Bullying

What is bullying?
The British Governments definition of bullying is:
“Behaviour by an individual or group, usually repeated over time, that intentionally hurts another individual or group either physically or emotionally”.
The Anti-Bullying Alliance states that bullying generally falls into two categories:
· Emotionally harmful behaviour, such as taunting, spreading hurtful rumours and excluding people from groups;
· Physically harmful behaviour, such as kicking, hitting, pushing, or other forms of physical abuse.
The following three conditions are used to define incidences of harmful interpersonal behaviour as bullying behaviour. Behaviour is bullying behaviour if:
· It is repetitive, wilful or persistent;
· It is intentionally harmful, carried out by an individual or group;
· There is an imbalance of power, leaving the person who is being bullied feeling defenceless.

Types and Forms of Bullying

Several types of bullying have been identified in academic literature for children. Among these are:

• Direct bullying: such as teasing, taunting, threatening, hitting, and stealing that are initiated by one or more bullies against a victim;
• Verbal bullying: taunting, teasing, name calling, spreading rumours;
• Physical bullying: hitting, kicking, destroying property, enlisting a friend to assault someone for you;
• Non-verbal bullying (non physical): threatening or obscene gestures, excluding others from a group, manipulating friendships, sending threatening emails, text messages;
• Sexual harassment: a form of bullying in which the intention is to demean, embarrass, humiliate or control another person on the basis of gender or sexual orientation.

For adults, the literature focuses mainly on workplace bullying. This might take the form of excessive monitoring of work, unreasonable deadlines, unmanageable workload, and meaningless tasks.
However, bullying does not only happen in schools or the workplace and can happen in other public places, residential homes etc.
 

Consequences of Bullying

Bullying occurs in walks of life but how it relates to health and well-being is uncertain. For children, on the one hand it could be considered to be a common and normal developmental experience, or it could be considered to be an important cause of stress, with resulting physical and emotional problems.
Since the 1980’s, when research started looking at bullying, peer aggression and victimisation within a school setting have been identified as being a significant threat to the development of children’s and adolescent’s mental and social well being. Children who are bullied suffer more often from health complaints such as sleeping difficulties, headaches, stomach-ache, bedwetting, and depression and have more suicidal thoughts.

For adults the consequences of bullying have been mostly looked at within the workplace. It is known that stress negatively impacts health and bullying is a very stressful situation that can cause lasting psychological and physical damage. Members of a work group who actually see bullying going on but are not directly bullied also experience stress.

Summary
· A history of victimization and poor social relationships as a child predicts the onset of emotional difficulties in adolescents such as depression, and behavioural disorders
· Bullying has been identifies as being a significant threat to the development of young people’s mental and social well-being.
· Adults who experience bullying in the workplace suffer from a whole range of physical and psychological symptoms.
· The experience of being bullied is often life altering and very traumatic. It may not only ruin an employees’ mental health, but also their social status, career and therefore their way of life.
· People who bully often go on to live a life of offending and re-offending.

Prevalence of Bullying in Jersey
The JCRT has evidence to suggest that there is an issue with bullying on the island. It is currently working with the psychology department to conduct an island wide questionnaire about bullying for all ages and across all settings. In order to do this the Trust is working with the Statistics department as well as compiling its own survey to be launched April 2010.
Once the results of this have been compiled a strategy to tackle the issues will be established.