do both and could we do both?

So, what would your definition be of bullying when it's your child that is being bullied?

Bullying to mean is when someone repeats a negative behaviour towards someone, causing discomfort (physically, emotionally, psychologically, sexually, etc). A person can be mean, disrespectful and rude but to define that behaviour as "bullying" it would have to occur multiple times and towards one specific person or group.

I seem to have a rather...I don't know...stringent?...definition of bullying. It seems to me that anytime someone does something that someone doesn't like, it is called bullying these days. I think that trend minimizes what I see as "true" bullying. As a kid and teenager, I was the "victim" of both "regular teasing" and bullying, and let me tell you, there is a difference. At least there was for me. The "regular teasing" was just something that was a annoying part of growing up as an unpopular kid. The bullying left scars that took years to heal.

To me, bullying is when someone repeatedly and intentionally behaves in a way toward a target that causes him/her to feel public humiliation or fear for their own safety or intimidation. There is definite intent. The bully either wants you to suffer humiliation or s/he wants you to feel fearful/intimidated.

True bullies are not simply rude or insensitive to the feelings of others. They are intentionally trying to cause feelings of humiliation and/or fear/intimidation. They take pride in their ability to do this and "get off" on the rush of the power of control over someone else. The more fearful or humiliated you feel, the bigger their rush.

I am already aware that my opinion is not usually very well received. It seems that to most people mean=bully. I think it is much more malicious than that. Plenty of kids were mean to me in one way or another. I really do think that is a part of growing up. Not everyone is nice; but most people are not bullies, even if they are not nice. For me, there were only a very few who set out with the intent to humiliate me and got personal gratification from knowing they did it. I bet on a psychological profile level, they are an entirely different breed than the kids who just needed to learn to put themselves in someone else's shoes.

InThisTogether, I completely agree with you. I sometimes get flack on here when someone talks about something being bullying and I tell them that I don't think that is bullying. That doesn't mean the actions are OK or right, they are still wrong but not bullying.

I also think that it will minimize actual bullying when people start calling everything bullying. It's like the boy who cried wolf. Have you ever seen those videos on YouTube of the lady with AS who talks about all the cars that go up and down her street and bully her? It seems there is an auto parts store on her block and people sometimes work on their cars or bikes there and rev them, which bothers her. So, she yells out the door at them to stop because she's autistic. She also films the people who come down her street with their radios loud and loud mufflers. She states that they are bullying her also. I don't think they are bullying her at all even though they are being inconsiderate to her and everyone else who lives on that block. I've heard people say that their kid was bullied when other kids didn't want to invite them to a party or play with them at recess. That's mean and rude, but again, it's not bullying. If the kid invited them to play with the intention of making them think they were friends and finding out personal information that they then told everyone in school, that would be bullying. Exclusion, while painful, isn't bullying.

People are going to end up ignoring serious bullying because they hear so much about it when it's something that isn't bullying, their knee jerk reaction will be to totally disregard it. That worries me because then the kids who are being hurt will fall right through the cracks and nobody will do anything to help them, because it's become a nonissue.

Another problem with labeling anything you don't like another person doing as bullying, especially if you have impaired social skills, is that there is always, always the chance (more than chance, really, the likelihood) that you are doing or saying or will soon do or say something that is insensitive, rude, or offensive. So then there is the very good chance that you have just hurt someone's feelings, completely unintentionally, yet by the definition you mentioned, like the woman saying the loud cars are bullying her, you are now a bully.

I, for one, do not like to think of myself as a bully. I try very hard to not behave in an offensive way, but I will do something that someone finds offensive if I hang around a place long enough. It won't be intentional. I don't think that makes me a bully.

Here is a situation. In another group I belonged to, there were a lot of Aspies. Now I am not diagnosed, maybe I wouldn't even qualify, but I do have social skills issues at the least. There was one member who had been around for a long time, and had the older members convinced she was a saint. She was not Aspie, maybe something else that requires a lot of attention and power, but definitely not Aspie. As long as she was around, people fought all the time. No one ever knew how the fights really got started or why they kept going long after most people were well past the point of wanting to quit. I met someone from another group that this woman had belonged to, and she told me that the same thing happened there. That as long as this woman was around, fighting happened, and she always managed to look like the victim. Only she finally targeted enough people that they banded together and made her leave. Things had been much more peaceful since.

I did something that in hindsight was very insensitive and just generally a stupid thing to do. It seemed good at the time. It was exclusionary and hurtful in reaction to the constant fighting that she instigated. I didn't do it with the intention to be hurtful, but the whole 'the road to Hell is paved with good intentions' thing gets me. I apologized profusely. Made myself scarce for a few months as penance. When I came back, things seemed settled. She was talking like she wanted to make things up. She continued instigating fights and playing the victim in the public setting. Then she used sockpuppets and forged chat logs to crucify me in the public opinion of the group. In her heyday, she had at least twenty group members terrified of her. She had made it where every one in that group had no good reputation with the leadership, though I think she did the most damage to me. I went from respected and nominated for a leadership position (even considering the stupid thing I done. The group had moved past that) to that pariah that hangs around even though no one likes them. She could say anything and it would be believed. She finally picked on enough people that the group leaders were starting to get wise to her and she left in a blaze of drama. It's going on two years now, and I'm still hurt over it.

How do you rank things that hurt other people's feelings?

She had every intention of maliciously stalking and hurting people. I was naive and insensitive and I hurt people.

We both did something hurtful. Are we both bullies?

I also think that for it to be bullying it has to be a pattern of mean behavior with intent to, as was said humiliate, degrade, beat up, abuse etc. a person and/or include a group of people doing said actions. There could be an isolated single act that does not (by this definition, anyway) constitute bullying but that would be much worse than something that constituted a mild form of bullying. So I also agree that something could be really heinous but not be bullying, whereas a minor amount of teasing done on a regular basis, might constitute bullying, albeit a mild form..

As far as excluding people: I think people have the right to associate with whom they wish to socialize. If they make a big production about it (as mean girls often do) then I think it can rise to the level of bullying. A simple "No, we don't want to play with you," is not enough in my opinion) It is hurtful, sure, but that does not in itself constitute bullying.

I dont understand whats so bad about a kid, inviting his friends for his birthday party? At a birhtday you want to have fun with the person you like, that are your friends. Why should you be forced to invite someone that you dont want at your party, and why should the school be involved with it? Classes have up to 30 kids, so its pretty impossible to invite the whole class. Because of that you simply invite your friends. I think it would be pretty rude, to force someone to lie that he would like a kid and would be friend to a kid, when this isnt true.

For me working is about working. If they are sabotaging my work in any way, then I need to take care of that problem. As long as they dont mix their personal feelings against me, not with our working business, I dont care what they chat privately.

No! O_o OMG, simply imagine that your kid would come home from school, is exhausted and stressed, and then he gets forced to act as a clown the whole rest of a day for another kid he dont like. I dont care, because if a kid feels better, when people get forced ruin their free time to be a slave to another persons free time, he is simply a egoistic person, and I dont care for such people feelings.

I think a major thing is the behavement of the parents. If they are themselves totally in a chimpladdersystem, then they will push it on their children too, and you will have a hard time negotiating with these kids, that thing it has to be normal to be a chimp. While if a kid has parents, that think themselves, that it is ok, not to be friend with everybody but that you have at least the duty to handle other people with distant respect, then I think talking with a bulliers kid parents is the best way, so that they can talk themselves with their kids and make him understand why his behaviour was wrong, and how he could do better. But with kids, whos parents think themselves that bullying is ok, the only thing you can do and they understand is to draw a border, where you dont allow other people to go on, and if they do, to hit them as hard as they can.

So for me personally I didnt care for all that verbal and psychic bullying, but when it went to physical bullying like beating, I simply hit back in return.

This is the one my school uses. But it also has to be an imbalance of power. My school also states not every fight, snotty comment, exclusion is bullying. Also there is multiple times component to it.

It is really hard to get an official charge of bullying from the school, because that gets reported to the state. Now everything's a behavioral.

The worse behavioral issues I see at school, are between kids with IEPs. The ADD/ADHD, ODD, Aspie and IE kids tearing it up with each other, and they are relentless.

Right now the brawls revolve around Legos and red rubber outdoor balls. (Like kick balls). We pulled both of those items for the rest of the year.

I work at after school program, so the help a teacher might get in the above situations is not available to us.

Hormonal tweens and 4 weeks of school left. Good times. Good times. Lol..

This is a great topic. My son has been a victim of teasing and bullying both. We have discussed how the two are different and he seems to get it now (he is almost 17). He had it rough in elementary school and horribly in junior high. It got so bad that I had to file criminal charges against three young men. In this case they were in gym class, and were using their phones to video tape my son while one of them antagonized him. They then sent it all over the school. Long story short, since they were so young, the prosecuting attorney's office did not elect to prosecute. However, they have a formal record with them, and if they do anything else..... This letter even followed them to high school. The school must change their schedules if they are placed in the same class as my son.

Thankfully high school is much better and he has come into his own and just blows them off most of the time. I think maturity on his part and perhaps others as well. I do worry and wonder if bullying has indeed gotten so bad, or if we are overly sensitive.

Here is the official policy where we live:

For the purposes of this policy, bullying means the intentional harassment, intimidation, humiliation,
ridicule, defamation, or threat or incitement of violence by a student against another student or public
school employee by a written, verbal, electronic, or physical act that may address an attribute of
the other student, public school employee, or person with whom the other student or public school
employee is associated and that causes or creates actual or reasonably foreseeable: physical harm to
a public school employee or student or damage to the public school employee’s or student’s property;
substantial interference with a student’s education or with a public school employee’s role in education;
a hostile educational environment for one or more students or public school employees due to the
severity, persistence or pervasiveness of the act; or substantial disruption of the orderly operation of
the school or educational environment. Whereas “attribute” means an actual or perceived personal
characteristic including without limitation race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, socioeconomic
status, disability, gender, gender identity, physical appearance, health condition, or sexual orientation.
Bullying behavior will generally be established when an individual has endured a pattern of offensive
behavior or when a single serious act is committed depending on the surrounding circumstances (ACA
6-18-514).

Vicky

A friend of mine actually wrote a book on the subject recently. Here is the definition she uses, and I think it is a good one:

1) It is repetitive (not a one-time event in the hall, but a regular ongoing problem).
2) It is unwanted (not two-way teasing where both parties are having fun, but instead a situation where someone is on the receiving end of taunts and aggression).
3) It takes place in the context of a power imbalance (a bigger kid against a smaller kid, or multiple kids against a single kid, or a kid with more social capital against a kid with less social capital).

In this definition, there is room for both the type of bullying that is very serious and involves physical altercations or serious public shaming like in the movie Carrie, and also for the type of bullying that involves flicking someone's desk to annoy them.

While the second instance doesn't sound harmful, it can be if given the above three criterion, especially if in #2 the victim has asked the bully to stop. In that case, it becomes psychological intimidation, which is serious even if the action is small and seems innocent on its own.

So, yes, I think there are many things that are bullying, even small things - but the key is that it involves a repetitive pattern of unwanted behavior on the part of someone who has the power to get away with it.

My daughter has one "bully" where I do not hesitate to label it as such. This girl knows what gets my daughter upset and will seek her out to instigate a reaction. Then the girl publicly ridicules my daughter for being reactive and seems to chuckle to the other kids while rolling her eyes at my daughter. This girl is obviously devious, and smart about it, as she will only do this when adults are not watching. It has been a horrible torment for my daughter to be up against this wily girl. I have to constantly coach my daughter to stay away from her-this girl will use methods of being overly nice to lure my daughter into to trusting her over and over. The girl knows my daughter reacts to physical touching and the girl will poke my daughter quickly when no one is looking and then act like she didn't do anything and accuse my daughter of being crazy. It's really horrible and I know this girl is just plain EVIL. These people exist in the world and I have to teach my daughter how to recognize them and stay far, far away from them. The teachers do nothing as they cannot catch the girl in the act.

I hope you know I genuinely respect you, Momsparky, but this is an example of the EXACT thing that should NOT be called bullying.

Bullying should be a criminal activity with criminal penalties, the same as harassment and assault. It can ruin someone's life. Being an a**hole should not be a criminal activity with criminal penalties. A kid who flicks someone's desk is an a$$, not a bully. IMHO, referring to desk flicking using the same terminology that we would refer to someone who makes someone feel too frightened or too humiliated to go to school is alarmist in regards to the desk-flicker, and minimizes the other. It doesn't make intentionally annoying someone OK. That is clearly not OK and should be dealt with because it is an issue of respect. But just because it is not OK does not mean it is bullying.

And I cannot help but see things from the other side of the coin. Imagine you have an 8 year old who has really poor self-control or who is hyperactive. They repeatedly do things that annoy their classmates. We should label them as a bully? Really? What purpose is served? Lots of kids do things to annoy other kids (I might even hazard to say it's close to 50/50 from my experience). Those kids need to be taught to respect boundaries, not be given a label that may very well end up creating a self-fulfilling prophesy. The message should be very clear: Purposefully annoying other people is disrespectful and wrong. The message should not be that this is bullying.

I am involved in the anti-bullying program in our school district, and I would have to say that I am alarmed by how liberally applied the term is, and I honestly to do not get the impression that anyone is concerned about the possible ramifications of assigning such a serious term to relatively minor infractions. Again, we are assigning what should be a criminal label to kids who don't deserve it. And I believe we already have societal issues involving victim mentality and the idea that blaming everything on everyone else is the way to go. I think that this mindset gets amplified when we send the message that not wanting to sit with someone at lunch makes you a bully and makes the person excluded the "victim" of someone else's "wrongness." It tells the kid who was not invited to a birthday party that they are a victim. It doesn't tell him or her that it's OK not to be friends with everyone and not everyone gets invited to everything and not only is that OK, it also doesn't make you a bad person (or the kid who didn't invite you). It's life. It doesn't always go the way we wish it would, sometimes it hurts, and some people are mean. But we are not victims because of that. We are human. We deal with it and move on.

I will again make the disclaimer I originally made. I recognize my opinions are often not very popular in this area, but I do have to say that this is something I feel very passionate about. Labels have meaning, and if we are going to assign them to grey areas, I think we need to be very careful to consider the long term consequences of doing so. And there are certain labels out there, such as bullying, that I think need to be reserved for behaviors that fall outside the range of "normal" behavior and step into the bounds of pathological and criminal. Flicking someone's desk is not pathological or criminal. For the vast number of people, experiencing it will cause annoyance, frustration, and irritation. Not lifelong scars. Pushing a naked kid out of a shower room and locking the door so that they need to suffer humiliation in front of their peers is pathological and it ought to be criminal. For the vast number of people, experiencing something like this, whether it be once or repeatedly will not be something easy to mend from.

The one time I can see a desk-flicker could be a bully is when the flicker is doing it to set off a meltdown in the other kid so that the other kid has to suffer the humiliation of losing control in front of his peers. But then, we are not talking about desk-flicking to annoy someone. We are talking about intentionally provoking someone for your own personal amusement and to provoke a public response that will humiliate the other kid. THAT is bullying.

To me, the difference is so huge that I honestly don't even see how anyone can call it a grey area. But maybe that's my aspie side coming out.

I read this after I responded to Momsparky. This is the kind of thing that I meant in the end of my post. While poking someone would not be bullying under the vast majority of circumstances--just rude and annoying--when it is done to provoke a response that will publicly humiliate the other person, it is.

My daughter has a kid like this in her school, too. I hate that little girl. I know that sounds harsh because she is only 7. But she is devious, and she has figured out that my daughter has a deficit and she capitalizes on this to humiliate her, all the while looking like the innocent little princess she usually makes herself out to be. Luckily, one of the after school counselors this year is totally on to her and has put a dead stop to it. Last year, I was told that my daughter was just misperceiving the other girl's intentions (which is conceivable and does happen) and that the other girl was a sweet kid. This year the counselor's attitude is "Sweet girl, my a$$. I'm not letting her anywhere near your daughter and I have told her I am on to her."

If you look carefully at the definition, you will see that this is how desk-flicking meets the criteria for bullying: desk-flicker has more social capital/power than victim, assuming it is repetitive and it is unwanted. So, in the case of somebody just stopping by the desk and flicking it for no reason, it's not bullying.

If it's just a kid that walks by a desk once and flicks it playfully, then it isn't bullying. If the kid whose desk is being flicked doesn't care, it isn't bullying. If the kid whose desk is being flicked is more capable of holding it together than the desk flicker, it isn't bullying. This is where it gets complicated for kids who don't understand the implications of their actions - but in general, those kids have less social capital/power than the kids who they are bothering.

Let's re-frame it another way: words cause no physical harm, right? The only way that words (like words referencing gender, sexual preference or race) could meet these criteria are if they are unwanted and involve an imbalance of power (repetition, unfortunately, has been done for us by history.) Bullies use those words (assuming they know the history and know what they mean) to highlight the imbalance of social capital on the part of certain groups. Otherwise, they're just words.

You also have to ask yourself - if someone is flicking another child's desk after being asked to stop or being made aware that it bothers the other child - why are they continuing to do it? If the only answer is that they know it bothers the other child, and they continue to do it repeatedly, then it is difficult to frame the behavior as anything but an expression of an imbalance of power between the kids: I can do this, knowing it bothers and upsets you, and you can't stop me. Bullying.

The specific behavior doesn't matter, and that's why other definitions of bullying by behavior break down.

I do see the challenge with kids on the spectrum, and I work with my son on this almost daily: first of all, he often doesn't see his behavior as unwanted, because kids usually rely on nonverbal communication to express that something is unwanted. Second, he may well be doing something he isn't even aware he's doing (like desk flicking.) Third, he may not be capable of stopping himself from flicking a certain desk if he's in an OCD sort of place and that will certainly drive repetition. The issue is that the balance of power may appear to lean towards my son, but these other factors need to be considered.

However, there's a way in which it kind of doesn't matter: if my son is flicking a kid's desk and it is bothering that kid, we have to find a way to stop it. The difference is that he probably isn't doing it to express his power over another kid, so it doesn't meet the criterion for bullying. (Desk flicking isn't actually something we've dealt with - but we did have other personal space issues that were framed as bullying that we had to address.)

Exclusion is complicated, but I'd agree that there is nothing in these situations that meet the criteria and I wouldn't label it bullying. The situations you describe aren't really behaviors. Not inviting someone to a party or not sitting with them at lunch in and of itself is not bullying.

So, for exclusion to be raised to the level of bullying, it would have to involve unwanted, repetitive behavior targeting the victim by someone in a position of power over them. For a popular girl to continually walk up to a socially struggling girl and announce to everyone that they are not invited to a party, are not allowed to sit near her at lunch, or are not friends could be bullying.

Is the distinction I'm trying to express making sense?

Momsparky, I hear what you are saying, and I think we simply disagree. I simply see a difference between intentionally annoying someone because you can and causing someone humiliation or fear. One kid is a budding jerk. The other is a budding sociopath. The target of the first kid needs to learn how to navigate a world that is not fair and filled with people who are jerks. The target of the second kid needs to be protected from criminal activity.

From my own perspective...the kids who teased me/annoyed me/irritated me/etc. clearly did so because they could. It wasn't bullying. It was insensitive crap that insensitive kids do. It hurt. I didn't like it. But it was not traumatizing over time, and I'm glad no one ever told me it was, or that it should be.

The kids who bullied me did so because they wanted to humiliate me. It didn't just hurt, and it wasn't that I just didn't like it. It was damaging to my psyche on a deep level. I actually wish that someone would have recognized that there was a difference between teasing and bullying and put an end to the bullying. But they didn't. I think they viewed it all as "teasing." That failure to discriminate by people in a position of power and authority (even though I could clearly see the difference between the two) caused long-term ramifications. I think the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. We are still not discriminating between the two behaviors, we are still lumping them all together even though they are not the same, and we are still setting the stage for long term consequences.

Plus, there isn't always a power differential and to assume there must be one for bullying to occur is dangerous. Some kids who lack social power bully to try to gain social power. But they don't have it. They want it. Some of the cruelest interactions I witnessed when I was a kid were between two social misfits, one of whom was trying to escape his social misfit status. The reality is that in the eyes of the kids with the social status, both kids were equally pathetic and worthy of keeping their inferior status. And they were not bullying the kid who was being bullied. But his equally socially inferior peer was. Without a doubt. But in the eyes of the people who controlled "social power," neither kid had it. No power differential.

Actually, for as ashamed as I am to admit it, in middle school, I once bullied an equally non-statussed girl in an attempt to gain status. I caused her a great deal of public humiliation. Make no mistake. It was classic bullying. It didn't work (it didn't raise my status) and I felt horrible. I felt even worse when I got "caught" by the principal and the girl tried to defend me, even after I had done something so horrible and degrading. Though we were never friends, I apologized to her, even up until the day we graduated. Somehow, even at the tender age of middle school, and even though I hurt her, she knew why I did it, and that is why she never held it against me.