School Bullying and Mental Health

Risks, intervention and prevention

Helen Cowie, Carrie-Anne Myers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781134977437
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Psychology

Bullying amongst young people is a serious and pervasive problem, and recent rapid advances in electronic communication technologies have provided even more tools for bullies to exploit. School Bullying and Mental Health collates current research evidence and theoretical perspectives about school bullying in one comprehensive volume, identifying the nature and extent of bullying and cyberbullying at school, as well as its impact on children and young people's emotional health and well-being.

There are many negative consequences of bullying, and children and young people who have been victimised often suffer long-term psychological problems, such as increased levels of anxiety, depressive symptoms, social isolation, loneliness and suicidal ideation. Perpetrators of bullying also have a heightened risk of experiencing problems such as anxiety and depression, as well as eating disorders and antisocial behaviour. Founded on rigorous academic research, this important book tackles the negative consequences of bullying, and bullying culture itself, by examining the social and cultural contexts that perpetuate such behaviour from childhood through adolescence and potentially into adulthood.

Containing contributions from an international team of authors, this book explores current interventions to prevent and reduce school bullying and to alleviate its negative effects on the mental health of children and young people. In-depth discussion of the profound implications of this research for researchers, practitioners and policymakers makes this book essential reading for those interested in bullying culture and the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents.

Theme 1
The nature of bullying

In chapter 1, Cowie and Myers consider key aspects of the nature and incidence of bullying in schools and its impact on the mental health of children and young people. They explore the moral disengagement that characterises bystanders’ apathy in the face of an episode of bullying. Bystanders who do nothing or who actively rejoice in the victim’s humiliation and shame demonstrate that they have become desensitised to prosocial values and seem to have suppressed feelings of empathy towards the bullied peer so that the distress of a fellow pupil has become a source of fun and enjoyment. This raises questions about individual qualities of vulnerability and resilience on the part of victims as well as the nature of the social contexts where the bullying behaviour takes place. These research findings are linked to interventions designed to promote positive values in the school community as a whole. The ideas are further explored in chapter 2 where Pörhölä considers continuities from school bullying through to bullying at university and the workplace and investigates why some children and young people escape victimisation while for others the bullying persists. She argues that, in order to develop means to prevent the continuities of bullying over time, more theoretical and empirical research is needed to better understand why the roles of bullies and victims tend to follow some individuals from one social context to another. Pörhölä suggests that more attention should be paid to social relationships between bullies and victims. She also considers the important role of the bystanders and their influence on whether the bullying continues or is prevented. To this end, she presents four explanatory theories that take account of the complex interactions among children and young people in their peer groups.

Chapter 1
What we know about school bullying

Helen Cowie and Carrie-Anne Myers

The nature and incidence of school bullying

This book is part of a series on the mental health and emotional well-being of children and young people. So, from the beginning, we emphasize the emotional risks that affect children who are involved in bullying, whether as victims or as perpetrators, or indeed as bystanders. School bullying is a major risk factor for children’s emotional health and well-being, whether as targets of bullying, perpetrators or witnesses. Every day in our schoolyards and classrooms, thousands of children suffer the humiliation and shame of being bullied by their peers. Most recently, and with the upsurge in cyberbullying, the threat is with them day and night, in their homes, on their way to and from school and in their communities.

Bullying affects children’s physical and mental health, their attendance at school, their educational attainment and their social relationships. The mental health consequences can be severe and long-lasting. For example, Lereya, Copeland, Costello, and Wolke (2015) found a strong relationship between being bullied as a child and mental disorders such as social anxiety and depression in adulthood; they also noted similar links to relationship difficulties in adulthood. The same research team (Lereya, Copeland, Zammit, & Wolke, 2015) found that the children most prone to mental health difficulties later on in their lives were the bully-victims – those children who bully others but who are themselves the targets of bullying in other contexts, whether in the family, the community or the school. Again, in a large ten-country study involving over 11,000 adolescents, Klomek et al. (2016) found a direct association between victimisation and self-injury, as well as depression and anxiety. In the present volume, in chapter 8, Luca presents case studies of adults whose mental health was badly affected by childhood bullying, while in chapter 10, Giovazolias and Malikiosi-Loizos investigate the moderating impact of fathers in alleviating depression in bullied children. Each of these chapters explores the mental health implications of bullying in some depth and offers insights to develop interventions to reduce the suffering of victims.

The authors in this book present current knowledge about the phenomenon of school bullying and the complex dialogues and debates that are involved in addressing the problem, with a particular emphasis on mental health. The overall aim of this book is:

• To collate in one volume current research evidence and theoretical perspectives about school bullying;
• To identify the nature and extent of bullying/cyberbullying at school and its impact on children’s and young people’s emotional health and well-being;
• To explore the interface between bullying and crime;
• To investigate social and cultural contexts which perpetuate bullying behaviour from childhood through adolescence and potentially to adulthood;
• To explore current interventions to prevent and reduce school bullying and to alleviate its negative effects on the mental health of children and young people;
• To discuss the implications for policy-makers, practitioners and researchers in this important field.

School bullying takes many forms and includes such behaviour as:

• Spreading nasty rumours on the grounds of age, race, sex, mental health, disability, sexual orientation and religion or belief;
• Physically attacking someone;
• Ridiculing or demeaning someone;
• Social exclusion;
• Unwelcome sexual advances;
• Posting embarrassing material online;
• Threatening someone, either directly on anonymously online.

Research into school bullying has traditionally focussed on the actual protagonists – the perpetrators and the targets. Consequently, we know a great deal about the psychological characteristics of bullies and victims and the consequences of bullying in undermining the emotional well-being of both targets and perpetrators. Pure bullies appear to show little empathy for others and have low levels of moral engagement with their community; they seem to have a cold callousness in their behaviour that allows them to perpetrate cruel acts towards targeted peers without feeling guilt or remorse, but they, like their victims, are also at risk of mental health and social difficulties, both in the short-term and the long-term. See chapter 9 where Cowie and Colliety explore the emotional needs of children who bully.

While an understanding of the personal aspects of the bully-victim relationship is important, it only addresses part of the issue. Bullying is experienced within a group of peers who adopt different participant roles and who experience a range of emotions. See chapter 2 where Pörhölä provides theoretical explanations of bullying in the complex world of peer relationships. Bullies do not act alone but rely on reinforcement from their immediate group of friends as well as the tacit approval of the onlookers. Most recently, there has been a concern to clarify the boundaries between bullying/cyberbullying and crime. This aspect is discussed in depth in Theme 2 of this book.

The most widely-used definition of school bullying is the one originally proposed by Olweus (1993) which identifies three core components:

1. There is an intent to harm or upset another student;
2. The harmful behaviour is done repeatedly over time;
3. The relationship between bully/bullies and victim/victims is characterised by an imbalance in power.

Since then, researchers have identified differences in how bullying is perceived and defined by children and young people (Currie et al., 2012) and by adults in the workplace (Jacobson, Hood, & van Buren, 2014) from which it appears that bullying is understood differently depending on the social context and the age of those involved. Smith, Cowie, Olafsson, and Liefooghe (2002) asked children from 14 different countries to look at 25 different stick figures illustrating situations that might be considered as bullying. Younger children had a less differentiated view of bullying than older children. There were also marked cultural differences, especially with regard to inclusion of indirect forms of bullying, such as ostracism and other forms of psychological bullying. Jacobson et al. (2014) argue that some of the ways in which individuals or groups interpret the phenomenon arise from cultural and situational differences in the construction of what it is to be bullied. Perceptions may vary widely depending on the amount of aggressive behaviour necessary for an act to be considered as bullying in that context. For example, bullying may be embedded in a child’s family or community and that will have an influence on how the aggressive behaviour is interpreted. In a very authoritarian school, the threshold of behaviour that would be labelled as bullying would be higher than in a more person-centred school with a greater emphasis on nurturing good relationships among pupils. In some social contexts, the child who bullies may well not be aware of the destructive effect of his or her behaviour on targets. Particularly in situations where the young person is a bully-victim, their aggression towards vulnerable peers may be part of a protective mechanism to help them cope with negative experiences in their own lives.

Cyberbullying

We also need to take account of a more recent phenomenon. Bullying has not been limited to the offline world in the last decade. Rapid changes in electronic communication technologies have provided new tools for bullies, who benefit from the anonymity and ease that these methods of harassment provide. This new type of bullying is usually referred to as cyberbullying. Like traditional face-to-face bullying, cyberbullying involves the deliberate intent to hurt a person or persons through the electronic transmission of messages and images which target the victim(s) repeatedly over time. It is widely proposed that the reported reasons for attacking a person online involve the bullies’ need for power and dominance within a group, the perceived vulnerability of the target, perceived provocativeness on the part of the target (usually as a justification for the aggression on the part of the bully) and interpersonal animosities (Kyriacou & Zuin, 2016).

The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) (2015) estimates that, in the previous year, around 26,000 counselling sessions were provided by teachers to support students who had been cyberbullied. This gives an idea of the scale of the problem. Clearly schools face a huge challenge in dealing with this relatively recent phenomenon. In fact, Livingstone, Haddon, Vincent, Mascheroni, and Őlafsson (2014) found that young people in Britain are more likely to be bullied online than face-to-face in the playground.

But there are some controversies in the research findings with conflicting evidence from different studies. On the one hand, some researchers have found a substantial overlap between traditional bullying and cyberbullying. From this evidence, they conclude that cyberbullies often target peers who are already being bullied in traditional, face-to-face ways (Perren, Dooley, Shaw, & Cross, 2010; Sourander et al., 2010). By contrast, Schultze-Krumbholz et al. (2015) found structural differences in cyberbullying when compared with traditional bullying. Most significantly, they found an absence of an exclusive victim class in their study of 6,260 school-age adolescents (mean age 14–8 years) from six European countries. Instead of the four traditional categories of bully, victim, bully-victim and bystander, they identified only three: bully-victims, perpetrators and uninvolved. In this study, the perpetrators of cyberbullying were likely to have been bullied themselves and, as the researchers hypothesise, perhaps the cyber-victims felt more free to fight back against their aggressors online than they would in the ‘real’, face-to-face world. The lack of a clear victim group in this study is consistent with other studies that document an overlap between victims and perpetrators in cyberbullying. Further research will unravel the differences between these two sets of findings.

Cyberbullying potentially reaches a much larger audience (through, for example, social networking sites) and postings can be viewed repeatedly, with extremely disturbing consequences for the targets, including insomnia, depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, self-harm and, in rare cases, suicide (Sourander et al., 2010). The anonymity of the cyberbully is a powerful component. Kyriacou and Zuin (2016) argue that this anonymity results in desensitisation of prosocial values and empathy towards another person and ultimately in a process of moral disengagement since the cyberbully does not meet face-to-face with his/her target. Thus, there is less likelihood that the cyberbully will experience social disapproval or intervention on the part of bystanders.

Bystanders and witnesses

As Salmivalli (2010) points out, the original conception of bullying as proposed by Olweus (1978) was mobbing – a group phenomenon in which a group of peers ‘gang up’ on another child and repeatedly torment and harass that child. Salmivalli took this idea further by identifying the range of participant roles within the group, each driven by different emotions and motives. She also took account of the school or classroom ethos which, she argues, has a crucial influence on the ways in which individual characteristics interact with the social context where the bullying act takes place. The deeper insights that Salmivalli’s approach offers contribute positively to the process of developing interventions, such as peer support, that help to counteract bullying within its particular context.

Within the school or classroom setting, the bystanders and witnesses of the bullying respond in a range of ways. The assistants to the bully actively join in the attacks of the ringleader bully; the reinforcers of the bully may not directly attack the victim but they provide strong encouragement for the ringleader and his/her cohort of followers by laughing and jeering at the discomfort and humiliation of the victim; outsiders ignore what is going on and claim to have nothing to do with it, even though their presence and inaction reinforce the behaviour of the bully and his/her supporters. Finally, defenders demonstrate their empathy for the victim’s situation by offering support or by seeking out adult help.

Bystanders’ behaviour has a powerful effect on whether the bullying continues or ceases. In classrooms where bystanders typically reinforce the bullies in some way, victimised children show the highest levels of social anxiety and peer rejection (Kärnä, Voeten, Poskiparta, & Salmivalli, 2010). Conversely, where classmates defend the victim, that child is less anxious, less depressed and has higher self-esteem than victims without defenders (Sainio, Veenstra, Huitsing, & Salmivalli, 2010).

But why do some bystanders intervene to help the victim while others simply stand back and enjoy the spectacle? In their classic study, Latané and Darley (1970) identified the impact of bystander apathy in the face of a disturbing event. They noted that the more witnesses are present in a potentially dangerous situation, the less likely it is that an individual witness will step forward to take action. This diffusion of responsibility can be explained by fear or embarrassment on the part of the individual about stepping out of line in the face of perceived inaction by the group. Related to this is the extent to whic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of images
• List of tables
• Series editor’s foreword
• List of contributors
• Permissions
• THEME 1 The nature of bullying
• THEME 2 The interface between bullying and crime
• THEME 3 Bullying: its impact on emotional health and well-being
• THEME 4 The social and cultural contexts which challenge or promote school bullying
• THEME 5 Effective interventions and policies to counteract school bullying
• THEME 6 Commentaries and epilogue
• Index