School bullying, or bullying, is one of the most common forms of psychological abuse, which, nevertheless, is still perceived as something natural and normal. According to the topic of school bullying, on average, every third teenager between the ages of 12 and 18 becomes a participant in bullying in one role or another, at the same time cyberbullying (bullying on the Internet. - Note. ed.) is less common - 15% of adolescents face it.
As a rule, such an experience does not pass without a trace. medical consequences of bullying, it is noted that former victims are more likely to suffer in adulthood with agoraphobia (fear of open spaces. - Note. ed.), anxiety disorders, and panic attacks. Pure aggressors have an increased risk of antisocial personality disorder, which is characterized by impulsivity, aggressiveness, ignorance of social norms, and problems forming attachments. Afisha Daily found out from former victims of school bullying what they had to endure, and asked the instigators why they did it.
Alice, 20 years old
“They shouted at my back that I was a lesbian, and then they ignored me”
Since childhood, I was called fat, although I only had a childishly plump belly, for which they teased. One of my early school memories: I cut my hair, went to the blackboard, and they laughed at me. In elementary school, I wanted to be the first in everything: to sing, dance, read poetry. But in productions I was always taken last or not taken at all. However, the real problems began in the 8th grade, when my family moved from Krasnoyarsk to Sochi and I went to a prestigious school there.
I fell in love with a girl - it seemed strange, although the feelings were mutual. I shared with a friend, and she told her gopnik boyfriend, after which everyone found out about my relationship.
They also “joked” at me: they threw textbooks out of the window, put bulls in a briefcase, wrote notes about me
Every morning, on the way to school, I passed by the site where the company hung out with the gopnik ringleader, and they shouted at my back: “Hey, lesbian, maybe you should call a girl?” Every time I was going to school, I thought: “I wish I didn’t meet anyone, just walk to the class and sit down at the desk.” I was often late for the first lesson. But all the same, even if I went into the classroom after the bell, classmates turned to me and someone called names - no one paid attention to the teacher.
During breaks, I did not leave the class alone - only if for company with someone. But at some point, everyone stopped communicating with me at all. No one declared a boycott - they just stopped talking. For example, I ask a question - and in response they ignore me or call me names. They also “joked” at me: they threw textbooks out of the window, put bulls in a briefcase, wrote notes about me. Once I was walking with my mother - and they spat in my back.
With the main offender, the ringleader, we lived in the same entrance. In private, he did not humiliate me, but when I asked him why he was mocking me, he said that it was because I live wrong, not according to the rules. When I asked who defines these concepts, he replied that if I live in a society, then I must comply.
Only one classmate continued to communicate with me. We lived in the same entrance, and after school she called and invited me to visit, and for some reason I walked, although she didn’t notice me at school either. Apparently, she was afraid that they would start to poison her.
There were other guys in our class who were cruelly teased by their classmates. As a rule, their parents came and sorted things out, and in this example, I realized that parents should not be drawn into a conflict: they will leave, and I will be left alone with the offenders.
I used to skip classes, go to the playground, buy myself a bottle of beer and drink alone
In 9th grade it got even worse. I sat in the back of the desk with headphones on, a hood on my head. Or the second pose - the face was stuck in the hands folded on the desk. I used to skip classes, go to the playground, buy myself a bottle of beer and drink alone. I skipped the 9th grade for about a month - the teachers didn’t even write a note to my mother, they generally wrote only when it was necessary to hand over the money. Studying didn’t interest me at all: everyone around studied with tutors, but I had deuces, and I didn’t care.
I became bolder: I began to write to them that they broke my life and turned it into hell. They said it was just a joke
Once I went to Krasnoyarsk for a month. And then a classmate hacked my page on VKontakte and wrote on my wall that I was a lesbian. I didn’t start to sort things out, I just deleted the entry, but hacking the page is just too much.
I started studying only when I returned to Krasnoyarsk. After the move, classmates from Sochi began to add me as friends. I became bolder: I began to write to them that they broke my life and turned it into hell. They replied that they were just jokes.
At the new school, I hid my orientation - I could not come to terms with the fact that I like both boys and girls until the 11th grade. Once I started dating a classmate and somehow in a correspondence with a classmate I described that I have “she” instead of “he”. A classmate in the smoking room stuck: "Well, tell me." And I was so afraid of the repetition of bullying, I was shaking, but out of fear, I suddenly laid out everything. He looked at me: “So what? It's your life, do whatever you want." Other classmates reacted the same way. It helped me accept myself.
Elena, 30 years old
“I was the main enemy of “normal” girls”
I studied in a village, in the Leningrad region. There were 25 people in the class - boys and girls approximately equally. In elementary school, I didn’t try very hard, and my mother said that she didn’t mind if I didn’t study at all, because she would always suit me as a milkmaid. I was so scared that I became an excellent student and remained so until the end of the eleventh grade.
Problems appeared in the 6th grade, when puberty began. Some girls matured earlier: they began to put on make-up, go to discos and meet boys - that is, they became “normal” girls. There were only two of them in the class, but they had a whole retinue that wanted to match. And others - me and three or four other losers - became "crazy". I studied well, but I was indifferent to discos, and besides, I resented this hierarchy, so I fell out of favor and became the main enemy of “normal” girls.
Insults were standard: a nerd, a nerd, and for some reason they sometimes called me a pistachio. Now all these curses seem stupid and childish, but then it hurt. They also constantly tried to write off from me, and if I refused, then the persecution intensified. Once I let it be written off, and then I found a mistake in myself and corrected it. As a result, it received a higher rating. After school, two girls caught up with me and started screaming and pushing me. It was humiliating and embarrassing.
The teachers treated me very well, because I was one of the few in our school who studied well, but they did not know about the bullying. I didn't show whether I was good or bad. At school, I hardly talked to anyone. There was only one girlfriend - the same nerd as me. We supported each other, and because of this friendship, I did not feel alone.
Almost the entire school I was accompanied by a complete feeling of self-doubt: in my appearance, in the way my voice sounds
Things got better in ninth grade. Exams were approaching, everyone understood that after them the class would be divided - many would go to colleges and technical schools. My offenders themselves came to put up: “Well, shall we communicate?” I looked at them and said, "No." In the sixth grade, I would have rejoiced at their initiative, and in the ninth, when an eternity had passed by school standards, I no longer needed friendship with them. Our communication became neutral only during the exams.
Then I moved to a stronger mathematical school, and with one of the main offenders, we even became friends. In the 11th grade, she apologized to me: “I don’t know what came over me - hormones, boys. Sorry". Now I think that perhaps she hated me because I liked, without knowing it, a boy she liked.
Almost the whole school I was accompanied by a complete feeling of self-doubt: in my appearance, in the way my voice sounds. I was terrified that I was doing something wrong. It probably didn't go away. If I join a new team, I behave very quietly: I sit and keep silent. It is still easier for me to communicate with boys, but it is difficult to build relationships with girls. Perhaps that is why I am interested in sports where there are not very many girls: long-distance running, triathlon and multisport.
Anna, 28 years old
“I thought that I had the right to humiliate a classmate just because he was nasty”
I lived in Moscow and studied in the Moscow region. The school was paid and prestigious, and I was new there, but I had support - a classmate. Our mothers were friends, and he moved to school a few months before me and has already gained authority. In the third grade, a boy came to us: thin, unpleasant, strange, he always smelled of tobacco, and it was also said that he smoked at the age of 9. His hair was greasy - he didn't seem to wash his hair. And my friend and I began to mock him. I don't remember our jokes, but it seemed to me that I had the right to humiliate him because he was nasty.
And then I took and hit the boy with his face on the table: it seems that blood flowed from his nose, he cried, and I felt ashamed
One day we were in the classroom together. The nasty boy was sitting at his desk, sorting through his notebooks, and my friend and I walked around him and said some nasty things. Then I put my hands in the boy's hair and began to almost pull it out - I even liked that it hurt him. And then I took and hit the boy with his face on the table: it seems that blood flowed from his nose, he cried, and I felt ashamed. I realized that I was bad, that I was cruel, and although he was nasty, he was weak. Up to this point, I have always been proud that I was not afraid to fight boys, that I was strong and won, that I defended the weak. And then I realized that the worst of all, that I was evil.
The weak boy was soon expelled from school: it seems that his parents hid some kind of mental illness that did not go well with studying at a prestigious school. On the last day, when his parents took him away, he cried and shouted at me in front of the whole class that I would be next. That is what happened, by the way. Either at the end of the eighth, or at the beginning of the ninth grade, they already hounded me - for snitching. For some reason, I decided that it was necessary to resolve conflicts not by fighting, but by involving adults, and I told the teacher that I had been offended. The bullying ringleader was my former bullying colleague.
As an adult, I tried to find the boy I bullied on social networks and apologize, but I don’t even really remember his last name, although I remember the smell and the red tear-stained face well. This experience has affected me in such a way that I cannot watch people being beaten, even pretend. And I don't write hateful comments anywhere either.
Nikolai, 36 years old
“We mocked all the weak guys”
I studied at a rural school, and we mocked downtrodden and weak-willed people. At school, fighting was the norm. I fought every day - I didn’t always win, but still everyone knew that you shouldn’t climb on me. And someone could not fight back, defend themselves - they made fun of such people. They could get hit on the back of the head in passing, but mostly the humiliations were moral: petty assignments and name-calling.
For example, we had a guy named Fish - he ate little and was very thin. Often we came to dinner and said: “Fish, you are in flight today” - and took away his portion. He shrugged his shoulders, drank tea and left. Now it’s a shame to remember this, especially because Pisces died of pneumonia a couple of years ago.
Someone, for example, was asked to transfer a briefcase to another class. Someone put worms, maggots, larvae of huge beetles in a briefcase - we dug them out in the school garden. There were also quite childish jokes: smear your hands with chalk and slap on the back.
My friend crushed two ugly classmates so that they only addressed him with the words "my lord"
Then there was a fashion - to go to school with diplomats. And so my friend took a drill at a craft lesson and drilled several holes in one boy's diplomat, saying: “Reflectors (reflectors, which, for example, are often attached to a bicycle. - Note. ed.) insert, you will walk and glow.
There was also a huge guy Ben - good-natured, strong. He was the only one who was beaten by three, and not one on one, as was customary. It was just that he was so big that it was impossible to cope with him alone. At the same time, Ben did not resist at all - he simply stepped aside, did not give up.
There were three ringleaders in our class, and I was not the best. For example, I never mocked girls, but my friend crushed two ugly classmates so much that they only addressed him with the words “my master”.
We also had one girl, developed beyond her years, with large breasts. She was sitting right in front of my friend, and he pulled back the fastener of her bra and let go - her bra belt hit her on the back. She was angry, complained, and once she took four textbooks in her hands and gave him a head turn with them.
Why did we do it? Then it seemed natural and normal, but we were interested. Herd feeling. It's probably wrong. But, on the other hand, the society is cruel, the children's society is three times more cruel: if not you - then you, you need to be able to earn authority.
Alexandra Bochaver
PhD in Psychology, Research Fellow, Center for Contemporary Childhood Research, Institute of Education, National Research University Higher School of Economics
Bullying, or bullying, is a regular purposeful aggressive behavior towards someone in conditions of inequality of power or power. It is found in any team (prison, army, school), where people are assigned not because they want to be there, but on some random basis, such as age.
Bullying is a social tool that allows you to build a hierarchy, distribute statuses and resolve uncertainty. The dominant aggressor raises status through the use of physical or social superiority - for example, through humiliation and beatings. At the same time, someone becomes an object of persecution and occupies the lowest status position, while everyone else is placed in the gap between him and the aggressor and more or less calm down. Such certainty provides a safe space for all but those at whose expense it occurs.
Research by Dan Olvaeus (Norwegian psychologist specializing in school bullying. - Note. ed.) and other psychologists show that bullying is harmful for all its participants. The longer bullying lasts and the less children and adults oppose it, the more familiar and normative it becomes for all its participants.
A child who is offended gets used to humiliation, begins to think that he is not worthy of a more respectful attitude, he does not count on recognition from his peers, so his self-esteem decreases, which may also cause psychosomatic symptoms.
A bullying child understands that violence gets away with him, and does not learn to build relationships in a different way: aggression can become his main method of interacting with the world, and he becomes convinced that the one who has the power is right, and the power can be not necessarily physical, it is also the power, status, wealth of parents and so on. Accordingly, such a child tries to keep power for himself, and when he meets someone of higher status, he expects suppression and humiliation in his address.
The incessant harassment also has a negative effect on the witnesses of these episodes, because they choose not to react, because they are afraid of the prospect of being in the place of the victim. At the same time, they often experience shame for their inaction.
Bullying usually begins in elementary school, peaks at the age of younger teenagers - 10-12 years old, and then declines. Bullying occurs differently in boys and girls. Boys are more likely to use verbal and physical aggression, while girls are more likely to use indirect ones, such as spreading humiliating rumors.
Teachers do not always cope with bullying situations: in part, they do not perceive it as their task, because they were not taught this. It seems that the class teacher should be responsible for the psychological climate in the classroom, but often he does not have the necessary tools for this, competence, motivation. Some teachers may even find it convenient when there is a scapegoat in the classroom: children take out aggression on it, and the teacher in this case does not become the object of negative attention. In addition, the emphasis on exams leaves less and less time and energy for building personal relationships with students. Moreover, children spend a lot of time at school and need relationships with peers and teachers, and such a “conveyor line” increases emotional stress.
In order to get involved in the situation in time, parents need to be generally aware of what the child is doing with friends at school: whether he calls up with classmates, chats on social networks, visits, chats. If all this is there, it means that everything is in order in the class. If the child walks alone, is sad, he has no one to ask for homework, no one to invite to his birthday, then it is important to understand what is happening. Not the fact that this is bullying - there may be other difficulties. In any case, it is useful for a parent to imagine how relations in the class are approximately arranged, to discuss them with the child, to be interested in them not only at the moment when everything becomes difficult.
For teenagers, statuses are very important. It is optimal when a child has different experiences in different groups and understands the multidimensionality of relationships: for example, in the class he is appreciated for being good at drawing, but in physical education he is not the best. For any child, the experience of success is important, and not everyone can get it at school: it's good when there are additional environments for this - sections, circles, interest groups.
The Internet also plays an important role. On the one hand, it can become a resource for those who do not have face-to-face communication for some reason. On the other hand, it also becomes a new environment for all kinds of aggression, in particular, bullying. Cyberbullying is somewhat similar to traditional bullying, but it also has a number of differences. For example, in face-to-face bullying, the child knows that there is a dangerous space (school bus, classroom, restroom) that is best avoided. With cyberbullying, the victim does not know when he will be attacked, does not understand who the offender is and what information about the victim is available to him - that is, he is in a situation of vulnerability everywhere and around the clock.
In order to stop bullying in the classroom, the coordinated activity of teachers, a school psychologist and the support of parents is needed. A psychologist can cope with the consequences of bullying and help the child outside of school - at individual meetings, trainings or within the framework of a teenage psychotherapeutic group, where in a safe environment one can discuss school situations and learn new ways of behavior.
In Soviet times, it was not customary to talk about bullying. Bullying is generally a fairly new term in the psychology of education, although it has always existed as a phenomenon. There are a number of myths about why it is useful, but in general there is quite a lot of talk about violence and countering violence now, so the situation with bullying should also change.
The public is now very concerned about bullying in schools, kindergartens and maternity hospitals. But in fact, bullying is not only children's entertainment. This will be confirmed by anyone who had the good fortune to visit a rigid hierarchical team: prison, army, monastery or advertising department.
For example, in adult groups they rarely spit chewed paper or rub chewing gum into their hair (although anything can happen), but being a victim of bullying there is no more fun than at school. Why is bullying such an important part of human culture and how to deal with it?
The nature of bullying
If we take, for example, a box with kittens or an aviary with puppies, we will quickly see that bullying is not a human invention at all. Animal cubs in their moments of leisure non-stop amuse themselves by gnawing each other's tails, hitting each other with their paws in the muzzle and jokingly biting, sometimes being too carried away. Animals thus learn important social functions: they run in the models of "attacking the enemy", "defending the territory", "pursuing prey". Own brothers and sisters are great trainers for such exercises, especially since everything is pretend: the claws are retracted, the jaws are relaxed.
But in parallel, in such a half-joking fuss, a hierarchical pyramid arises: it becomes clear to everyone who is stronger, bolder or more resilient here, with whom it is better not to mess with, and who can be pushed off the bowl without ceremony. In adult animals, such fights are more violent, but when they occur among members of the same group, it is still almost always just an imitation, which, however, allows one to fairly accurately distribute roles in the pack.
In human society, everything looks about the same. We use reduced or simulated violence where we do not intend to use real. To express displeasure to a colleague, it is not necessary to boil him in hot resin - it is enough to shake his fist at him as a joke. Instead of scalping the enemy, we give him the nickname "red horseradish from the sixth floor" and are quite satisfied with what we have achieved. Why cut your opponent's throat when spitting in his soup is enough?
Bullying lives and thrives even in groups where formal violence is excluded - for example, in the offices of large corporations. In developed countries, they are trying to fight it, but the laws and regulations that regulate it often look even more stupid and disgusting than bullying itself. What is worth, for example, a ban on any nicknames and abbreviated forms of names, on any comments about the appearance and clothes of employees, on any physical contacts, except for handshakes in negotiations, etc.
Bullying or bullying
No one says such horrible, offensive things to each other as some best friends do. Friendly jokes, jokes, practical jokes, brawls and other wonderful things that make the friendship of men (especially young ones) so rich and diverse are a common phenomenon in various cultures. If someone thinks that such relationships are the lot of representatives of wild tribes or semi-primitive guys from the working outskirts, then he can read, for example, Wodehouse's stories about the entertainment of young English aristocrats who could not sleep without putting Lord Wu's bosom friend a couple of tritons under the pillow. We can also recall the description of the drinking bouts of Chinese syutsai - young scientists who, tired of reading treatises, smeared each other with soot and arranged complex nightmarish jokes involving demons, spirits and copper cauldrons suspended in the dark, about which a frightened friend should bang his head at the end of the event. Such relationships were called in the Pushkin era by the French word "amikoshonstvo" - "friendly swinishness", which swinishness meant familiarity and extreme simplicity in communication, reaching mutual insults under the guise of light chatter.
Such forms of friendly bullying are an important element of male culture. In this way, we test friends for stamina, for a loyal attitude towards us, for readiness for informal contacts, and so on and so forth. But a good friend always knows the limits of our personal patience and, having crossed them, asks for forgiveness (not always in words, really, but oh well).
True bullying is not supported by either friendly feelings or the offender's readiness to get back: it is always aggression, even if it is innocent at first glance.
Bullying methods
Verbal
Nicknames, threats, obscenities, insulting remarks, sharp criticism often for no reason, whistles, laughter, and that farting sound that some virtuosos can make with their lips and tongue without spitting on their chin - this is all verbal bullying. To bullying, some psychologists and lawyers also include conversations that can hurt the feelings of those who might accidentally hear these conversations. For example, discussion of girls' articles in a strip club may be regarded by the court as bullying of female employees. This was the case, for example, in the case of Svetlana Lokhova against the London branch of the investment bank Sberbank CIB, when in 2012 an employee sued the bank for more than three million pounds for chronic verbal bullying and gender discrimination.
Physical
This is not necessarily a beating on the head with a briefcase or spanking on the back of the employees' uniform skirts. Under physical bullying, lawyers are ready to understand any unwanted touches - for example, twirling the buttons on the interlocutor's jacket, smoothing his hair, patting on the shoulder or a friendly push with a colleague's head clamped under the arm as a greeting. Bullers usually do not understand what claims can be against them: they were just joking, warming up, imitating a fight! The victim of bullying, on the other hand, usually reports that she felt rumpled, disheveled, and humiliated by such treatment. In addition, physical bullying includes damaging the victim's belongings, including eating her lunch from a public refrigerator.
Ignoring
School boycotts or prison bans on communicating with the "lowered" - this all applies to this form of bullying. In less harsh conditions, bullies usually show deafness and simply do not hear the words of the victim addressed to them, and besides, they interfere with her communication in the team - for example, spreading nasty rumors about her or directly approaching her at corporate parties and rallies and taking her interlocutors away from her under various suggestions. It may seem that this is some kind of too feminine method of bullying, but in fact, the representatives of the stronger sex also sin with it all the time.
Private
If children's groups usually bully in chorus, choosing a victim for themselves and harassing them with the whole class or group, then in adults, independent individuals, personal bullying is extremely common. Having disliked someone, the buller methodically and systematically spoils the victim's life in small ways and in a big way, without involving outsiders in the process, so that the victim's indignation often looks like paranoia. “Yes, you did! Vasily is a normal man, why would he add salt to your coffee? And your project was really weak, Vasily just said what he thinks ... ”However, among adults, group bullying is also no exception, especially if they belong to the following type.
Organized from above
An authoritarian leader who is accustomed to leading according to the “divide and rule” method can often turn out to be a bully of the highest standard. As a result, an atmosphere of falsehood, denunciations, favorites and outcasts, total injustice and undeclared wars reigns in the company. Such bosses usually always have one or two employees on whom he sets the rest of his colleagues, thus turning the unfortunate victims into some kind of lightning rods of public discontent. These employees are always to blame for everything, their successes are ridiculous, their ideas are nightmarish, because of them the team lost their bonuses, fuck them! Especially often this type of bullying happens in closed institutions such as monasteries, prisons or military bases, from where the victim cannot escape. But this type can also be found in much more respectable places, such as universities, theaters, museums.
Snakes or crocodiles?
Men and women relate to bullying very differently, and this difference manifests itself already by the age of 12–13, according to sociologists (for example: Vishnevskaya V.I., Butovskaya M.L. The phenomenon of school bullying: aggressors and victims in the Russian School // Ethnographic Review, 2010, No. 2). Girls are less likely to experience bouts of anger and aggression. In addition, they generally have a negative attitude towards all but the mildest forms of friendly bullying. In communication with friends, most girls are extremely ceremonial and friendly, joking and teasing between friends is much less aggressive, physical contacts practically exclude any form of struggle. Nevertheless, it is not worth considering that women are such special angels who never, ever poison the weak or stand out too much. They just play differently. Their verbal bullying mostly consists of passing on gossip and slander, and of all bullying methods they prefer ignoring. Moreover, according to a number of sociopsychologists and business psychologists, bullying is much more common in women's teams than in men's, especially when it comes to the "organized from above" type, in which the boss pursues objectionable hands, and even more so with the tongues of her faithful favorites.
How to behave if you are a victim of bullying
It is best not to become a victim of bullying from the very first day in the team. Which is not so easy, since the choice of the victim is often quite random. That is, people with striking behavioral patterns are more at risk of attracting the unwanted attention of aggressors, but still the situation in the team itself and the will of chance are also important factors. This will be readily confirmed by the parents of the children who solved the problems of the victim child by simply changing the school: the bullying usually stopped in the new place. And vice versa: a successful person, a favorite of the team, accustomed to general sympathy, may well turn into an outcast and a loser in a new place.
Don't be aggressive, don't get upset and don't appeal to your conscience
The emotions of the victim are the favorite treat of the aggressor, and it does not matter if they are expressed in complaints, resentment or rage. The more active you react, the more interesting it is to poke you with a stick. Ignoring jokes and petty mischief often solves the problem on its own. If, having found a fart pillow on your chair, you start throwing thunder and lightning and carry the aforementioned object to the board of directors with a demand to sort it out, then you can turn into a favorite target of bullying for the whole company. If, with a shrug, say: “Well, very funny!” - the prankster will feel that the trick has failed. Or you can laugh, examine the pillow and admit that the thing is worth it. Such behavior is likely to evoke sympathy from both the team and the offender, but there is some risk of falling into the trap of the next point.
Don't be a joke
If a person likes to laugh at himself and willingly invites those who wish to participate in this, then either he really must like this attitude, or one day he will realize that he has become a pincushion for the entire team. It is noteworthy pranksters and merry fellows who often become victims of the most cruel bullying, especially when they suddenly try to abandon such a role. However, this problem can be avoided - see the next paragraph.
Be physically strong or appear to be
It's not that people are afraid that you can flare up and knock out everyone's teeth. It's just that big or very strong people are less likely to cause irritation and a desire to kick them. Yes, this is pure biology - the care of the subconscious about those same teeth at an unconscious level.
Don't try to make friends with "kings" and "queens"
Flattery and trying to make connections with local alphas and leaders is a bad idea. This is expected of a beginner: such a pathetic attempt to flatter will cause contempt (although formally it can be graciously accepted), but your status will be somewhere in the plinth region for a long time.
Find yourself friends from those who are on the sidelines.
When there are people in the team that you like and who like you, bullying stops being so exhausting, and it’s easier for the aggressors to ram alone than to contact the group.
If you are still severely bullied
If the thought of having to spend another wonderful day in this wonderful team makes you longing and despair - run. God bless them, with a salary and a dissertation! There are no bars on the windows, is there a sentry at the gate? Run! Bullying in full growth is not a trifle, it can lead to severe nervous breakdowns. Recall that spontaneous killers are often the victims of bullying at school or at work.
Well, if possible, do not terrorize anyone, even the most ridiculous and pathetic psychos who are just asking to be kicked!
COMBAT RULES
Bullying or friendly joke?
Determining whether you are friends or are already bullied is not so easy. However, friendship has symptoms that bullying does not.
Equality
After he called you a red-bottomed baboon, you have every right to call him a cholera vibrio, and he will take it for granted.
sincerity
You can talk seriously about things that are important to you, and at that moment he will not laugh and joke. At least he will try.
Confidence
He can warm you with a wet towel, but he won't tell strangers what you asked to be kept secret.
Help
Having dropped you on the floor and broken your leg, he will not only visit you in the hospital, but he will also take your cat to live with him (but he will not take the girl).
Boundary Respect
There are things that he will never joke about, because he knows that you are painful about this topic. Even if he just found out a brilliant joke specifically against bald people!
Bullying is not an easy topic to discuss and study: on the one hand, almost all people have encountered situations of bullying in one way or another, on the other hand, they are associated with experiences of fear, guilt, shame, helplessness, hatred, despair, and these experiences are very little discussed.
The first studies of the phenomenon of teenage bullying
Bullying, or bullying (sometimes the term "mobbing" is also used), is a complex social phenomenon that has probably taken place throughout the entire period of a person's existence, his life in a team. It is most often defined as systematic, purposeful aggressive behavior under the condition of an inequality of power or power of the participants. Key characteristics are intentionality, regularity, inequality of strength or power. Especially actively, as one of the most important, this topic is discussed abroad in the framework of the psychology of education; In Russia, the problem of bullying is just beginning to acquire the status of a subject of discussion and research, the number of scientific papers on this topic increases from one or two per year from 2001 to 2009 to 112 papers in 2016.
Despite the fact that the first publications on the topic of bullying in the educational environment appeared in 1905, Scandinavian researchers made the greatest contribution to solving the problem: the Swedish school doctor Peter-Paul Heinemann, especially the Norwegian psychologist-researcher Dan Olveus, the teacher and sociologist Erling Georg Ruhland, the Estonian Swedish cognitive psychologist Anatole Pikas. In recent years, a significant contribution to the research and development of a system of prevention in education has been made by the Finnish psychologist Christina Salmivalli. The work of Dan Olvaeus was especially significant: it was thanks to him that the phenomenon of bullying in the scientific field became visible and determined the trend of world psychology for a long time.
First of all, thanks to the work of Scandinavian psychologists, research in the field of phenomenology and technologies for the prevention and cessation of bullying began to develop rapidly throughout the world. Their relevance remains very high due to the existence of severe consequences of bullying for all participants. In Russia, the topic of harassment and bullying was studied at different times by I.S. Kon, S.N. Enikolopov, V.S. Sobkin, S.V. Krivtsova, A.A. Bochaver, K.D. Khlomov.
The phenomenon of bullying as a subject of psychological science is located at the intersection of personality psychology, social and clinical psychology. To study relations, aggression, power, at first separate experiments were carried out (the most striking ones are Stanley Milgram's experiments with electric discharges and Philip Zimbardo's prison experiment), recently material for studying the same phenomena can be found in everyday reality.
Manifestations of bullying
Distinguish bullying direct when a child is beaten, called names, teased, things are damaged or money is taken away, and indirect: spreading rumors and gossip, boycotting, avoiding, manipulating friendship ("If you are friends with her, we are not friends"). Sexually tinged comments and gestures, threats, racist nicknames may also be used.
Direct bullying occurs primarily in elementary school, with indirect bullying peaking during middle and high school transitions. Boys are more likely than girls to engage in bullying in various roles, they are also more likely to be victims of physical bullying, their money is taken from them and things are damaged, they are threatened and forced to do something, while girls are more likely to become victims of gossip, obscene statements and gestures. With the spread of the Internet, a new form of bullying has appeared - cyberbullying, bullying using modern technologies: SMS, email, social networks, and so on.
Prevalence of bullying
According to the first anonymous study conducted by D. Olvaeus in the 1980s, it was found that 15% of children regularly face a situation of bullying: 9% are victims, 7% are persecutors, 2% are mastering both roles. Over the years, researchers have obtained different data. For example, according to 2007 data, in the United States, 32% of students experienced school bullying: ridicule, spreading rumors, beating, spitting, threatening, refusing to communicate, they were forced to do what they did not want, or their property was damaged.
A cross-cultural study of teen bullying in Europe in 2005 showed a range: from 9% of boys in Sweden to 45% in Lithuania, and from 5% of girls in Sweden to 36% in Lithuania, experienced two or more episodes of bullying within a month. In general, according to the authors in different cultures, from 5 to 75% of schoolchildren around the world have experienced victims of traditional bullying during their schooling. With regard to bullying using modern computer technologies, cyberbullying, on average 10-40% of schoolchildren and youth had the experience of victims of cyberbullying in 2010.
According to our forthcoming 2016 data for Moscow, up to 71.2% of teenagers have experienced cyberbullying, with the most prominently represented method (59.1%) being insulting or humiliating others on social media. Up to 17% of teachers are also cyberbullied by students.
Victim and Persecutor
There are three main roles of participants in a bullying situation - these are victim, pursuer, witness. In general, they are not rigidly fixed and can change from situation to situation and from group to group. However, researchers often say that the child's active mastering of one of the roles is provided by his internal prerequisites. Bullying participants have certain personality and behavioral traits and have a number of social risks associated with roles.
Victims of bullying are characterized by sensitivity, anxiety, a tendency to cry, physical weakness, low self-esteem, they have little social support, friends, such children prefer to spend time with adults. An example of a victim of bullying can be described as a withdrawn child with behavioral problems, negative beliefs about himself, and social and communication difficulties. Such features can also be formed as a consequence of bullying, but they can act as its prerequisites, perceived as "signals" for other children that this child can easily be made a victim.
Numerous studies show that children who have:
- learning difficulties ,
- attention deficit hyperactivity disorder,
- autism spectrum disorder,
- diabetes,
- epilepsy,
- weight disorders
- and other disorders and chronic diseases, especially those affecting appearance.
The typical stalker can be described as impulsive and willing to use violence to assert himself. Children who practice stalking other children tend to show rudeness and lack of compassion for the victim, may be aggressive with adults, and find it difficult to follow the rules. They may appear to be loners with a lack of social skills, but this is not so: they are less depressed, lonely and anxious than their peers, and often have a high social status among them and a group of accomplices, however small.
Stalkers have high emotional intelligence, they are good at recognizing other people's emotions and mental states and successfully manipulate children. The main motives for bullying among persecutors are the need for power, a sense of satisfaction from harming others, and reward - material (money, cigarettes, other things taken from the victim) or psychological (prestige, social status, etc.). The negative consequences of the fact that such behavior becomes habitual for them are poor academic performance and absenteeism, fights, theft, vandalism, possession of weapons, alcohol and tobacco use.
Up to 3% of children combine both roles, simultaneously behaving aggressively and provoking other children to harm themselves, or in some situations in the class being a persecutor, and in others becoming a victim - these are the so-called "persecutors/victims", or "provocative victims". Characteristics they often exhibit are hyperactivity, impulsiveness, clumsiness, irascibility combined with behavioral problems, poor self-control, low social competence, difficulty concentrating and studying, anxiety, and the presence of depressive symptoms; they are more infantile than their peers. Although these children are few in number, they are the most difficult for teachers to work with and receive the least sympathy and support from other children. It is for them that suicidal and auto-aggressive behavior is most characteristic.
Witnesses to bullying
The third group of participants in bullying, the key one from the point of view of prevention, are witnesses, it is this group that includes the majority of participants. According to Canadian researchers, up to 68% of high school students witnessed bullying at school in 2010. Interestingly, almost all children (but the older, the less often) report a feeling of pity for the victim, but less than half try to help her. The reaction of witnesses is extremely important for what is happening: joining in the bullying and even the slightest approval (smile, laughter, etc.) of witnesses serves as a reward for the persecutors, and resistance and attempts to support the victim keep the persecutor from further violence. Witnesses are faced with an internal conflict, which consists in the fact that the attempt to stop bullying is associated with the fear of losing their own security and their own status in the children's team. A negative consequence for witnesses of bullying is the formation of a worldview when they perceive the environment as unsafe, experience fear, helplessness, shame for their inaction, and at the same time feel a desire to join the aggressor. Witnesses lose their ability to empathize.
Reasons for bullying
For the last twenty years in the world and three years in Russia, various studies of harassment and bullying have been conducted. The focus of attention is both individual characteristics and the characteristics of the environment. Of course, bullying will be perceived and manifested differently in different societies. For example, according to studies by Japanese researchers, in Japan, up to 60% of adults aged 25 to 60 indicate that they have been bullied at work, with the lack of feedback on work performed as the main form of bullying. In Scandinavia, as a result of regular bullying prevention programs for twenty years, a threefold decrease in the total number of schoolchildren involved in bullying situations was shown, but at the same time, the ratio of victims and aggressors changed from 1 to 1 to 1 to 2 in favor of the aggressors and did not lead to the disappearance of bullying altogether.
In addition to the individual and personal prerequisites of the participants, the emergence of bullying is facilitated by such features of the social context, such as, for example, the presence in the family of victims of bullying, or domestic violence, or overprotection, the child’s learned helplessness; children who initiate bullying are often subjected to domestic abuse. As for the behavior of the teacher, this is a figure that can stop or support violence; the child's subjective sense of safety in the classroom depends on it. Also, children are affected by the broadcast of violence in the media, the danger of the environment and the community. The risk of bullying increases in a socially disorganized environment, with high levels of overcrowding, alcoholism and drug addiction.
Various crises - family (for example, divorce, remarriage of parents), social (revolution, perestroika) - can significantly increase the child's aggressiveness and at the same time his vulnerability, which significantly increases the risk that the child will be involved in bullying as a victim or aggressor.
bullying at school
Until the end of the 80s of the last century in the world and, in particular, in Russia, bullying was perceived by almost everyone in society as part of the "normal" way of growing up and an element of the educational process. Only data obtained as a result of a number of studies allowed us to see more clearly the ways in which bullying escalates and its consequences for participants. The traditional form of education is built on the transmission of knowledge and social principles within the framework of the power relations "student-teacher", where the student is a passive beneficiary, and the teacher is an active "well-wisher".
To organize the hierarchy and regulate anxiety about their social position in a group (for example, in a classroom), children will use the same methods as teachers, building relationships on power and control. Teachers can often keep bullying on the "use" of bullying: if kids learn to stand up for themselves they won't be bullied, or bullying helps them learn social norms, or that kids only become victims if they avoid other kids. Our study of teachers' attitudes towards bullying showed that they tend to take the position of "active observers": they represent bullying in detail, understand its causes and consequences, can imagine a variety of possible ways to respond, but their actual attempts to respond to bullying situations are rare and ineffective.
For Russian culture, the problem of bullying has been relevant for a long time, since coercion in conditions of power inequality is traditionally and intensely present both in vertical relationships (parent-child, teacher-student, boss-subordinate), and horizontal (between colleagues, peers, spouses, siblings) . This topic is included in the study of the safety of the educational environment. According to various sources, from 25 to 75% of modern Russian teenagers at least once participated in bullying, 13% of schoolchildren have the experience of victims, 20% are aggressors, and in big cities the level of bullying is higher than in rural areas.
The discussion of bullying and its socio-cultural background has historically been based on descriptions of examples and the study of the individual characteristics of bullying participants. For example, according to V.R. Petrosyants, victims are characterized by a decrease in self-esteem, self-acceptance, strong self-blame, and persecutors are characterized by a positive self-attitude, self-esteem, self-acceptance and high dependence on the group. MM. Kravtsova gives a phenomenological description of situations in which outcast children are treated, analyzes "name-calling" and "teasing" among teenagers, and to stop bullying, she proposes to develop tolerance in adolescent aggressors and increase confidence in an outcast teenager. This is an approach typical of domestic pedagogical practice, which, however, is more aimed at coping with the “symptom” than at preventing the causes of bullying.
It is known for sure that bullying exists not only in the educational environment. So, in studies conducted in the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia and military units, the presence of destructive relationships, closed from the command and teaching staff, in the form of coercion, threats, humiliation, various types of alienation of group members, as well as the use of physical force, was recorded. In other sociological studies, conscript units are defined as "multi-level status systems of organized violence."
Violence acts as a unifying factor (conscription is the involuntary service in the army, the formation of people into groups forcibly) and a means of self-organization (hazing is an analogue of bullying). It is possible that bullying may serve as a way of coping with the emotional stress of being in forced groups.
The lack of motivation to accomplish assigned tasks among soldiers (as well as among many schoolchildren) also leads to the use by superiors of the difference in power to regulate behavior through obedience, irresponsibility and helplessness. Bullying serves as a mechanism for ensuring the desired behavior and therefore is tacitly supported by teachers / officers.
Cyberbullying
Modern everyday life is characterized by active communication in the virtual world, and adolescents and young people are included in the process of socialization along with acquaintances, reference groups, mastering various social roles and norms, largely localized on the Internet. Following the transfer of communication to the Internet, cyberbullying appeared - a new and rapidly spreading form of bullying both abroad and in Russia, using the Internet's capabilities (primarily anonymity and a huge number of users) to aggressively persecute a person. Cyberbullying causes no less strong anxiety in children than bullying in the "real" world, but the peculiarity of the processes on the Internet is that information about bullying does not disappear, it is almost impossible to remove it, and stigmatizing information of any degree of reliability remains available and replicated.
The traditional form of bullying turns out to be safer in some ways, because it does not have the uncertainty that is present in the virtual space, and it has temporal and spatial restrictions that are not present in communication on the Internet. Teenagers are the most vulnerable group for cyberbullying. Up to 80% of Russian children post their last name, exact age, school number on the Web, and for a third of the children surveyed, profile settings allow everyone to see personal information about the user; abroad, 62% of children share personal photos. There are already known cases of suicides committed by teenagers after cyberbullying.
All this data suggests that bullying can change and at the same time is some fairly stable characteristic inherent in human society. It seems to be a continuation and reflection of authoritarian ways of governing and oppression in the community as a whole. While people have made significant progress in studying bullying and its consequences, and a number of technologies have been found to effectively reduce bullying situations, nevertheless, the study of this phenomenon needs to be continued.
Bullying. How to resist him.
bullying - (from English bully- hooligan, brawler, bully, rude, violator) - harassment, harassment, discrimination. In a broader sense, it is a special kind of violence when one person (or group) physically attacks or threatens another, physically and morally weaker person (or group of people). Bullying differs from a random fight in its systematic and regular repetitions.
The purpose of bullying is to hide your inferiority behind aggressive behavior. Bullying has nothing to do with managing a team if it is used by adults, since a good administrator (teacher) manages and leads the team, a bad one poisons. Therefore, anyone who chooses bullying as a method, whether an adult or a child, shows his inferiority, and the force with which a person poisons another determines the degree of inferiority of the tyrant.
Who is involved in bullying?
Bullying involves not only children, but also teachers. That is, both children and teachers can become victims of bullying, and both adults and children can act as bullies.
Causes of bullying in children's groups
There are a number of factors that contribute to the flourishing of bullying in children's groups. In many ways, the development of this phenomenon is facilitated by upbringing in the family and the microclimate of the educational institution where children go to receive education.
Adults in the school may inadvertently or otherwise engage in, provoke or facilitate bullying by:
humiliating a student who fails/does well academically or is vulnerable in other ways.
making negative or sarcastic remarks about a student's appearance or background.
frightening and threatening gestures or expressions.
privileged treatment of ingratiating students.
insulting students with humiliating, and sometimes even obscene words.
Bullying can also be promoted by:
the presence of a recognized "leader" in the class;
the emergence of an acute conflict between two students under the influence of external causes that are provocative factors for the aggressor (buller);
the unwillingness of teachers, due to their ignorance, to take responsibility for resisting the power-hungry behavior of students.
lack of control on the part of teachers over the behavior of students during breaks.
Bullying motives are:
revenge (when the victims become bullies: punish for the pain and suffering caused);
feeling of dislike;
power struggle;
neutralization of an opponent by showing an advantage over him;
self-affirmation up to the satisfaction of the sadistic needs of individuals;
the desire to be the center of attention, to look cool;
the desire to surprise, amaze;
the desire to discharge, "pin";
the desire to humiliate, intimidate a disliked person.
Often bullies become:
children raised by single parents;
children from families in which the mother has a negative attitude towards life;
children from conflict families;
children with low resistance to stress;
low achieving children
Bullers are:
active, sociable children claiming to be the leader in the class;
aggressive children who use unrequited
children who want to be the center of attention;
arrogant children, dividing everyone into "us" and "strangers" (which is
the result of appropriate family upbringing);
maximalists who do not want to compromise;
children with poor self-control who have not learned to take on
responsibility for one's behavior;
children who are not trained in other, better ways of behavior, i.e. not educated.
The most common victims of violence are children with:
Physical disabilities - wearing glasses, with hearing loss or with motor impairments (for example, with cerebral palsy), that is, those who cannot protect themselves are physically weaker than their peers;
Behavioral characteristics - withdrawn, sensitive, shy, anxious or impulsive children. Hyperactive children are too annoying and sociable: they get into other people's conversations, games, impose their opinions, are impatient while waiting for their turn in the game. For these reasons, they often cause irritation and resentment among their peers;
Features of appearance - everything that distinguishes a child in appearance from the general mass can become an object of ridicule: red hair, freckles, protruding ears, crooked legs, a special head shape, body weight (fullness or thinness);
Poor social skills - insufficient experience of communication and self-expression. Such children cannot defend themselves against violence, ridicule and insults, often do not have a single close friend and communicate more successfully with adults than with peers;
Fear of school - academic failure often forms in children
negative attitude towards school, fear of visiting certain subjects, which is perceived by others as increased anxiety, uncertainty;
Lack of experience of life in a team (domestic children) - those who do not have experience of interacting in a children's team before school may not have the skills to cope with communication problems;
Health features - there are a lot of disorders that cause ridicule and bullying by peers: epilepsy, tics, stuttering, speech disorders and other painful conditions;
Low intelligence and learning difficulties - weak abilities can be the cause of a child's low learning ability. Poor academic performance forms low self-esteem: “I can’t do it”, “I am worse than others”, etc. Low self-esteem can contribute in one case to the formation of the role of the victim, and in the other - to violent behavior as a compensation option. Therefore, a child with a low level of intelligence and learning difficulties can become both a victim of school violence and a rapist.
Bullying can be recognized by the behavior, certain signs and mood of the child. The victim, as a rule, feels his defenselessness and oppression in front of the offender. This leads to a feeling of constant danger, fear of everything and everything, a feeling of insecurity and, as a result, to a loss of self-respect and faith in one's own strengths. In other words, the child - the victim becomes really defenseless against the attacks of hooligans. Extremely severe bullying can push the victim to commit suicide. In this regard, the surrounding close people need to show utmost attention to even a slight change in the behavior of the child.
Behavioral features of the victim of bullying: distance from adults and children; negativism when discussing the topic of bullying; aggression towards adults and children.
Emotional features of the victim of bullying:
tension and fear when peers appear;
resentment and irritability;
sadness, sadness and unstable mood.
Consequences of bullying:
Bullying leaves a deep mark on the lives of victims and affects the emotional and social development, school adaptation, and can have severe psychological consequences. Children who have been bullied receive severe psychological trauma. It does not matter what kind of bullying took place: physical or psychological. Even after many years at trainings, people, remembering how they were bullied at school, often cry and talk about their very painful experiences. This is one of the strongest emotional traumas for a child. Therefore, the child needs to be helped.
Bullying has an impact not only on the victim, but also on the aggressor and on the audience. Victims of bullying experience difficulties with health and academic performance, three times more often than their peers have symptoms of anxiety and depressive disorders, apathy, headaches and enuresis, and attempt suicide.
Adults who were bullied as children show higher levels of depression and lower self-esteem, suffer from social anxiety, loneliness and anxiety, often suffer from depression in middle age and severe depression in adulthood.
School "aggressors" of bullying in adulthood may experience guilt, develop a high risk of falling into criminal gangs.
What to do in cases of bullying detection
As practice shows, relations in the class largely depend on the tactics of behavior chosen by the teacher from the first days of working with the class. The teacher can not only prevent the emergence of a situation of rejection, but must also contribute to overcoming the stereotype of relations in the class that he inherited from his colleague. But he will need the help of a psychologist and parents in the fight against the division of the class into separate groups and the development of bullying.
Algorithm of actions when a case of bullying is detected:
any mockery of the failures of classmates should be stopped from the very first day;
any disparaging remarks about classmates should be stopped;
if for some reason the child's reputation is damaged, it is necessary to give him the opportunity to show himself in a favorable light;
help unite the class through joint activities, trips, performances, wall newspapers, etc.;
it is necessary to give the most active children the opportunity to express themselves and assert themselves at the expense of their abilities, and not at the expense of humiliating others;
making fun of and comparing children in the classroom should be avoided. Some teachers do not even publicly announce grades for test papers, but put them in diaries;
analysis of mistakes must be done without naming those who made them, or individually. It makes sense to talk with the persecutors about why they pester the victim, to draw their attention to the feelings of the victim.
1. Engage in the prevention and correction of deviations in the emotional sphere of adolescents.
2. Reduce antisocial behavior of schoolchildren.
3. Develop stress-resistant personality traits of students.
4. Shape:
the skills of assessing the social situation and taking responsibility for one's own behavior in it;
perception skills, use and provision of psychological and social support;
skills to defend their boundaries and protect their personal space;
skills of self-protection, self-support and mutual support;
conflict-free and effective communication skills.
5. Direct awareness and development of available personal resources that contribute to the formation of a healthy lifestyle and highly effective behavior.
Methods and exercises for working with the class:
Exercise "Cap"
All participants stand in a circle. First, the coach reads a small comic quatrain: My triangular cap. My triangular cap. And if not triangular, then this is not my cap. Next, the trainer sequentially introduces the instruction: instead of the word “cap”, the participants should slap themselves on the head twice; instead of the word "my" - show yourself; the word "triangular" is depicted by throwing out three fingers. The replaced word itself is not pronounced. Each condition introduced by the coach speaks and shows; he does it quite slowly, consistently complicating the instructions. Gradually, the pace of the exercise increases.
"Playing Situations"
Target– development of group cohesion, ability to resolve conflict situations.
Discuss with the children a real conflict or tell yourself about some kind of quarrel and invite them to give recommendations on how to “pay off” this conflict. Suggest the game "You quarreled with a friend and want to make peace." During this role-playing game, the following techniques can be used: creating an appropriate environment (some kind of scenery, costumes, etc.); role reversal (children can change roles during the game, which makes it possible to experience a different point of view); mirror reception (children try to depict the pose, facial expressions and typical expressions of the depicted character as accurately as possible).
Exercise "Letter of love"
Assignment to the participants: “Draw five columns on a piece of paper. The name of the first column is “Anger”, write in it why you feel anger, resentment, irritation towards your partner. The second column is called "Sorrow", in it write down what makes you sad or disappointed in relation to your partner. The third column is about fear. In the fourth, called “Regret,” express embarrassment, regret about something, ask for forgiveness, apologize to your partner. In the fifth column, write about love, how much you appreciate your partner, about your wishes for the future. After that, try to answer your own letter. Usually people write exactly those phrases that they want to hear from their partner: “I understand everything”, “I'm sorry”, “You deserve more”.
Any child can become a victim of child abuse. However, the most vulnerable are children who differ from their peers in external features, both physical and mental. The “risk group” includes children with physical disabilities, other nationalities, unusual behavior, etc. Ill-treatment deforms the child's psyche and can be the cause of pathological disorders. Children affected by abuse may develop socially dangerous forms of behavior: violent, suicidal and addictive (substance addiction, Internet addiction, gambling addiction). Consider some forms of child abuse.
In Scandinavian and English-speaking countries, the following terms are used: harassment, discrimination, mobbing (mainly group forms of child harassment), bullying. The last term is used in the specialized literature most often. It is believed that it most fully reflects the essence of the phenomenon we are discussing. D. Lane and E. Miller (2001) associate this term with bullying and define bullying as a long-term process of conscious, physical and (or) mental abuse by one child or a group of children towards another child (other children).
The motivation for bullying and mobbing is different: revenge, restoration of justice, an instrument of submission to the leader, competition, hostility, sadism of accentuated and disharmoniously developing personalities.
bullying - this is a social phenomenon, characteristic mainly of organized children's groups, in the first place, the school. Numerous researchers explain this circumstance, first of all, by the fact that the school is a universal place for discharging numerous negative impulses. At school, certain role relationships develop among children in the “leader-outcast” range. An additional factor contributing to the persistence of bullying in the school space is the inability, and in some cases unwillingness, of teachers to cope with this problem. Bullying manifests itself through various forms of physical and (or) mental harassment experienced by children from other children. For some children, this is systematic ridicule, reflecting some features of the appearance or personality of the victims. For others - damage to their personal belongings, pushing under a desk, extortion. For the third - outright bullying that humiliates the sense of human dignity, for example, an attempt to force publicly ask for forgiveness, kneeling before the humiliating.
Some researchers propose to systematize all manifestations of bullying into two large groups:
Group 1 - manifestations associated mainly with active forms of humiliation;
Group 2 - manifestations associated with conscious isolation, obstruction of the victims.
Identification and diagnosis of medical and psychological consequences of bullying (mobbing)
The objective difficulties of early detection of bullying in our country limit the possibility of targeted work in this direction. The detection of bullying is random and episodic. In this regard, every teacher, psychologist or social worker should be prepared to face bullying in their professional activities in order to recognize the main manifestations of its most severe consequences: violent, suicidal and dependent behavior. In practice, in our country, they are more focused on identifying children and adolescents at risk for bullying.
Factors that make it possible to classify a child as a risk group for bullying include:
- multiple stress. The point is that victims of bullying are burdened with many problems. Poor health, low social status, unsatisfactory relationships with peers, large families, pronounced social disadvantage, and low compensatory opportunities are all typical of victims of bullying.
- provocative characteristics of the victim. The so-called provocative victims are children and adolescents who, due to their personal characteristics, can be annoying factors for the majority of their conditionally tolerant peers. In fact, we are talking about the phenomenon of "otherness" in children's groups. "Unusual" manner of speech, "unusual" laughter, "unusual" humor, etc. already, from the point of view of "ordinary" schoolchildren, may be a sufficient reason for a negative attitude.
- stigmatization- racial (national) and physical characteristics of the child, not only physical defects, for example, "cleft lip" or hearing loss, but also some phenotypic features. Unusual hair color, voice timbre, ear shape, etc. for a certain category of children and adolescents, they can be an incentive to bullying.
In a bullying situation, there is always:
- ? Instigators.
- Active, sociable children who claim to be the leader in the class.
- Aggressive children who have found an unrequited victim for their self-affirmation, etc.
- ? Persecutors.
Some of them:
- obey the "herd mentality";
- trying to earn the favor of the class leader;
- afraid to be in the position of a victim or do not dare to go against the majority.
All children react to manifestations of bullying (mobbing) in different ways. When observing children suffering from bullying (mobbing), their following features may be found:
Behavioral features:
Distance from adults and children;
Negativism when discussing the topic of bullying;
Aggressiveness towards adults and children.
Emotional features:
Tension and fear when peers appear;
Resentment and irritability;
Sadness, sadness and unstable mood.
In chronically stressed minors, the body's resistance to infectious diseases decreases; psychosomatic disorders occur (classic vomiting of children before school, vegetative-vascular dystonia, tachycardia, bradycardia, enuresis, etc.)
Reliable information can also be obtained as a result of a sincere conversation between a specialist and an injured child. However, this is not always possible and also requires special preparation. On the other hand, any teacher, psychologist or social worker should be ready for an adequate, understanding and empathetic reflection of the traumatized child's confession about bullying by other children, if the latter decided to open up to him. It is especially sad when a child or teenager (as a rule, this is extremely difficult for teenagers) decides to open up to an adult, to tell about his trouble, and for one reason or another, such revelations are not interested in an adult. In this case, a precious opportunity to learn about serious problems in the lives of children and adolescents, perhaps even unrelated to the topic of violence, may be missed. Children tend to choose authoritative adults as their confidant in many cases. Parents, who may lose their children's trust, are often followed by educators and psychologists as such positive ideals of trust. The collapse of a child's hope can lead to fatal consequences.
To determine the situation of bullying (mobbing) and its consequences, it is necessary to collect relevant information and conduct a clinical and psychological examination. It is necessary to interview both the victim himself, as well as possible participants in the abuse of the victim and witnesses. All the information received should be carefully analyzed. As a result of the analysis, it is necessary to clarify the following aspects:
The reality of bullying itself;
- its duration;
- his character (physical, psychological, mixed);
- the main manifestations of bullying;
- participants (initiators and perpetrators of bullying);
- their motivation for bullying;
- witnesses and their attitude to what is happening;
- behavior of the victim (victim);
- the dynamics of everything that happens;
- Other circumstances important for diagnosis.
Help for children affected by violence
The sooner professional assistance begins to be provided to the victim, the better the prognosis (psychological-pedagogical, psychotherapeutic, psychiatric (depending on the severity of the victim's condition). The work should cover all areas of damage to the victims, taking into account their condition (somatic, mental, social). Therapeutic assistance is already begins with the interview mentioned earlier.
An important role is given to work on establishing relations with the social environment. It is necessary to separate the child (adolescent) with the corresponding stressful influences.
Psychological and pedagogical aspects of bullying (mobbing) prevention
Primary prevention is implemented in three areas:
- Creation of conditions for preventing bullying (mobbing).
- The fastest and competent separation of the child with the corresponding stressful effects.
- Strengthening the body's defenses in resisting bullying, both for relatively healthy children, and for those who already have a somatic or mental pathology.
1. From the very first day, any mockery of the failures of classmates should be stopped.
Petya answers at the blackboard, makes mistakes or writes not very beautifully. A classmate maliciously comments on what happened, trying to draw the attention of the whole class, to cause laughter. It is necessary to express your attitude to this situation, saying that the failure of a comrade cannot be a reason for fun or gloating. We all learn, and everyone has the right to make mistakes. The mocker should make a stern remark.
2. Any disparaging remarks about classmates should be stopped.
The teacher seats the students at his own discretion or forms teams. At the offer to sit down with Vasya, Misha exclaims: “I won’t be with him! Just not with him!” You need to stand your ground. And then talk to Misha alone, inquire about the reason for his refusal. Invite the child to take Vasya's place: "Will you be pleased if someone refuses to deal with you?"
3. If for some reason the child's reputation is damaged, you need to give him the opportunity to show himself in a favorable light.
With Vitya, a smart, well-read boy, in the first grade there was a nuisance - he peed himself in class. The guys began to tease him, did not want to play with him and sit next to him. The teacher began to ask Vita difficult questions, to entrust responsible tasks, with which he successfully coped. Soon the guys noticed how much Vitya knows, how interestingly he tells, and the unfortunate incident was gradually forgotten.
4. They help to unite the class through joint events, trips, performances, wall newspapers, etc.
5. It is necessary to give the most active children the opportunity to express themselves and assert themselves at the expense of their abilities, and not at the expense of humiliating others.
6. You should avoid making fun of and comparing children in the classroom. Some teachers do not even publicly announce grades for test papers, but put them in diaries. Analysis of mistakes must be done without naming those who made them, or individually.
7. It makes sense to talk to the stalkers about why they pester the victim, to draw their attention to the feelings of the victim.
The teacher gathered her fifth class in the absence of the looming outcast and discussed with them why they were all turning against him. Draws their attention to his positive qualities. And in conclusion, she asked the guys to answer the question in writing: “How can I help Slava?” It turned out that most of the guys have nothing against Slava, but stick to him out of habit.After the conversation, the attitude towards a classmate changed.
- Remain calm and in control of the situation;
- Take the incident or the story about it seriously;
- Provide support to the victim;
- Show the offender your attitude to the situation;
- Assess the situation of the offender from the point of view of the victim;
- Remember that the punishment must match the offense;
- Discuss the identified problem with a group of peers;
- If necessary, involve the parent community.
According to the site: www . nsportal . en
