Dan Olweus member of the Research Center for Health Promotion, University of Bergen, Norway. Towards the middle of the 1980s, he developed the following definition of bullying:
" A student is harassed or victimized when he is repeatedly exposed to negative actions by one or more students."
We speak of negative action when someone intentionally inflicts or tries to inflict harm or discomfort on another person. Basically, it is what is implicit in the definition of aggressive behavior.
Negative actions can be carried out through physical contact, verbally, or in other ways such as grimacing or insulting gestures and involve intentional exclusion from the group. To use the term “bullying” correctly, there must be an imbalance of power or strength (an asymmetric relationship): The schoolchild who is exposed to negative actions has great difficulty defending herself.
Speaking more generally, bullying behavior can be defined as "repetitive and intentional negative behavior (unpleasant or hurtful) of one or more people directed against a person who has difficulty defending himself. " According to this definition, which seems to have gained considerable acceptance among researchers and professionals, the phenomenon of bullying can be described as: aggressive behavior or intentionally wanting to “do harm” carried out repeatedly and even outside of school hours in an interpersonal relationship characterized by a real or superficial imbalance of power or strength.
It can be added that much of bullying seems to occur without an apparent provocation on the part of the victim.. This definition makes it clear that bullying can be considered a form of abuse, and the term peer abuse is sometimes used as a name for the phenomenon. What separates it from other forms of abuse such as domestic violence phenomena is the context in which it occurs and the characteristics of the relationship of the parties involved. It has been proven that boys are more often victims and in particular perpetrators of direct bullying. This conclusion fits very well with what can be expected from research on sex differences in aggressive behavior. It is well documented that relationships between boys are by far tougher, more difficult, and more aggressive than between girls. These differences have both biological and socio-environmental roots.
We can add that being a bully or a victim is something that can last a long time, often years.
The objective of the practice of bullying is to intimidate, reduce, reduce, subdue, flatten, intimidate and consume, emotionally and intellectually, the victim, with a view to obtaining some favorable result for those who bully or to satisfy an urgent need to dominate, subdue, assault, and destroy others that bullies may present as a predominant pattern of social relationship with others.
Types of bullying
Teachers have described up to 8 forms of bullying, with the following incidence among victims.
- Social blockade (29.3%) Harassment (20.9%) Manipulation (19.9%) Coercion (17.4%) Social exclusion (16.0%) Intimidation (14.2%) Assaults (13.0%)) Threats (9.1%)
It is estimated that the simultaneous intervention on individual, family and sociocultural factors is the only possible way to prevent bullying. Prevention can be done at different levels.
Primary prevention would be the responsibility of the parents (commitment to a democratic and non-authoritarian education), of society as a whole and of the media (in the form of self-regulation regarding certain contents).
A secondary prevention would be the concrete measures on the population at risk, that is, adolescents (fundamentally, promoting a change of mentality regarding the need to report cases of bullying even though they are not victims of them), and on the population directly linked to this, the teachers (in the form of training in appropriate skills for the prevention and resolution of school conflicts).
Finally, a tertiary prevention would be the measures to help the protagonists of the cases of bullying.
