Chapter 2
Bullying becomes something to study
For most of history, bullying was described through stories, moral arguments, observations about cruelty and accounts of school life. What changed in the twentieth century was that researchers began treating it as something that could be defined, measured and studied systematically.
One important starting point came from Sweden. In 1969 the physician Peter Paul Heinemann introduced the term mobbning into Swedish public debate when discussing harmful group behaviour among children. The word drew on the idea of a group turning against an individual, and it quickly entered wider discussion about school life. By the early 1970s it was also becoming a subject for behavioural research.
Dan Olweus and the Scandinavian research tradition
The researcher most closely associated with this shift is Dan Olweus, a Swedish born psychologist who worked for much of his career in Norway. His research in the early 1970s helped turn bullying from a loosely recognised social problem into a defined field of study. His 1973 Scandinavian book on school bullying was followed by the English language Aggression in the Schools: Bullies and Whipping Boys in 1978. Later reviews of the field describe these Scandinavian studies as the beginning of sustained empirical research into school bullying.
Olweus helped establish ideas that remain central to bullying research today, particularly repeated negative behaviour over time and difficulty defending oneself. He also developed questionnaires that allowed researchers to ask large numbers of pupils about their experiences and then compare schools, age groups and changes over time.
That sounds straightforward, but it introduced an important problem.
Before you can count bullying, you have to decide what you are counting.
If one researcher requires repetition, another requires an imbalance of power and another concentrates mainly on harm, their prevalence figures may not describe exactly the same thing. Measurement does not simply reveal bullying. It is partly shaped by the definition used to look for it.
That problem is still with us.
From research to intervention
Research in Scandinavia did not remain confined to universities. During the 1980s, large scale anti-bullying work was introduced in Norway and systematically evaluated. The first major evaluation of what became the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program took place in Bergen between 1983 and 1985, involving nearly 2,500 pupils in 42 schools. It helped establish another idea that would become increasingly influential: bullying might be reduced not simply by dealing with individual incidents, but by changing the wider school environment.
This was an important change in thinking. Instead of asking only:
What is wrong with the person who bullies?
or:
How can the person experiencing bullying defend themselves?
researchers increasingly began asking:
What is happening in the group, the classroom and the school that allows bullying to continue?
That shift towards the wider environment will become important later in this history.
Britain begins to look more closely
In Britain, bullying attracted growing research and public attention during the 1980s. By the end of the decade it was beginning to appear more explicitly in national discussions about schools. The Elton Report on Discipline in Schools, published in 1989 for the Department of Education and Science and the Welsh Office, considered bullying as part of the wider school environment and emphasised that behaviour could not be understood through simple explanations or single remedies.
At roughly the same time, researchers including Peter K. Smith, Sonia Sharp and Irene Whitney were developing work that would become particularly important in the UK.
In 1993, Whitney and Smith published a major survey involving more than 6,000 pupils in 24 schools in and around Sheffield. It provided some of the first large scale figures on bullying in English schools, examining not only how often pupils reported being bullied but where it happened, what forms it took, whether adults were told and how pupils themselves responded.
The resulting Sheffield Project became the first major school bullying intervention project of its kind in the UK. Schools experimented with whole school policies, curriculum work, playground approaches, staff training, direct work with pupils and other strategies. Importantly, schools did not all achieve the same results. The project demonstrated both that schools could make a difference and that simply adopting an intervention did not guarantee success.
Research changes the language
Once bullying became something researchers were trying to count and compare, the language around it became more precise but also more contested.
Researchers distinguished between physical, verbal, psychological and social forms. They examined people who bullied, people who experienced bullying and those who occupied both roles. They investigated age, gender, school environment, peer groups, special educational needs and eventually online behaviour.
But greater precision did not produce universal agreement.
The more researchers studied bullying, the more questions appeared.
Does it have to be repeated? Must harm be intentional? How do we measure an imbalance of power? Can exclusion be as serious as physical aggression? Can the same young person bully someone and also be bullied?
Those questions eventually produced the many definitions we explore elsewhere on this site.
So the emergence of bullying research did something slightly paradoxical. It helped us understand bullying much better. It also showed us how difficult bullying is to define.
From subjects of research to participants
There was another limitation in much early bullying research.
Adults usually asked the questions. Adults designed the questionnaires. Adults interpreted the answers. Young people supplied the data.
That began to change as peer support, student participation and youth led approaches developed. The next chapter looks at that shift.
What happens when young people stop being only the people we study and begin helping to shape the response?