What is School Bullying
Bullying is unwanted, aggressive behaviour among school-aged children that involves a real or perceived power imbalance. The behaviour is repeated or has the same potential to be repeated, over time both kids who are bullied and who bully others may have serious and lasting problems.
In order to be considered bullying, the other behaviour must be aggressive and include:
- An imbalance of power: kids who bully use their power –such as physical strength, access to embarrassing information, or popularity- to control or harm others. Power imbalances can change over time and in different situations, even if they involve the same people
- Repetition: bullying behaviours happen more than once or have the potential to happen more than once
Bullying includes actions such as making threats, spreading rumours, attacking someone physically or verbally, and excluding someone from a group on purpose.
Types of Bullying
There are three types of bullying:
- Verbal Bullying: saying or writing mean things.
- Social Bullying: sometimes referred to as relational bullying, involves hurting someone’s reputation or relationship’s.
- Physical Bullying: involves hurting a person’s body or possessions.
Where or When Bullying Happens
Bullying can occur during or after school hours. While most reported bullying in the school building, a significant percentage also happens in places like on the school-ground or on the bus. It can also happen travelling to or from school, in the youth’s neighbourhood, or on the internet.
What is Cyber Bullying?
Cyber bullying is when someone uses the internet to be mean to a child or young person so they feel bad or upset. It can happen on a social media site, game, app or any other online or electronic service or platform. It can include posts, comments, texts, messages, chats, livestreams, memes, images, videos and emails.
These are some examples of ways the internet can be used to make someone feel bad or upset:
- Sending hurtful messages about someone
- Sharing embarrassing photos or videos of someone
- Spreading nasty online gossip about someone
- Leaving them out online
- Creating fake accounts in their name
- Tricking them into believing you are someone else
Sadly, cyberbullying happens a lot in Australia and around the world
44% of Australian young people report having a negative online experience in the last six months, this includes 15% who received threats or abuse online.
What you can do?
If someone is being really mean online, first of all it’s a good idea to:
- Get your child to speak to a trusted adult, Psychology can be a good option.
- Change the settings on your device or online account so your child can’t see so many messages, posts or comments from the person who was mean
If you need cyberbullying material removed:
Report it to the social media site, gaming site or other apps that was used to send, post or share the harmful content (this can be the fastest way to get it removed)
This means the content sent to you, posted, or shared about you must be likely to harm your physical or mental wellbeing/health because it is serious:
- Threatening (for example, when someone says they are going to harm you or tells others to harm you)
- Intimidating (for example, when you stop doing something because someone makes you feel scared or bad about it)
- harassing (for example, when someone keeps sending messages to you or keeps sharing posts or comments about you even though you don’t want them to)
- humiliating (for example, when someone teases or embarrasses you very badly)
If someone is cyber bullying your child, book an appointment with us at Alegna Solutions Psychology Practice as soon as you find out. Bullying can lead to a number of issues for the bullied party and the bully, booking with us can help prevent these issues from escalating into problems as they grow into young adults. Don’t wait until something unpreventable happens, book with us at your earliest convenience.