The definition of bullying.

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So how do you define it?

To me I see bullying as intentionally causing physical or emotional damage to someone, to make one feel better about themself or gain some sort of reward. Like maybe if they pick on the outcast like most of their peers are doing they will be accepted by their peers.


I am just confused because I got accused of being a bully, and outside of a couple incidents as a child I am not someone who intentionally hurts other people. So is my definition close or am I way off?

Continued harassment, name calling meant out of spite and not just harmless teasing, emotional abuse (putting the person down repeatedly whilst refusing to acknowledge any of their good points or giving a fair critique with the intent to inflict emotional pain or humiliate), Physical abuse (hitting etc), using intimidation, inciting hate against the person by others (encouraging others to gang up on them), spreading vicious rumours that are not true with the intent to incite hate, humiliate or degrade the individual the rumour is about and so on.

Some examples of what is not bullying for comparison:

Someone snapping at you because they had a bad day.
Someone teasing you with a bit of light hearted name calling that is not meant to degrade or humiliate.
Idiotic gossip by people who have nothing better to do today lol

And so on.

Bullying would require intent then, yes? Not just a mistunderstanding.

Frances

Bullying is intentional, continued harassment.

So without intent it could simply be ill manners or just someone in a bad mood?

Frances

Yes bullying is intentional...it is undertaken with the intent to either humiliate, embarrass or inflict emotional or physical harm on another.

A misunderstanding is just that, a misunderstanding. No harm was meant by either party usually.

Bullying is usually obvious as it can become particularly vicious and is usually carried out by the same perpetrators over a longish period of time.

Misunderstandings occur when two people misread each other and things go all wonky lol. It can usually be resolved by talking calmly and using reason where as bullying cannot. You cannot reason with a bully. I know, I used to try, endlessly, but it always failed and the same group of people continued to harass me for years long after I had asked them to please leave me alone.

i don't think bullies always consciously intend to hurt other people, but they do anyways. someone who degrades others and makes them feel bad about themselves may not be actually intending to hurt their feelings. but i would still class them as a bully because of the result.

some bullies just think they are defending themselves from perceived harm from other bullies, so their motivation might not be to hurt them, but to either protect themselves. or they just don't care about other people's feelings so they might try to get ahead without caring about other people. they are bullies too, but don't set out to harm their victims.

we can't really know anyone else's motivation anyways - all we know is their behaviour.

But if you explain to someone that what they are doing is hurting you and they then do it more than before I really don't think their intentions are particularly nice....

Sweetleaf I don't know why you were called a bully, I read that and it didn't make any sense to me.

I agree with hyperlexian, bullying does not have to be intentional. Sometimes people hurt others without realizing it, out of carelessness.

Overt bullying is someone picking on you, making threats, hitting you, that sort of thing. But it can also be more subtle than that, like a person who seems nice but has a way of saying things that makes you feel like you are being put down. Friendly teasing and joking around can be bullying if the person knows they are hitting your sore spot. There is a lot of gray area where people don't realize what kind of effect they are having on others, and/or they cover up what they are doing by making it look friendly.

Most of the bullies I have encountered have known exactly what they are were doing and they were doing it deliberately. Most people who are not doing it intentionally will desist once you explain to them that what they are doing is hurting you and ask them to please stop.

Personally I am not hurt by teasing as it is usually meant in a harmless way. For example I once had a lover who would often say 'Hi stinky' when he greeted me. Knowing that I could get nervous my response would be to sniff my armpits and reply with "no I don't". After a few times he responded to that with "no I am joking lol". I said "oh", went away, thought of a good name to call him back and came up with 'skunk butt' because he had issues digesting certain foods. After that we would affectionately refer to each other as stinky and skunk butt lol. It was funny! The term 'stink thing' also gots thrown around as did 'stink thing from stink lagoon' lol

Thing is, his intent was not to hurt...he was just a teaser lol. Bugger he was lol but an incredibly funny dude!

Bullies on the other hand will almost stalk you, they will intentionally intimidate you, they will threaten you with physical violence or hit you, they will humiliate you in public. It is a power game on their part. Online they will follow you around and copy and paste your posts only to regurgitate them years later. In the case of one lady I knew they set a up blog specifically to ridicule her. They made outlandish claims such as that she was performing sexual acts in front of her young children (when her children were fully grown, had left home, and she was doing no such thing). They even went as far as to find out her personal details (employer, home address) etc and to post them publicly online along side these claims.

That sounds pretty intentional to me! Or did they create that blog by accident? Please don't tell me they did not know what they were doing or that they did not realise they were hurting someone. The more it hurt her, the more she got upset, the worse they got! Do not make excuses for those kinds of bullies. They knew EXACTLY what they were doing.

Yes there can be some bullies who get involved with a group of other bullies and go along with the pack because they are afraid to go against the group in case they become a target themselves, but that still does not mean that they do not realise that what they are doing is wrong.

Now other types of abuse can be unintentional...Ie a violent partner may not be intentionally trying to hurt you, they may just have anger issues that they need to get help with and so, but in my experience, most bullies know exactly what they are doing and the harm they are inflicting. Especially the ring leader....bullies usually come in groups and there is usually a ring leader. They will target vulnerable people and gang up against them, they rarely have the balls to act alone.

Bullying - the verb - is somewhat more complex than "being a bully" (the noun). I think anyone can be guilty of occasional bullying without intending to. For example, another may lie to them, convincing them a third party deserves treatment that they, in fact, do not. Or someone may simply take part because others are, without thinking about what they're doing. I am not saying bullying is not serious, or that anyone ought to do such things once they become aware of them. But I do think some of those who take part are not intending to cause harm.

A bully, on the other hand, is someone who habitually bullies, someone for whom it is a way of life. They hurt people deliberately, intentionally, for various selfish motives. Anyone who is genuinely a bully has at least some idea what they're doing, no matter how many excuses they make to themselves.

But the important thing to remember is, being called something does not change who you are. If you are a bully, the fact no one dares tell you so doesn't make you less of one. If you aren't, the fact that someone calls you that doesn't make you one. In fact, it is often bullies who take great delight in labeling someone inaccurately.

Bullies are usually not that difficult to spot. Even the very rare ones on this site. I have never read a single post by the OP that would lead me to suspect they might be a bully. So, Sweetleaf, to answer your question, I'd say there are three possibilities. Either the person who accused you of being a bully is one themselves, you unintentionally took part in bullying (see the distinction above) them and they aren't good at making those types of distinctions, or they were hurt in some way related to you - whether that was your fault or not - and blame you for that for whatever reason. I don't think they are necessarily a bully, although that is possible, because when people are hurt, they tend to get irrational.

In that specific situation, they certainly are a bully. That is more than a misunderstanding.

In fact, one excellent if painful way to spot a bully is to make them aware of your weak / painful spots. A decent human being will at least make some effort to avoid hitting those spots. A bully will zero right in on them. Of course, this is precisely the reason why this method is not a good one to employ for identifying bullies, but if you accidentally fall into the trap, at least then you know what sort of person you're dealing with.

I would just like to add, I will give online bullies some slack though based on findings from Milgram's Obedience study back in the 1060's (as far as I can recall).

In this experiment he asked participants (ordinary people) to volunteer for a laboratory experiment which he told them was about the effect of punishment on learning. In this experiment he set up a situation where a team member played the role of the investigating scientist and another 'mild mannered' team member played the role of a make believe volunteer. On arriving at the lab the participant was introduced to the fake volunteer and slips were drawn to see who would play either the role of learner or the role of teacher. Of course the draw was fixed so that the participant always drew the role of teacher.

The learner was then lead off into a room where the teacher could not see him and the teacher was placed in a separate room and sat in front of box that he was told was a 'Shock Generator' and that it would give the learner an electric shock if he flicked the switches which increased in 15 volt increments from around 15 volts to 450 (450 volts being an lethal shock if applied). The teacher was then told that he had to read out a list of word pairs and then question the learner about those word pairs later (ie the learner had to remember the second word of the pair after the list had been read out by the teacher). If the learner got an answer wrong the teacher was to shock him and for each subsequent answer he answered incorrectly the voltage would be increased.

Of course it was fake and the learner would make deliberate mistakes. The shock generator was also nothing more than a prop. However, half way through the experiment the learner would be heard screaming and begging to be let out (the screams had been pre-recorded and were being played from a different room) but the scientist would ask the participant to keep issuing the shocks anyway....each time they would ask the scientist what to do as a result of hearing the learners screams he would say things like "please continue", "you must continue you have no choice", "you must go on"

Now bear in mind the participants actually believed they were giving the learner genuine electric shocks but in regards to the result only a very small percentage of people actually refused to continue issuing the shocks when the learner became distressed. I think about 26 out of 40 though continued on all the way up to 450 volts...which had the shocks been genuine would have killed the man.

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How does a study on obedience to authority relate to bullies on the internet?

Milgram did a variation of the study where he placed people in the same room as the learner, where they could physically SEE the learners distress and NONE of the teachers would continue issuing the shocks past 150 volts. Those finding were later replicated in a later study using a virtual character that was computer generated.

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It seems that if people cannot see the distress they are causing and or they are distanced from the person in distress they are more likely to continue on with a behaviour that is clearly hurting them. Especially if other conditions in place...Ie there is an authority figure around. In the case of online bullies that group up that authority figure could either be the ring leader or even group dynamics.

So maybe they are partly protected from the suffering they are causing by the screen that separates them from their target. However that still does not completely excuse them.

Milgram is one study among many (although not the most ethical of studies and there are criticisms of study that I am not going to list here) and so there is more data to be gathered on such phenomena, but it could be one possible factor that plays a role in online bullying.

My apologies if my point is not completely clear in this post.

1 My pc is glitching and being a pain in the bum tonight so it's difficult to concentrate

2 I am still studying Milgram and I need to further clarify my thoughts on the matter and take a look at other studies that may be relevant. For now it is just a line of thought I am exploring.

Last edited by bumble on 01 Dec 2011, 5:21 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I have what I feel is a fairly logical way to view bullying.

Bullies do not always know they are bullying. Some do, some don't. A lot of what constitues true bullying behavior is in the eye of the person being bullied. People raz each other all the time. Some people take it in stride, and either find it funny, return it in kind with good nature, or just ignore it without trouble. Others are intimidated by it.

A lot is dependent on the recipient being very clear about what is or is not acceptable treatment. It's incumbent on people who feel they are being bullied, to say so.

I know there are clear cut cases that no one should ever have to speak up about. If you're being beaten, physically or verbally threatened, that is bullying whether the victim speaks up or not. Verbal harassment though, can be hard to identify from person to person.

Bottom line: If somebody TELLS you to stop doing whatever it is you are doing, and you don't, you are bullying. Period. Intent, at that point, has nothing to do with it.

EDIT: "No means no" applies to a lot more than just rape.

I agree with what I think you are trying to say. But this "bottom line" rule, like every other one, has the potential to be abused. What if you are autistic, and so you rock as a stim, and someone tells you that your rocking is annoying them, so you should stop it. Are you bullying them if you don't stop? If you literally apply your rule, then you are - but I obviously wouldn't consider that bullying. Although if you went out of your way to stim around them just for the purpose of annoying them, then it would become bullying. Life is complex. Rules are appealing, because they're so simple - but I was so attracted to them, and yet so literal, that I was forced to confront the fact that every rule will encounter situations that cause it to fail.

I think there is a difference between annoyance and complete and utter emotional distress.

Someone rocking may to some be annoying but my personal experience of bullying has left me feeling downright suicidal at times, to the point where I have actually attempted to take my life in the past (several times). Fortunately I survived but the bullies found my suicidal mood hilarious as I recall and merely mocked me even more because of it. How nice of them. The last time I felt suicidal over stuff like that I got as far as popping the pills out of the packet before putting them down and spending the morning frantically calling my drs until someone helped me. I had decided by then that it was not worth dying for.

Other people are not so lucky, they do succeed in taking their life. It is heartbreaking to hear about. So many lives lost...so very sad and upsetting.

Bullying is a very serious issue and its effects on people should not be underestimated.

I know very few people who attempt suicide because they are a bit annoyed today.

Yes, I am very vocal on this subject, mostly because it has a lot of personal meaning to me.