Many years ago, I was sitting across from my house on a Saturday morning, when a gang of kids saw me and one of them decided to make me his punching bag. I left that encounter with a black eye, a bloody nose, and a fat lip.
When I was able to slip away, I ran into my house, where my mother went to work trying to put my face back in some order. Meanwhile, my father kept pacing up and down the room, muttering, "Why didn’t you kick him in the crotch?" over and over again. I could have, but doing so never occurred to me. In my mind, the most important thing was to get away from the barrage of punches.
I can remember the incident very clearly, even though it occurred more than 65 years ago. The idea of defending yourself when you are being bullied clearly went from theory to my kitchen. The problem is that this kind of pressure from home only causes the intimidated, dominated victim to become more frightened and feel more humiliated by his or her classmates.
On the other hand, when the antibullying message comes from the top school administrator, the result can prove powerful, as my 5-year-old granddaughter recently learned.
It seems that my granddaughter, who is in kindergarten, told another girl in her class that she was not welcome to play with her and her group. Later that day, the principal called my granddaughter into her office and said. "We don’t do that here." My granddaughter was shocked, as was I when I heard about the incident from my daughter. Exclusion is the method most often used by girls when they bully a classmate.
Girls also are more likely to experience cyberbullying, and these results also can prove tragic. Recently, a 12-year-old girl in New York who was found hanged in her home reportedly left behind a suicide note that mentioned online bullying.
Bullying is a power game. The bully usually finds a kid he knows he can get the better of. He is bigger and dominates the victim, takes his lunch money, hits him, kicks the victim, or makes the victim do things that he will be ashamed of for many years to come. These kinds of events last in the victim’s mind for a long time. Sometimes, the bully makes the victim do things that they would be too embarrassed to tell anyone about which gets into the area of hazing, another form of bullying (Int. J. Adolesc. Med. Health 2008;20:235-9).
Both the bully and the victim get hurt. The bully begins to feel very powerful and thinks that he can do anything to anyone. It can be intoxicating for some kids and harmful to the school. The way in which he acts in class and speaks to the teacher emboldens the bully so that he begins to feel he has the power to dominate and control others.
Psychopathology grows out of bullying, as does youth murder. In my work in the area of preventing youth murder, bullying is often an antecedent to "going home to get a gun" and is one of the markers for actually committing the act of ending a life. I believe the bully sacrifices some of his humanity to the power and control he achieves in dominating others.
We have to do something to get kids to talk to one another. Can the bully learn the damage he does to the victim? A psychopath will laugh in the victim’s face, especially if the victim cries. Teenagers don’t usually have a capacity for expressing themselves, but the bully who has to hear about the extent to which he hurt others can learn a powerful lesson.
The Olweus system is not the only strategy that can be used to stop bullying, but it is considered the best. Everyone in the school must be work collaboratively in this effort. The key is to find a way to change the culture so that being a perpetrator, a victim – or even a bystander – is totally unacceptable.
We can do this!
Dr. Fink is a psychiatrist and consultant in Philadelphia and professor of psychiatry at Temple University.