Bullying

Types of bullying are as follows:

• Verbal bullying: Bullying can be through writing or saying things such as teasing someone, calling their names, taunting, or threatening someone to harm them.
• Social bullying: This type of bullying means hurting someone’s relationships or social reputation for example spreading rumors about someone or embarrassing someone in public. Embarrassing someone in public.
• Physical bullying: This type of bullying involves physically hurting such as hitting, kicking, making mean gestures, or breaking someone’s things.

Bullying is something that has a severe impact on the child’s cognition. It majorly affects the perception of the child affecting his or her self-image, social interactions, and even academic performance. Bullying in childhood predicts future mental health problems along with behavior issues ranging from depression to suicidal thoughts. These negative outcomes affect every aspect of the child’s life (physical, emotional, social-behavioral, academic) Some of the short terms and long-term effects of bullying are as follows:

• Short term Effects: These effects include stress anxiety, depression, frustration, feelings of isolation, rejection, and maybe poor self-esteem. Children who are bullied may experience changes in their eating and sleeping patterns and may suffer from other health complaints.
• Long term Effects: Bullying can cause children to avoid school and even result in dropping out. It affects their academic performance where they may often have suicidal thoughts. 

Young children who have witnessed bullying can also be affected by it. They may feel guilty or unsafe. Their mental health may also be affected by witnessing such events. Depression, anxiety, drug abuse, avoiding school is common among such bystanders.

Bullying and childhood trauma have a complex relationship. Children who are bullied can suffer from trauma such as PTSD. Victims of bullying are more likely to bully others. They may become desensitized by bullying or can also be more distressed.

Case Study:

A study was done in 2012 (Idsoe, Dyregov, & Idsoe, 2012) showed that students who were victims of bullying showed PTSD at the rate of about 27.6% in boys and 40.5% in girls. Children who were once targets and then bullied others showed severe Symptoms.

Researchers suggest that bullying causing childhood trauma cause social or interpersonal difficulties. Such children are more prone to become targets of bullying. Studies of Adverse Childhood Experiences have found that children reporting more such experiences have more chance of exhibiting bullying behavior (Sacks, et al., 2014).

Although it was important to highlight students who are victims of bullying but the language, we use has great power in this case and can have unintended outcomes. We should try not to use words like “bullies” and “victims,”. Instead of using labels like “the bully” the more appropriate way to address them would be by calling “the child who bullied another student” or “the student who was bullied” (rather than “the victim”). We should avoid using labels because they can cause hopelessness and rigidity. Labeling also shows that we are focusing only on internal circumstances.