On Monday, after the student parent teacher conferences were finished, we took the boys to Nyon to have an nice afternoon outside in the fresh air.

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.

Despite being a famous and common phenomenon, “bullying” and its causes are still sometimes neglected and we believe it’s worth reflecting on its origins.

As human beings, we tend to identify ourselves with people who share the same features like 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 defence 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 ourselves apart from people different from us. It is a mechanism of defence that 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 against.

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?