Have you ever been brought to your knees? Unfortunately, not everyone will be able to give a negative answer to this question [1].
It is becoming increasingly difficult for an ordinary social media user to avoid seeing videos of schools' massacres against their classmates. In addition to the brutality of the aggressors, it is no less striking that victims comply with humiliating requirements and allowing them to do whatever they want with themselves. After all, it seems like you can disobey, you can run away eventually, or even try to fight back. The question is: how does this helplessness develop, why does the victim become a victim, and why do girls humiliate and beat their classmates, often right in school?
Bloggers and journalists have repeatedly discussed the topic of declining school education. Time and time again, the Unified State Exam, the bureaucratization of teacher work, and the replacement of school education with an educational service are criticized. But to this series of problems we should add another, no less important one, bullying as an indispensable element of the school environment in the capitalist system.
Now everyone remembered the Soviet film “The Scarecrow” in chorus and was outraged by the fact that I attribute such a historical phenomenon as bullying to only one economic formation.
To avoid this misconception, let me explain that bullying is indeed one of the forms of human communication, but in the era of capital rule, it becomes systemic among schoolchildren and takes concrete forms. We will now discuss which ones and why.
It will not be a secret to anyone that many students do not go to school for knowledge. Some are to kill time and hang out with friends, while others are just to kill themselves a little bit more. This happens slowly — a little bit every day. School bullying, or bullying in English, is common all over the world from Kenya to Japan and does not spare even relatively prosperous countries. For example, 38% of thousands of students surveyed in England in 2018 said that they had to miss classes due to bullying, and 46% were afraid to go back to school after the holidays [2]. On average, 35% of schoolchildren around the world face bullying as victims or aggressors [3]. Most research concerns Western Europe and the United States, but there is also data for countries on the capitalist periphery.
For example, two studies in Nicaragua show the prevalence of bullying at 35% of high school students, of whom 12% are victims, 11% are aggressors, and 12% have both roles [4]. In Peru, far more children aged 8 are bullied — 45% of the children surveyed; by the age of 15, this figure falls to 22% [5]. As for Eastern Europe, 44% of schoolchildren in Estonia admitted to being bullied, and in Romania, 42% [6].
According to a report by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), the percentage of students who reported frequent bullying increased by about four percent from 2015 to 2018 on average across OECD countries [7]. In 2015, 27% of schoolchildren in Russia were bullied several times a month, which is higher than the OECD average [8]. And in 2019, an analysis of responses from 890 students in grades 9-10 from five federal districts revealed that 45% were verbally harassed more than once a month [9].
Early researchers, like some journalists now, were inclined to attribute bullying to children and adolescents. A century later, there is much more interest in works that investigate the dependence of the role of victim or aggressor on social factors. In this regard, Rean and Novikova's study “Bullying among high school students in the Russian Federation: the prevalence and influence of socio-economic factors” is valuable [8]
[[1]]
As can be seen, the column corresponding to the indicator of involvement in aggression hardly changes depending on material wealth, while the victim rate increases significantly when the family does not have enough money even to buy clothes.
[[2]]
Another factor that increases the likelihood of becoming a victim is the lack of a permanent job for parents. Most often, children whose mother works only (and the family can be full) are bullied. The authors claim that there was no connection with the parents' higher education, but having more than one child in the family dramatically increased the likelihood of becoming either a victim and an aggressor. Single children are more likely to be victims.
[[3]]
There are more victims and aggressors in cities with a population of less than 500,000 people, as well as in cities with a population of over a million, where the difference in material wealth is probably more noticeable. Thus, students from the lowest income families with only one mother are most often bullied (not families without a father).
Family wealth, appearance and expensive things become the measure of success already in high school. Remember the 83 movie “The Scarecrow” and you'll see that, as now, students in the late USSR were ruled by the ideas of capital: children only talk about money, millions and clothes. At the same time, the ideals of private property dictate the criteria for success, cutting off everything that is redundant and useless in the tastes and interests of teenagers, leading everyone to the same template. These are perfect conditions for destroying mutual understanding and persecuting those who are either simply poorer or those who refuse to accept these overriding values (!) , those who think beyond the ideals of capitalism.
After all, they began to bully Lena Bessoltseva long before she was formally boycotted — and they were bullied precisely because her interests and views differed from those in that school. She doesn't think about millions, she's not interested in expensive fashion items, and has strange dreams. It's not okay. This is the first stage in training a person, which capitalism does at the hands of children and over children [and continues factory and office slavery. Publisher's note].
This training takes the form of bullying. Moreover, it is not only wealthy children who bully the poorer ones. Children from low-income families can also bully, winning their place in the classroom with charisma and leadership skills, and becoming more successful classmates. These are the most vile aggressors. A child from a poor family, often with a lack of attention, feels that his situation is unfair, realizes that he has no chance to overcome this level, but instead of realizing common interests with similar children and thinking about the causes of inequality, he chooses the path dictated by capitalist morality — to walk over the heads. For example, these schoolgirls begin to form companies with the wealthiest classmates, becoming the main initiators of bullying anyone who is either poorer or very different from their party. They are acutely aware of injustice, but only towards themselves.
One can imagine how school bullying is deformed with the change or disappearance of capitalism. I think that the most beneficial effect will be primarily to reduce inequality, change the education system and create a demand from society for well-rounded graduates. However, children will continue to bully, only on other grounds. However, I believe that bullying will become much less systemic and take less violent forms.
Well, let's move on from theory to practice. What to do if you're a student and you're being bullied. I will not describe in detail the well-known facts that people can bully for anything in principle, and trying to honestly “fix it” will not solve the problem. The aggressors want your humiliation, and you need to preserve your dignity.
[1] https://gubdaily.ru/blog/news/podrostki-tolpoj-unizili-i-izbili-rovesnicu-v-shkole/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=Cz6nIfnFwL8&feature=emb_title
https://vesti-lipetsk.ru/novosti/proisshestviya/v-otnoshenii-roditelej-shkolnic-iz-dankova-vozbuzhde...
https://www.newsru.com/crime/07jun2017/beat15yschgrlmsk.html
[2] https://diana-award.org.uk/news/bullying-in-schools-has-a-shocking-impact-on-academic-education/
[3] Bullying prevalence across contexts: A meta-analysis measuring cyber and traditional bullying/K.L. Modecki [et al.]//J. of Adolescent Health. — 2014. — Vol. 55. — P. 602—611. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265015497_Bullying_Prevalence_Across_Contexts_A_Meta-analys...
[4] Bullying en los países pobres: prevalence y coexistence con otras formas de violencia/R. Ortega Ruiz, R. D. Rey Alamillo//International Journal of Psychology and Psychological Therapy. — 2008. — Vol. 8, No. 1. — P. 39—50.
[5] Victimization among Peruvian adolescents: Insights into mental/emotional health from the Young Lives study/C.E. Lister [et al.]//J. of School Health. — 2015. — Vol. 85, no. 7. — P. 433-440.
[6] Periodization of the study of the phenomenon of bulling/Yarmina A.N.//Researcher. — 2018. — Vol. 1-2 — P. 82—87.
https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/periodizatsiya-izucheniya-fenomena-bullinga/viewer
[7] PISA report 2018
https://www.oecd.org/pisa/PISA%202018%20Insights%20and%20Interpretations%20FINAL%20PDF.pdf
[8] PISA report 2015
https://www.oecd.org/pisa/PISA-2015-Results-Students-Well-being-Volume-III-Overview.pdf
[9] Novikova. Bullying among high school students in the Russian Federation: the prevalence and influence of socio-economic factors/A.A. Rean M.A. Novikova//World of Psychology. — 2019. — Vol. 1 (97) — P. 165—177.
https://publications.hse.ru/mirror/pubs/share/direct/227157531
Source: Social compass
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