Bullying
Explore the causes, effects and solutions for school bullying
Bullying is a cycle of violence. Those who are bullied often become bullies. Bullying often begins as a defense mechanism and evolves into a way of being accepted. Victims learn the technique and start to use it against weaker kids, in a simple effort to be cool. School social workers (see School Social Work) consider the intervention in bullying situations one of their prime directives.
Bullying, in its milder forms, developed into a way of communicating among many adolescents. Students often challenge, judge, criticize, and tease in a way that is marginally hurtful. These mild forms of meanness blur the lines between normal conversation and emotionally damaging bullying.
Students often tell school social workers that this language isn't bullying - it's just the way they communicate with each other. Instructing teens (see Life as a Teenager) that the use of language as a weapon of emotional violence is often difficult. While they don't always understand the insidious process, they do understand that at some level it makes people feel badly about themselves.
On the other hand, much bullying is malicious, a deliberate attempt to diminish and damage another person as much as possible without coming to blows. Some bullying is violent. Students who are attacked and beaten or are enticed into a physical confrontation are subject to serious punishments by the school, and possibly legal charges of assault.
Cyberbullying has taken bullying to new levels. Whereas once it was left at school, now it follows its victims everywhere – the cellphone, Facebook, chat rooms, and e-mail. There's no relief and it appears that there's no protection. The emotional impact from unrelenting attacks can be too much for some to withstand. Some states have instituted laws that punish the act of intimidating someone on the Internet.
School social workers are pivotal in the fight against bullying. Operating at ground zero in schools, they enter the fray more directly than do parents. They identify victims and offenders, and plan interventions.
Peer intervention is the most effective way to stop bullying. Led by school social workers, schools are initiating programs that increase the awareness of school populations. Student action movements that counter bullying on a peer level disarm the bullying mentality and use peer pressure (see Peer Pressure) to intervene and stop bullying when it begins.
Because school social workers are committed to teaching students to respect the dignity of all people, they are the advocates who often find resolutions to the most difficult issues.