bully ... long but interesting

No, it's not just boys being boys. It takes a special breed of person to cause pain to others. But the one most hurt by bullying is the bully himself—though that's not at first obvious and the effects worsen over the life cycle. Yes, females can be bullies too. They just favor a different means of mean.

On the first day of spring in 1993, honor student Curtis Taylor took his seat in the eighth-grade classroom he had grown to hate in the Oak Street Middle School in Burlington, Iowa. For three years other boys had been tripping him in the hallways, knocking things out of his hands. They'd even taken his head in their hands and banged it into a locker. Things were now intensifying. The name-calling was harsher. Some beloved books were taken. His bicycle was vandalized twice. Kids even kicked the cast that covered his broken ankle. And in front of his classmates, some guys poured chocolate milk down the front of his sweatshirt. Curtis was so upset he went to see a school counselor. He blamed himself for the other kids not liking him.

That night, Curtis went into a family bedroom, took out a gun, and shot himself to death. The community was stunned. The television cameras rolled, at least for a few days. Chicago journalist Bob Greene lingered over the events in his column, and then he printed letters from folks for whom the episode served largely as a reminder of their own childhood humiliations at the hands of bullies.

Months later, in Cherokee County, Georgia, 15-year-old Brian Head grew tired of the same teasing and deeds. The denouement was only slightly more remarkable. He shot himself to death—in front of his classmates. He walked to the front of the classroom and pulled the trigger. The Georgia death came on the heels of five bullying-related suicides in a small town in New Hampshire. Within days, the story got lost in the cacophony of breaking events.

Just over a decade earlier, in late 1982, a nearly identical series of events unfolded in the northern reaches of Norway. Three boys between the ages of 10 and 14 killed themselves, one newspaper reported, to avoid continued severe bullying from schoolmates. But the story would not die. Nor would it shrivel into self-pity. An entire nation erupted. The following fall, scarcely nine months later, a campaign against bullying was in full swing in all of Norway's primary and junior high schools, launched by the minister of education. And its architect, Dan Olweus, Ph.D., a psychologist who, in 1970, had pioneered the systematic study of bullying, became something of a national hero.

The difference between the American and the Scandinavian experience could arguably be summed up in four words: Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. A nation whose toys are given to slashing robots in half seems to have more tolerance for violence as a solution to problems. Most Americans do not take bullying very seriously—not even school personnel, a surprising finding given that most bullying takes place in schools. If Americans think at all about it, they tend to think that bullying is a given of childhood, at most a passing stage, one inhabited largely by boys who will, simply, inevitably, be boys.

"They even encourage it in boys," observes Gary W. Ladd, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois and one of a growing cadre of Americans studying the phenomenon. "That's what parents always ask me," says psychologist David Schwartz, Ph.D., of Vanderbilt University, "isn't it just a case of boys being boys?" The same parents harbor the belief that kids should somehow always be able to defend themselves—to "stand up for themselves," "fight back," "not be pushed around by anyone"—and those who don't or can't almost deserve what they get. Bullying is just good old boyhood in a land of aggressive individualists.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

First in Scandinavia, then in England, Japan, the Netherlands, Canada, and finally, the United States, researchers have begun scrutinizing the phenomenon of bullying. What they are finding is as sad as it is alarming:

• Bullies are a special breed of children. The vast majority of children (60 to 70 percent) are never involved in bullying, either as perpetrators or victims. Early in development, most children acquire internal restraints against such behavior. But those who bully do it consistently.
• Their aggression starts at an early age.
• It takes a very specific set of conditions to produce a child who can start fights, threaten or intimidate a peer ("Give me the jump rope or I'll kill you"), and actively inflict pain upon others.
• Bullying causes a great deal of misery to others, and its effects on victims last for decades, perhaps even a lifetime.
• The person hurt most by bullying is the bully himself, though that's not at first obvious, and the negative effects increase over time.
• Most bullies have a downwardly spiraling course through life, their behavior interfering with learning, friendships, work, intimate relationships, income, and mental health.
• Bullies turn into antisocial adults, and are far more likely than non aggressive kids to commit crimes, batter their wives, abuse their children—and produce another generation of bullies.
• Oh yes, girls can be bullies too. The aggression of girls has been vastly underestimated because it takes a different form. It is a far more subtle and complex means of meanness than the overt physical aggression boys engage in.

  What's a Bully and Who Is It.

  There is no standard definition of a bully, but Dan Olweus has honed the definition to three core elements—bullying involves a pattern of repeated aggressive behavior with negative intent directed from one child to another where there is a power difference. There's either a larger child or several children picking on one, or a child who is clearly more dominant (as opposed to garden-variety aggression, where there may be similar acts but between two people of equal status). By definition, the bully's target has difficulty defending him- or herself, and the bully's aggressive behavior is intended to cause distress, observes Olweus, professor of psychology at the University of Bergen.

  The chronicity of bullying is one of its more intriguing features. It is the most obvious clue that there comes to be some kind of a social relationship between a bully and his victims—and most bullies are boys, while victims are equally girls and boys. And it suggests that, contrary to parents' beliefs, bullying is not a problem that sorts itself out naturally.

  The aggression can be physical—pushes and shoves and hitting, kicking, and punching. Or it can be verbal—name-calling, taunts, threats, ridicule, and insults. Bullies not only say mean things to you, they say mean things about you to others. Often enough, the intimidation that starts with a fist is later accomplished with no more than a nasty glance. The older bullies get, the more their aggression takes the form of verbal threats and abuse.

  Figures differ from study to study, from country to country, and especially from school to school, but from 15 to 20 percent of children are involved in bullying more than once or twice a term, either as bullies or victims. In one Canadian study, 15 percent of students reported that they bullied others more than once or twice during the term. According to large-scale studies Olweus conducted in Norway in 1983, 7 percent of students bullied others "with some regularity" But since then, bully problems have increased. By 1991, they had gone up a whopping 30 percent.

  Bullies, for the most part, are different from you and me. Studies reliably show that they have a distinctive cognitive make-up—a hostile attributional bias, a kind of paranoia. They perpetually attribute hostile intentions to others. The trouble is, they perceive provocation where it does not exist. That comes to justify their aggressive behavior. Say someone bumps them and they drop a book. Bullies don't see it as an accident; they see it as a call to arms. These children act aggressively because they process social information inaccurately. They endorse revenge.

  That allows them a favorable attitude toward violence and the use of violence to solve problems. Whether they start out there or get there along the way, bullies come to believe that aggression is the best solution to conflicts. They also have a strong need to dominate, and derive satisfaction from injuring others. Bullies lack what psychologists call prosocial behavior—they do not know how to relate to others. No prosocial attitudes hold them in check; they do not understand the feelings of others and thus come to deny others' suffering.

  Bullies are also untroubled by anxiety, an emotion disabling in its extreme form but in milder form the root of human restraint. What may be most surprising is that bullies see themselves quite positively—which may be because they are so little aware of what others truly think of them. Indeed, a blindness to the feelings of others permeates their behavioral style and outlook.

Not All Bullies Are Alike

Until recently, a bully was just a bully. But researchers are turning up differences among them that provide strong clues as to how the behavior takes shape. There seem to be two distinct types of bully, distinguished by how often they themselves are bullied.

To make matters slightly more complex, different researchers have different names for them and draw slightly different boundary lines. There are those bullies who are out-and-out aggressive and don't need situations of conflict to set them off, called "proactive aggressors" in some studies, "effectual aggressors" in others. Classic playground bullies fall into this camp. Their behavior is motivated by future reward—like "get me something." It's goal oriented, instrumental. Or perhaps these bullies have high thresholds of arousal and need some increase in arousal level. Hard as it is to believe, these bullies have friends—primarily other bullies. What they don't have at all is empathy; cooperation is a foreign word. They are missing prosocial feelings.

Hey — What About the Girls?

Bullying has been studied largely in boys because they are so much more overtly aggressive. The problem, contends psychologist Nicki R. Crick, Ph.D., is that aggression has always been defined strictly in terms of what boys do that's mean. And that's just one more instance of male bias distorting the way things really are. She and her colleagues now know that "girls are just as capable of being mean as boys are."

"The research shows that boys engage in physical aggression such as kicking, hitting, pushing, shoving, and verbal aggression like name-calling and making fun of kids more than girls do," notes Crick. "The interpretation is that boys are just a lot more aggressive than girls are. But if you go back to the textbook definition of aggression, it's 'the intent to hurt or harm.' "

"For the past three years we've been looking at the ways girls try to harm others. We've identified a form of aggression unique to females, what we call relational aggression, hurting others through damaging or manipulating their relationships in aversive ways." Like:

• Spreading vicious rumors in the peer group to get even with someone so that other people will reject that person.
• Telling others to stop liking someone in order to get even with him or her.
• Trying to control or dominate a person by using social exclusion as a form of retaliation: "You can't come to my birthday party if you don't do x, y, and z."
• Threatening to withdraw friendship in order to get one's way, control another's behavior, or hurt someone: "I won't be your friend if... "
• Giving someone the silent treatment and making sure that they know they're being excluded as a form of retaliation.

It makes intuitive sense to Crick. "If you want to hurt someone and you want it to be effective, shouldn't it be something they really value? Numerous studies have shown that women and girls really value relationships, establishing intimacy and dyadic relations with other girls. That led us to looking at the use of relationships as the vehicle for harm, because if you take that away from a girl, you're really getting at her." Similarly, boys' aggression, plays into goals shown to be important to boys in the face of their peers—physical dominance and having things, or instrumentality.

In studies of children ranging from three years of age to 12, she has determined that parents, teachers, and kids themselves see these behaviors as problematic. They regard them as mean and manipulative. "This behavior cuts across all socioeconomic and all age groups. Adults do these things too." In fact, Crick's studies show that relational aggression becomes a more normative angry behavior for girls the older they get. Particularly as girls move into adolescence, themes of social exclusion increase in frequency in girls's conflicts with their peers.

While Crick's studies show that 27 percent of aggressive kids, mostly boys, engage in both overt and relational aggression, the majority of aggressive kids—73 percent—engage in one or the other, not both. Relational aggression is far more characteristic of girls, at least throughout the school years. Taking relational aggression into account leads to a startling conclusion: Girls (22 percent) and boys (27 percent) are aggressive in almost equal numbers.

HOW TO HANDLE A BULLY

What Children Can Do:

• A wise line of defense is avoidance. Know when to walk away. It is thoroughly adaptive behavior to avoid a bully. Being picked on is not character-building.
• Use humor to defuse a bully who may be about to attack. Make a joke: "Look, Johnny, lay off. I don't want you to be late for school."
• Or tell the bully assertively, "Get a life. Leave me alone." And walk away. This may be the best defense for girls.
• Recruit a friend. Observers find that having a friend on the playground is one of the most powerful protectives, especially for boys.
• In general, seek out the friendly children and build friendships with them.
• See that your child has a grounding in assertive behavior. The real first line of defense against a bully is self-confidence.
• Spread the word that bullying is bad for bullies.
• Ask your children how peers treat them. Children often are ashamed to bring up the subject. Parents must.
• Enroll your child in a social-skills group where children learn and practice skills in different situations.
• Model good relationships at home. Help siblings get along.
• Increase the social opportunities of all kids, but especially victimized ones. Invite other children, and groups of children, over to the house. Encourage sleepovers. This is your job; parents are social engineers.
• Enroll your child in classes or groups that develop competencies in activities that are valued by peers. Even kids who don't love sports may like karate, tae kwon do, and similar activities.
• Shut off the TV: much programming reinforces the idea that aggression is the only way to deal with conflicts.
• Empathy helps. Instill in all kids a sense of the distress that a victim experiences.
• Help your child come up with a set of clever verbal comebacks to be used in the event of victimization by verbally abusive peers.
• See that kids in groups have plenty of things to do. Provide play materials. Buy a soccer ball. Paint a hopscotch pattern on the sidewalk. Bullying flourishes when kids are together and have nothing else to do.
• Do not tell or teach a kid to fight back. Fighting back is the worst defense. In most instances, victimized children really are weaker and smaller than the bully—thus their fears of losing there fights may be quite real. Besides, not all bullying takes the form of physical aggression. Counter-aggression to any form of bullying actually increases the likelihood of continued victimization.
• Do not expect kids to work it out on their own. Bullying is not a simply a problem of individuals. Given the influence of the peer groups and reputational factors in maintaining the behavior of bullies and victims, it is extremely unrealistic to expect kids to alter the dynamics of bullying by themselves.
• Always intervene. Adults have a crucial role to play in the socialization of children. And consistency counts. Any time adults do not intervene they are essentially training others to solve problems through aggression.
• Intervene at the level of the group. Let all kids know bullying is not OK. Declare emphatically: "This is not acceptable behavior. You can't do this here."
• Talk to your child's teachers to find out what is normal behavior for children of that age group and to find out the class atmosphere is like.
• Talk to other parents; where there's one victimized child there are likely to be others.
• Get the school involved. At the very least, ask that the school declare bullying off-limits. A change in the atmosphere of the school is not only possible, but helpful in reducing bullying.
• Go to the school administration and demand that bullies be transferred to other classes or schools. Every child has the right to a safe school environment.
• If all else fails, see that your child is transferred to another school. The same child may thrive in a different school with a group of children having different values.