Bullying is the repetitive, intentional hurting of one person or group by another person or group, where the relationship involves an imbalance of power. It can happen face to face or online.
ANTI-BULLYING ALLIANCE
Despite being a famous and common phenomenon, “bullying” and its causes are still sometimes neglected and we believe it’s worth reflecting about its origins.
As human beings, we tend to identify ourselves with the people who share the same features as us. It can be a language, an history, a background, a physical trait or a personal experience. As we create bonds and links among people of the same group, instinctively we start defining defense strategies against those who do not share the same features or values. That is the principle of stereotypes.
A definition of stereotype can be “to believe unfairly that all people or things with a particular characteristic are the same.” With it we assert our dominance, our power. We express jealousy or disagreement.
And this leads to discrimination because we wrongly believe that we are protecting ourselves by keeping apart from people different from us. It is a mechanism of defense who ends up causing more harm than good.
Bullying then happens as a result of this. We get blinded by our values, our features and we close our eyes to those who are different from us and ignore that so much more could bind us together.
Among many other things, bullying is then a form of discrimination. In the video below you can hear some testimonials about this and the effect on the people being discriminated.
It is interesting to see how discrimination, bullying and racism work very tightly together. It is therefore essential we tackle them all in order to eradicate such hurting behaviors.
Below we can also watch the Bullying Experiment. It’s worth having a look and question where would we stand in those case scenarios and what our actions would be? Would we intervene? Would we let go and ignore?
Finally, it is important to be able to identify bullying. One of the messages of this pillar is that Bullying happens in different settings. It changes its context and frame in society and evolves around common day situations we face on an ordinary day.
