According to Kids Help Phone, bullying can be categorized in four ways: physical, verbal, social, and internet.
- "Physicalbullying involves hitting, shoving, pushing, tripping, and other kinds of force."
- "Verbalbullying involves hurtful comments, name-calling, teasing."
- "Socialbullying involves using relationships to hurt someone. It involves excluding or ostracizing someone from a friend group, spreading rumors, or 'the silent treatment.'”
- "Cyberbullying happens over cellphones or the internet."
When most people think of bullying, they think of physical harm. However, the most common type of bullying is verbal bullying, with about 77% of students experiencing it at least once. Verbal bullying is used to degrade the victim while at the same time making the perpetrator seem powerful. According to BullyingStatistics.org, girls are more likely to use verbal bullying techniques than boys. “Girls are more subtle (and can be more devastating), in general, than boys. Girls use verbal bullying, as well as social exclusion techniques, to dominate others and show their superiority and power. However, there are also many boys with subtlety enough to use verbal techniques for domination, and who are practiced in using words when they want to avoid the trouble that can come with physically bullying someone else.” Most verbal bullying happens between ages 11 to 17, but the effects can last a long time. Verbal bullying can be just as harmful as physical bullying.
Verbal bullying can affect the way one looks at themselves. They become insecure and question everything they do. Their self-image becomes askew and they may even have thoughts of hurting themselves. The emotional and psychological health of the victims of this type of bullying is put at a higher risk than those not affected. “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me” is something young children are taught when told to ignore harsh words, but this is not the case. Words are powerful and have a long lasting effect.
The newest form of bullying is cyber bullying. Instead of face-to-face bullying, students have taken to the web to torment each other. "Cyber bullying is bullying that takes place online, through either email, chat rooms, social networking services, text messages, instant messages, website postings, blogs, or a combination of means. Cyberbullies may conceal their identity so that their victim experiences an anonymous attack” (bullyingstatistics.org). Because of a feeling of anonymity, bullies feel more free to say what they want. Cyber bullies post insulting derogatory comments, stalk and harass victims, and go out of their way to even make fake profiles. Cyberbullying makes it easier for rumors about someone to be spread and can be very harmful for someone’s reputation.
According to research done by NoBullying.com in 2014, 25% of teens report having experienced bullying online or through their cell phone and 55% of teens have witnessed online bullying. Because over 80% of teens have access to phones, gossip can spread like wildfire. 50% of teens said that they did not confide in their parents when they were bullied over the internet and “only one out of every six parents of adolescents and teens are even aware of the scope and intensity of cyber bullying today.” Victims of cyber bullying are more likely than the victims of other forms of bullying to consider suicide.
More harmful to a child is being the victim of “pack bullying.” Pack bullying is bullying of an individual by an entire group. “The 2009 Wesley Report on bullying found that pack bullying was more prominent in high schools and characteristically lasted longer than bullying undertaken by [single] individuals” (bullyingstatistics.org). Pack bullying can involve any of the four categories of bullying and take place on the bus, school yard, gymnasium, and online.
Students are afraid to go to the washroom, cafeteria, and other social areas in their schools for fear of bullying. Social bullying also instills fear of being ostracized by ones peer group. “Children who are less accepted by their classmates in school tend to get lower grades and to be rated by teachers as more anxious, fearful, and depressed” (education.com). Because of the fear of being different, students are less likely to intervene when they see bullying taking place. Bullying usually involves more than the bully and the victim; there are usually bystanders as well, those who hear about the bullying or see it as it is happening. While most bystanders just watch bullying take place, some instigate it or eventually join in.
Bullying is 100% preventable and should not be as big of a problem as it is. For more information about how to stop bullying, visit bullyingstatistics.org or stopbullying.gov.
