Chapter 5
Bullying changes shape
For much of the twentieth century, the popular image of bullying was fairly easy to recognise. A bigger or stronger child picked on somebody weaker, perhaps in the playground, corridor or changing room. Physical intimidation, threats and name calling fitted the picture well.
Research never showed that bullying was only physical, but as the field developed it became increasingly difficult to maintain such a simple image. Bullying could involve friendship, reputation, belonging, exclusion and the behaviour of a whole peer group. It could be loud and visible, but it could also happen quietly, sometimes in ways that adults barely noticed.
The question was no longer simply “Who is bullying whom?”
Researchers were increasingly asking:
What is happening around them?
From physical to relational
Researchers began paying much closer attention to forms of bullying that operated through relationships. Someone might be deliberately excluded from a friendship group, have rumours spread about them, be ignored, humiliated or repeatedly made to feel that they did not belong.
This became particularly important because physical bullying can be relatively easy for adults to recognise. Relational bullying can be much harder to see. There may be no injury, damaged property or obvious confrontation. A teacher may walk into a classroom and see nothing happening at all, while a young person may know very clearly that they are being excluded.
UK research around the turn of the century was already distinguishing between direct bullying and relational bullying, examining how both affected children and showing that bullying did not need to involve a punch, kick or threat to have an impact.
That change in understanding also brought isolation further into the picture.
Sometimes the harm is not what somebody does to you. It is making sure that nobody does anything with you.
Bullying as a group process
Another important development came from Finland.
In the 1990s, Christina Salmivalli and colleagues began looking at bullying not simply as a relationship between one person bullying and another person being bullied, but as a group process.
Their 1996 research identified several participant roles within bullying situations. Some young people actively assisted the person bullying, others reinforced the behaviour through attention or encouragement, some remained outside the situation, while others defended the person being targeted.
This helped change the picture considerably. In a situation where one young person is mocked in front of ten others, the important question is no longer only who made the comment. It also includes who joined in, who laughed, who watched, who walked away and who checked afterwards whether the person was all right.
Once bullying is understood as a group process, the behaviour of everybody around it begins to matter. It also gives schools more possibilities for intervention because changing the response of the wider peer group may alter the environment in which bullying takes place.
The whole school matters
This wider understanding was appearing elsewhere too.
In New Zealand, Kia Kaha, developed by New Zealand Police and originally released in 1992, approached bullying through the culture of the whole school rather than treating it only as a problem between individuals. Its continuing resources involve pupils, staff and families and place classroom activity within a wider whole school approach.
The principle is important. A school can punish individual incidents and still have an environment in which humiliation, exclusion or aggressive language are normalised. Equally, a school can try to change what its community notices, accepts and challenges.
This shifted some attention away from fixing particular children and towards examining the conditions around them.
Difference, identity and belonging
As research widened, it also became clearer that bullying did not affect every young person in the same way. Disability, special educational needs, race, religion, sexuality, gender identity, appearance and other forms of perceived difference could all become connected with bullying. Sometimes bullying overlapped with discrimination or harassment, making the boundaries between those concepts increasingly difficult to separate.
Homophobic bullying became particularly visible in UK research and campaigning during the 2000s. Stonewall's first School Report, published in 2007, surveyed 1,100 lesbian, gay and bisexual young people and reported that around two thirds had experienced bullying at school because of their sexual orientation. A decade later the proportion had fallen, but Stonewall's 2017 research still found that 45 per cent of LGBT pupils surveyed had been bullied for being LGBT.
The importance of this history goes beyond one group. It helped force a larger question:
Are we dealing only with bullying behaviour, or are we also dealing with the attitudes that give some bullying its meaning?
A racist insult, homophobic taunt or disability related humiliation may be part of bullying, but it also exists within a wider social context. That makes the response more complicated than telling two young people to sort out a disagreement.
What adults see and what young people experience
As definitions widened, another difficulty became harder to ignore. Adults and young people may look at the same event and understand it differently.
An adult may see an argument while a young person sees the latest event in six months of exclusion. An adult may hear banter while the person receiving it knows there is no mutual exchange at all. A teacher may see four friends sitting together and one pupil somewhere else, while the pupils understand perfectly well that the person sitting alone has been deliberately pushed out of the group.
This does not mean that the young person's interpretation must automatically be accepted without question. It means that context matters, and some of that context may only become visible when somebody takes the time to ask.
The labels become less certain too
The old picture of bully, victim and bystander also became harder to sustain. Young people can move between roles. Someone experiencing bullying in one context may behave harmfully towards somebody else in another, while a witness may reinforce behaviour on one occasion and defend somebody on another.
This is one reason we need to be careful about turning behaviour into identity. Calling somebody “a bully” or “a victim” can make a temporary or complex position sound permanent.
The expanding research was increasingly showing something much messier. Bullying happened within relationships, groups, cultures and systems.
Same behaviour, changing world
By the early 2000s, the understanding of bullying had therefore expanded considerably. Physical aggression remained important, but so did exclusion, reputation, relationships, group behaviour, identity and the wider culture in which bullying happened.
And another change was already accelerating.
A young person no longer necessarily had to be standing beside someone to hurt, humiliate or exclude them. Mobile phones, messaging and online social spaces were beginning to remove the boundary between the school day and everything that happened afterwards.
But before we look fully at that digital shift, there was another question anti-bullying work needed to confront:
With all these programmes, policies and approaches, what actually works?