Bullying : Bullying and academic performance.
When a person is seen to use force, coercion and (or) threat to dominate, harm or abuse, someone is known as bullying. Bullying is characterized by an imbalance of social and (or) physical power, which differentiates it from conflicts and fights. It is a repeated form of behaviour and is a result of malicious intent, sadistic behavioural patterns or underlying trauma or confidence.
There are various forms of bullying, a few of them being:
- Physical bullying: This is the most common form of bullying, and the name suggests what it means. Physical bullying is when one uses physical strength to threat or dominate.
- Verbal bullying: In the case of verbal bullying, there is no physical strength involved and often leaves deep scars on the person being bullied.
- Social or Psychological bullying: This bullying takes place when a rumour or gossip goes on around a person, and everyone talks about is resulting in the one bullied being socially unacceptable.
- Cyberbullying: Cyberbullying came around along with the internet and with the social media platform gaining popularity. Talking about cyberbullying might need a completely different essay.
- Emotional bullying: Psychological bullying and emotional bullying might go hand in hand at times. It is when the bully is your friend or when the bully pulls out personal attacks to harm you emotionally or psychologically. It is proved that girls pull psychological and emotional bullying while the boys usually stick to physical bullying, but the tropes keep changing.
Bullying is or can be done individually or in a group. One can even remain anonymous when bullying. Bullying takes place at all levels of life, but one common place of bullying turns out to be schools.
Popular culture constantly brings into focus bullying in schools (especially high schools full of teens and young adults). Pop culture might even have had a role to play in the increase of bullying because pre-teens watching movies might even get inspired by the portrayal of bullies movies. A classic teen-drama movie that involves everyone bullying everyone that paved the way for bullying in the 2000s and 2010s is Mean Girls, later in the 2000s came another pop culture stop, Gossip Girl which is the epitome of Social, Verbal and Cyberbullying.
However, one should not be confused between a bully or a mean person. The later’s nature is so, and they do not have specific targets, whereas a bully can even be your friend or as sweet as honey. There are times when the blatant signs of bullying are not even present in a person from afar, but only the bully’s victim knows what is going on.
It is said that on an average one in every three children get bullied in schools. UNESCO also says that about 32% of students get bullied in schools all around the globe. When the behaviour of bullies is not checked in school when they are at the stage of growth, it continues to different stages of their lives and in turn affecting lives of those who they decide to bully.
