15 Minutes Oral Presentation on

"Bullying in Schools"

Bully Online

May 1, 2001

Yumi Tanno

Site Navigation

This site is about issues on bullying in schools and it is a part of Bully Online.

Bully Online is web site of UK National Workplace Bullying Advise Line and the author of this site is Tim Field.

The title of this page is "Those who can, do. Those who can't bully—Bullying in Schools". On the top of this page, there are links to a homepage of the Bully Online, the Advice Line, information about seminars, and sales of books written by the author. Also, within the text, there are links to his other articles, such as issues on education, abuses, serial bully, child bullying, and definitions of bullying. On the bottom of this page, the author lists all links that are over a hundred of other articles provided in his web site. The list includes his greeting to visitors of the site, site search, site map, site index, frequently asked questions, bullying and law, recent news on bullying, information for teachers being bullied, information for parents and teachers on child bullying, bullying in workplaces, and bullying resources in other countries including the U.S. There are also links to articles on various psychological disorders, such as antisocial personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, stress, depression, and post traumatic stress disorder.

On the homepage, the author organizes all information into eight topics and each topic has its own homepage. Therefore, by clicking each one of the eight icons, readers can access to all articles related to their interests available in this site. The topics are workplace bullying, school bullying, legal issues on bullying, stress and other health issues, books, training, achievement, and related issues. The related issues include information on violence and rage. Site index and the site map can be access from the homepage.

The home page also contains search engine. The search can be done on both within this site and a whole web sites. I searched on a word aggression and rage.

Overall Interest

There is so much information on bullying available in this site. I searched this site before when I was working on the annotated bibliography and I was confused at the time while searching for information on workplace violence. And I still became a little confused this time. I think this is because of my own purpose for navigating this site that is to have overall impression of a whole content. If some readers navigating this site for a specific topic, such as stress and bullying, I do not think they feel lost. It should be easy for those people to look for information that is very comprehensive and useful. The site index and the site map can be very helpful. Also, most pages contain a list of all articles available in this site.

The author says that he use minimum amount of graphics in order to make easier for readers to download and navigate throughout the site faster. I think this is very important and thoughtful because I always quit checking some web page if it takes longtime to download although the site seems interesting because I cannot be patient when I have to do research on many sites. Also, this would help someone desperately seeking information, such as a person being bullied. Layout of all pages is very simple, and fonts and colors were carefully chosen that all readers would find easy to read articles. It is said that there have been approximately 200,000 visitors of this web site since November 1997 and about 200-500 visits per day.

General Content

The purpose of this site is to provide information about many different issues on bullying to people being bullied in workplaces, home, and school, and also other people concerning the issue. The author of this site is Tom Field and he established UK National Workplace Bullying Advice Line after he experienced bullying himself in his workplace. The author recognizes bullying as one of the most "widespread social evils" today.

The author says that although most information in this web site dealing with bullying in workplaces are applicable to issues of child bullying and school bullying, there is a major difference. Because although if a child shows bullying tendency, he or she can learn and develop better skills for managing aggressive behaviors relatively easy if the child can receive appropriate helps from adults. However, he says that there are not many training programs available for the children to learn how to improve their interpersonal skills.

He points out that there is not enough support from government, schools, and local education authorities on the issue because of deficiencies in time, budgets, leadership, and due to large class sizes. Most time, adults are not aware of the problem, they simply punish people who bully others, and punish bullied individuals. And they tend not to make effort to pursue the cause of the problem. Those current situations can lead to death of children due to suicide or violent attacks. He says that about 10-12 children commit suicide each year in the UK due to bullying in schools.

The author states, "Bullying is the general term applied to a pattern of behavior whereby one person with a lot of anger and consequent aggression and lacking interpersonal skills chooses to displace their aggression onto other person, chosen for their vulnerability with respect to the bully, using tactics of constant criticism, nit-picking, exclusion, isolation, teasing etc with verbal, psychological and (especially with children) physical violence. When called to account, the bully child will typically exhibit the denial-counterattack-feigning victimhood response to evade accountability, often with success." (Field, 2001)

He says that children should be taught in a school from the beginning of their school years that expressing their internal aggression to other children in a form of bullying is NOT acceptable behaviors. And school education should contain programs for development of assertiveness skills to express their feelings in a verbal form not in a form of aggressive behaviors and social skills to interact with other children in a more positive way.

The author says that physical punishment is inappropriate because this can lead to children to view violent behavior as acceptable ways to deal with their various problems. Thus, the children who bully other children should be taught by adults to recognize and to understand violence is not a way to deal with many types of difficulties that they encounter in their life.

I strongly agree with this view because if the children are punished physically by adults every time they do something wrong, they cannot learn any other alternative ways to solve the problems.

It is found in a research that at least 4 in every 10 children are being bullied at school. The bullying can lead to decrease in overall school performances of children. Some children who bully others in a school without learning appropriate behaviors might still bully people in workplaces when they become adults.

The author says that reasons for bullying is not simple and there are many factors associated with it. Everyone in a situation, such as a child, parents, teachers, and authorities should consider their responsibility for occurrences of bullying. He emphasizes that identifying the causes is particularly important for change to occur. The author has an optimistic view about the situation in the future. He says that if an appropriate action in education system is taken place, there will be fewer or no occurrences of bullying in schools.

The author says that every individual may have met a person with a characteristic of serial bully once in his or her life. The serial bully can be a spouse, a family member, a coworker, a boss, or an aggressive neighbor.

The author states:

Specific Content

The author says that about 10-12 children in the UK commit suicide due to bullying in school every year. All schools in the UK are legally required to have anti-bullying policy since 1999.

In this page, he suggests several aspects that needs to be concerned when parents select schools, description of a deference between child and adult bullying, and reasons for people who are bullied.

The author says that if a school has no anti-bullying policy, this school should be avoided, especially when the staff says, "There is no bullying here." Because it is likely that many cases of bullying occur in such school. Although the school has a policy, it is necessary to know if the policy really works in a real situation. In order to check this, parents can ask directly to children currently attending the school or the graduates.

He lists several aspects that should be checked for the last academic year. For example, the parents should check rate of staff turnover, amount of staff sick leave, number of days when supply staff are engaged, number of different supply staff engaged, number of suicides and attempted suicides among both staff and children, and number of early retirements.

The author says that there are two main differences between child and adult bullying.

—Bullied adults have good job performance and they are popular while bullied children are not so as popular as other children. Children who bully others are not popular, however, other children associate with the bullying individuals because they fear to become next target and there is no friendship in such interaction.

The bullied children and also adults are characterized by being imaginative, creative, caring and responsive while bullying individuals are unimaginative, uncaring, aggressive, immature, inadequate and irresponsible. It is likely that if the bully did not learn to change their attitudes while in a school they would bully others in workplaces. Also, the bullied individuals are more likely to be bullied in workplaces as adults.

— He says that behavior patterns of individuals are fixed when they reach at age about 18. However, people tend to be bullied have an ability to modify their behavior as adult while people tend to be the bullies have less ability to learn and they are likely to keep bullying throughout their lives.

Bullying children differ from adult bullies because they are capable of developing better behavior patterns if they are adequately guided.

A family environment of children who bully others are often dysfunctional and they learn aggressive behavior patterns from the environment. Parents of the bullying possibly do not have parental skills because they are likely to be raised by parents who also lack the ability. In this case, outside support, such as training programs in a school environment can help children to learn more positive behavior patterns.

The author says that reasons for bullying believed by most people are often different from a real reason. Those reasons include various types of physical appearances of an individual, such as being fat, thin, tall, short, having big or small ears, and hair or skin color. Those reasons are used by bullying children simply to justify their wrong behaviors. The truth is that the bullying children select a child simply as a target in order to express their aggression toward their target. Thus, if a child is bullied for being fat and if the child loses weight, it is not a solution and it does not change behaviors of the bullying because they can find other convenient reasons or targets. Therefore, it is necessary to consider underlying reason for the bullying children to engage in their wrong behaviors.

The author says that children becoming targets of bullying are often seen as weak and inadequate but however in reality, the bullying individuals are the people who are weak and inadequate therefore they bully others.

Some characteristics of bullies include: aggressive, physically strong, easily and willingly resorts to violence, poor communication skills, low self-esteem, insecure, thrives on control and dominance, immature, jealous, envious, often lies, lacks empathy, and exploitative.

Some characteristics of target are: physically not as strong as the bully, oppose violence, unwilling to lie and deceive, caring and empathic, easy forgiving, high integrity, high moral standard, often independent, and not powerful and escape classroom politics.

I thought it was interesting because some of characteristics of targets seem to associate with emotional competencies, such as being empathic, forgiving, high integrity, high moral standard, imaginative, creative, responsible, and low propensity to violence while some of the characteristics of bullies suggesting lack of emotional competencies.

Overall, I think that this site is a very useful resource for all people dealing with bullying problems. Because the author of the site has experienced bullying in workplace as the target, he is both empathic and sympathetic about the issue and people experiencing bullying.