I used to argue on LiveJournal about the impact of capitalism/socialism on the prevalence of such a disgusting phenomenon; school bullying is systemic bullying against a student in class (or bullying, from English.bully — bully, brawler). Back then, my arguments were mostly indirect and scattered, but now I have direct ones:
”Bullying — systematic, deliberate action by one or more persons to cause physical harm. Here I want to say that very often the data about him is greatly underestimated. In 1958, Lawrence also introduced the concept of mobbing. But mobbing — this is group pressure, and bullying is often perceived as individual. Physical bullying — hitting, beating, fighting with objects — and emotional bullying — controlling friends, various types of boycotts, public humiliation. Boycotts, public humiliation, etc., are also largely a characteristic of Morgan. I must say that the situation is much more serious than it seemed.
I thought that this was a result that I will say next, because what we researched was the methods described here: the questionnaire we developed to study bullying, the Bas-Darkey method for measuring aggressiveness, and Roterra for measuring locus of control. And seven schools were interviewed in Moscow, one school in the Moscow region and in Voronezh.
Thus, prevalence: 13% are involved in the bullying process as a victim, 20% as aggressors. And if we compare settlements, the level in big cities is higher, and the number of victim students is lower, the emotional well-being in the team is lower, children tend to assess the situation as less positive, and the most interesting thing is that the fact of school affiliation has been reduced.
If we talk about individual psychological characteristics, we must say the following. Bullies distance themselves from their parents, have an external locus of control, are characterized by an open position in communication, a positive attitude towards themselves and a willingness to be active in life. Teachers love these people. That's the whole thing. Bullies are people who, unlike ordinary hooligans who do something in the yard, on the streets, are often seen by teachers because they are nice, good and, most importantly, they know for sure that there is no need to do anything bad in front of regulatory authorities, including teachers. We have to do everything secretly, outside the school, and everything will work out.
Victims distance themselves from their parents, a closed position in communication, an unwillingness to communicate, a feeling of loneliness and indifference. Will teachers love them, and will they stand up for them as actively as they will stand up for bullies? Will they be found in some other way? Therefore, very often we can witness how teachers and teaching staff defend the bully, who was identified as a result of the victim's complaint, but by an external party: either by a psychological service to which they can complain, or by the police, and the teaching staff begins to defend him: he is a wonderful, good boy, and this is such a nasty lonely figure that no one wants to sit at a desk with. That's why he doesn't want to.
A very important aspect is outside observers. Outside observers are not just random people; they are largely the choir that the bullies are trying for. It is especially important to draw attention to outside observers now, because it is no coincidence that a paradoxical thing is happening: denunciations against oneself are posted on the Internet, generally speaking. That is, a person hits someone, takes pictures with a camera, with a camera. Then this is posted on the Internet, that is, to prove that he was a hooligan and does not present any job. This is a done job, as opposed to logic, perhaps, but so that more people know, be afraid and understand who is the boss at school or somewhere else. This is done for outside observers.
What else is important to note here. A large percentage of people who are victims of bullying have been identified. They are victims now, and they may become bullies tomorrow: this is very clear in the example of military bullying. When you just have to wait until you're a bully yourself. But what's important is not that these victims are not all equally harassed, beaten, and so on. They can snap and become rapists and bullies in any other situation where they find company. And this may be where some very acute problems related to domestic violence lie. That is, a person who is a victim in one place begins to win back on the weak in another. Unfortunately, this study did not include a study on violence against teachers. In my opinion, this is a serious problem. Not necessarily physical abuse, but also psychological abuse.
Now I would like to return to a systematic analysis of the situation. What is the teacher's role in it? What is the teacher's personality, for example? A man who knows that society doesn't treat him like God knows, he's disrespected, he's unsuccessful. If he were successful, he would work in some successful place. This is a person whose self-esteem is artificially low. And who is said to be an ascetic, but at the same time an ascetic, is a figure who has been smirking at best for the past 15-20 years. If the school did not have a powerful gender asymmetry, if it had male teachers, the school would gain more weight and authority.
I went to a school where there were a lot of men. It was a different school, where relations were tough, tough, in the good sense of the word. The school's harsh attitude towards domestic violence. Because I remember very well that when I was in elementary school, a huge number of my classmates came by on the first Monday and didn't know how to sit at their desks, because my parents were engaged in parenting. But by the fourth or fifth grade, not one of them tried to do it, because they knew that the teachers would make him feel bad. And this bold position was largely due to the fact that there were teachers with such a masculine orientation. At least that's how I see it.
And I think there is an understanding that we can't create programs that are isolated for one person to make them feel safe. It is just an indicator that he feels safe, that it is a simultaneous problem at the relationship level when we teach why I brought this scheme to well-being, when we do everything to make the child understand how he interacts with others, what is of value, with high self-esteem, with a desire for personal growth and autonomy. When community, that is, school, family, and industry, treats it in a way that does not give grounds for increasing negative feelings: feelings of fear, when society does not support this fear and begins to create some horror stories out of unknown things, but still maintains more positive views on life. Only then, in my opinion, will it be possible to achieve any progress in the sense of safety in the educational process.”
S.N. Enikolopov. Psychological safety issues at school. Materials of the project “Education, Wellbeing and the Developing Economy of Russia, Brazil and South Africa”.
To put the data in an international context:
“According to N. Whitney and P.K. Smith (Whitney, Smith, 1993), in England, 27% of schoolchildren of both sexes are abused. Although the level of violence varies from one school to another, at least 19% of all teenagers are bullied by their classmates. Violence is an act of behavior aimed at an active or passive victim. Observations show that this act is often approved by other students and, therefore, this type of bullying often takes a collective form (Pikas, 1975; Lagerspetz et al., 1982).”
Butovskaya M.L., Timenchik V.M., Burkova V.N., 2006. Aggression, reconciliation, popularity and attitude towards school in a modern metropolis//Aggression and peaceful coexistence: universal mechanisms for controlling social tension in humans. Red. M.L. Butovskaya. Moscow: Scientific World. PP.44-67.
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See also an interesting study done on the example of schools teaching in Russian and the official languages in Latvia. Of the social factors, two are the most important:
1) family income — children from poor families are bullied more, plus poverty is a factor of alienation from the team, and alienated people are also bullied more;
2) nationality — schools with the official language of teaching “outsiders” are significantly less bullied than in schools with Russian (the oppressed compensate for oppression in this way).
Another important point is that the risk of bullying is higher for those who do not fit into the gender stereotypes of “typically masculine” and “typically female” behavior (here it is insignificant, but in bullying studies in developed countries it ranks 2-3).
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Another interesting review about bullying at school, based on material from different European countries, he records 2 important patterns:
1) the minimum incidence of this phenomenon in countries of “social capitalism”, like Sweden, and the maximum is in countries of unlimited capitalism, such as the United States or post-Soviet types of Lithuania. See also data, on the one hand, on Canada, on the other hand, by Northern Ireland. What is clear is the reason — the fewer restrictions on capitalism the brighter the phenomenon; in the US, it is found not only in schools, but also in Higher education institutions.
2) Contrary to what pop ethologists say, it is by no means natural for a class to differentiate between “best” and “worst” so that the former ride second. Psychologically speaking, minorities who are ready for the first and second minorities are by no means “average” individuals, but “extreme” individuals, sometimes with pathologies. It all depends on the reaction of the majority, in which acts of violence initially always cause sympathy for the victim, a desire to intervene, stop, etc.
At the end of the day, it follows from”unnegotiable sociality” of our species; because of it, we automatically tend to cooperate and cooperate in a group if the context suggests that this is a “circle of equals” (and if it is possible to punish “egoists” with “deceivers”, then prosocial behavior, as usual, becomes totally dominant). See examples in economic games.
And we descended from primates like bonobos, with very loose and egalitarian communities, not like baboons, but also for those normatively reconciliation behavior, aimed at restoring social ties broken by aggression, containing the aggressor and comforting the victim.
So, if an automatic intervention in favor of the victim and against the aggressor develops, at the suggestion of adults, like one of the children trained to stand up for the weak, bullying is suppressed. If not, no, especially if this mini-bullying in the classroom is used by the teacher either to clean things up or because he thinks it's “natural”.
In the late USSR, bullying was not reported in every school/class (for example, no more than 10% of Kyubz residents of my generation watched this in their class or heard that this happened nearby; out of 3 schools I replaced, one, 175, was lightly ridiculed). And where it happened, about one or two students, there was not a whole stratum of “outcasts” (alas, in some vocational schools and in many places in the army). So yeah — school violence is a product of capitalism, like other social ills.
“... when I gave an interview about bullying and mobbing in Rossiyskaya Gazeta, 21,000 people visited the article on the newspaper's website in 4 days. And most of the comments were that this was not from school life at all, but from office life. Mostly adult office workers were represented there; students don't read Rossiyskaya Gazeta, as a rule, except for some politicized ones, whom I would not like to see as my students. But normal adults and young people who are quite successful from our point of view, they noted that this is natural office life, and we are almost all victims of either mobbing or bullying. That's why it's quite common in society...
I know Vladimir Samuilovich Sobkin's work very well, which showed that when children divide themselves into nine strata at school according to their parents' income, it turns out that all nine hate each other. There's no problem of envy, there's hate for higher and lower. This is very explosive, and the worst thing about it is that there is no “average” one. They're the same to everyone else. Give the opportunity — everyone will jump into each other's throats. ... why do I think it has become worse [compared to the USSR]. When we were 250 million, there was the Soviet Union, and this is your first visit here. In 1985, there were more than 24,000 murders out of 250 million. With almost a very small number of people lost, most of whom suffered from multiple sclerosis. Since the seventies, and since the nineties, the peak has been ninety-eighth, ninety-ninth, and 2000th — 32.5 thousand murders per population of 140 million. And the fact itself can be translated into odds per hundred thousand, but it's still an indicator of trouble. The second indicator of trouble is suicides. In the Soviet Union, the figure was about 28 per 100,000, which means that in the 2000s and now it is 57-58 per 100,000. Again, only Russian territory. I will specifically mention another figure that is not Soviet, but Soviet in terms of time, but the RSFSR, that is, 85 years old, the territory of Russia alone is 30.6 per 100,000, and now this figure is 57-58. Now it falls slightly to about 56. Moreover, the most interesting thing here is that this figure consists mainly of male suicides. Paradoxically, female suicide in the nineties and 2000s was about the same level, separated from the two.
If we talk about the fact that there are a lot of rich people and a lot of poor people, then yes, by Genie index we are one of the most “stretched” countries. Our index is very high: the top 10% are the richest and 10% are the poorest. They are fantastically far away, and you can also find small countries where the Genie index is about the same, but here it is high. And that's why it's noticeable. And with our mass media, they're still making it even more overblown. I've been a little ill here. At that time I was watching TV: I saw nothing but movies about rich people. In no country, not in America, nowhere, are there so many films about the rich. There is no film about ordinary people at all: not about the hard life of a lonely policeman, not about teachers, not about anyone. There's only about the rich and Cinderella who were poor and got rich, but only because they got married on time. Despite the fact that a very important part of the fairy tale has been thrown out, Cinderella was supposed to work after all. She was rewarded. Our Cinderella is only rewarded for her leg length or the sparkle of her eyes. Therefore, of course, everyone feels insecure. Just one more thing to end with. In Moscow, in 67, there were 9%, only 9% of mercenary murders, all the rest, of course, were emotional, jealousy, drunkenness, etc.
And then we didn't seem to pay attention to it, only then did I start comparing how much these self-serving murders grew; it was the nineties, when they accounted for almost 80% of all murders. This is the “tail” of social optimism that existed in the country at that time. Can we now, based on some sociological data, say that the country is in a state of social optimism?”
Source: Social compass
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