Naming Bullying

Bullying rarely starts with a formal announcement. First comes a nickname, a repeated joke, a small shove, or a test of how much a person will put up with.

After the murder of Kitty Genovese in New York, the newspapers created an influential but inaccurate story about dozens of indifferent witnesses. John Darley and Bibb Latané decided to study not the heartlessness of the city but the structure of the situation. In their experiments, participants were slower to seek help when they believed other people could hear what was happening too.

That is where the idea of diffusion of responsibility came from. A crowd doesn’t necessarily make each person worse; it makes it less clear who exactly should act. So in real danger it is more useful to address a specific person — “you in the blue jacket, call for help” — than to appeal to humanity in the abstract.

It helps to mark the boundary early and clearly:

I don’t like this.

Don’t call me that.

Don’t touch my things.

This isn’t a joke to me.

It is better to talk about the specific action than to prove the other person is bad. Calm helps keep things clear, but a lack of calm doesn’t make the boundary any less legitimate. A person has the right to be frightened, angry or in tears.

One statement may be enough for an accidental lapse. With systematic bullying, a simple refusal is often not enough. What is needed:

• a record of the episodes;
• witnesses;
• going to adults or to management;
• changing the environment;
• support from a group;
• a safety plan.

The advice to “just not react” sometimes reduces the bully’s pleasure. Sometimes it signals that there will be no resistance. The choice depends on the situation.

The reasons for bullying may involve status, group norms, aggression or the wish to get a reaction. You don’t have to look for hidden pain in the bully in order to hold them responsible. Unhappy people are also capable of answering for their own actions.

The main thing is not to take the aggressor’s choice as an objective assessment of yourself.

A target isn’t picked only for its own properties. Sometimes it is simply a test of who the group will allow to be attacked.

Systematic bullying usually starts with small things that feel awkward to say out loud: a nickname, a hidden backpack, a ruined notebook, “come on, we’re only joking.” Each episode on its own is easy to call trivial, and the whole construction rests on that. So a record helps with more than a conversation with the head teacher or HR: three lines with dates turn a set of trivialities into one long fact that is harder to write off as being oversensitive.

Hence an unpleasant consequence for anyone who reviews such cases from the outside. A person who comes with one episode looks unconvincing. By the time the episodes have piled up enough, they usually no longer come.