The Nature of School Bullying

A Cross-National Perspective

Richard Catalano, JOSINE JUNGER-TAS, YOHJI MORITA, DAN OLWEUS, PHILIP SLEE, Peter K Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415179843
• eBook ISBN: 9781317798408
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The Nature of School Bullying provides a unique world-wide perspective on how different countries have conceptualized the issue of school bullying, what information has been gathered, and what interventions have been carried out. Written and compiled by well known experts in the field, it provides a concise summary of the current state of knowledge of school bullying in nineteen different countries, including:
* demographic details
* definitions of bullying
* the nature and types of school bullying
* descriptive statistics about bullying
* initiatives and interventions.
The Nature of School Bullying provides an authoritative resource for anyone interested in ways in which this problem is being tackled on a global scale. It will be invaluable for teachers, educational policy makers, researchers, and all those concerned with understanding school bullying and finding ways of dealing with it.

Part I
Europe

1 Sweden

Dan Olweus

Geography, social and cultural background

Sweden is an elongated country and measures about 1600 kilometers from north to south. The northern part of the country, in particular the long area bordering on Norway, is mountainous and sparsely populated except for the coastal belt. A majority of the 8.8 million people residing in the country live in the southerly third, which also comprises the three largest cities of the country: Stockholm (about one million inhabitants), Göteborg, and Malmö. Overall, the country is fairly sparsely populated with about 20 inhabitants per square kilometer.

School system

Schooling in Sweden is compulsory from ages 7 (grade 1) through 16 (grade 9). As from 1 July 1997, it is the duty of the municipal authorities to provide places in school for all 6 year olds as well. Compulsory schooling also comprises Lapp nomad schools (for the ethnic minority of Lapp children in the northern part), special schools (for children with impaired vision, hearing, or speech), and compulsory schools for the intellectually handicapped. More than 90 percent of all students attending compulsory basic school go on to upper secondary school. Generally, Sweden's public sector school system is fairly similar to that of Norway, and the country reports on bully/victim problems in Sweden and Norway should be seen as complementary.

The great majority of schools in Sweden are municipal. Most children attend a municipal school near their homes, but students and their parents are entitled to opt for another municipal school or for an independent school. There are about 890,000 students attending compulsory basic schools; about 1 percent of them - some 10,000 students - attend one of the 200 or so independent schools. Teaching in independent schools can be based on a religious creed or on special educational principles, such as Montessori or Waldorf methods. About 15 percent of the students in compulsory basic schools are immigrants, in the sense that they have at least one non-native parent. These students represent more than 90 foreign languages.

Simultaneously with the introduction of a new curriculum and syllabi (in 1994), a new system of grades is being introduced. Under this system, grades are awarded on a three-point scale from the eighth school year. The grades are "Pass," "Pass with distinction," and "Pass with special distinction." The grades relate the students' achievement to the national objective stated in the syllabus for the subject. Students and their parents are to be given regular progress reports all through compulsory school. Starting in the fifth year of school, this information is to be verbal and written.

In compulsory schools, several classes are often joined together to form work units in which the teachers plan work jointly, often together with special teachers. These work units are usually the context in which student welfare activities are discussed, often with the support of special student welfare staff. This latter category may include the school social worker, the school psychologist, and the school nurse, among others.

The school or academic year normally begins at the end of August and ends early the following June, which makes a total of about 40 weeks (minus Christmas and Easter vacations comprising approximately three weeks). The school week is five days long, from Monday through Friday.

The beginning and some terminological distinctions: mobb(n)ing versus bullying

A strong societal interest in the general phenomenon of bully/victim problems was first aroused in Sweden in the late 1960s and early 1970s under the designation "mobbning" or "mobbing" (Heinemann, 1969, 1972; Olweus, 1973a). The term was introduced into the Swedish debate by a school physician, P.-P. Heinemann, in the context of racial discrimination. Heinemann had borrowed the term "mobbing" from the Swedish version of a book on aggression written by the ethologist Konrad Lorenz (1968). In ethology, the word mobbing is used to denote a collective attack by a group of animals on an animal of another species, which is usually larger and a natural enemy of the group. In Lorenz's book (1968), mobbing was also used to characterize the action of a school class or a group of soldiers ganging up against a deviating individual. Incidentally, it has been claimed (Lagerspetz, Björkqvist, Berts and King, 1982) that Lorenz himself never used the word "mobbing" in his German original (1963, 1966) and that the word in fact became introduced into the Swedish debate by Lorenz's Swedish translator Sverre Sjolander, himself an ethologist by profession.

In any case, the English expression "mob" has also been used for quite some time in social psychology, and to some extent by the general public in English-speaking countries, to denote a relatively large group of individuals - a crowd or a mass of people - joined in some kind of common activity or striving. As a rule, the mob has been formed by accident, is loosely organized, and exists only for a short time. In the social psychological literature, distinctions have been made between several types of mob, including the aggressive mob (the lynch mob), the panic-stricken mob (the flight mob), and the acquisitive mob. Finally, the members of the mob experience strong emotions, and the behavior and reactions of the mob are considered to be fairly irrational (see, for example, Lindzey, 1954).

Already at an early stage, I expressed doubts about the suitability of the term mobbing, as used in social psychology/ethology and by Heinemann, to denote the kind of peer harassment that presumably occurred in school settings (Olweus, 1973a, 1978, pp. 4-6). Generally, with my background in aggression research (e.g. Olweus, 1969), I felt that the connotations implied in the concept of mobbing (as described above) could easily lead to inappropriate expectations about the phenomenon and to certain aspects of the problem being overlooked.

One particular point of concern related to the relative importance of the group versus its individual members. The notion that school mobbing is a matter of collective aggression by a relatively homogeneous group did in my view obscure the relative contributions made by individual members. More specifically, the role of particularly active perpetrators or bullies could easily be lost sight of within such a conceptual framework. In this context, I also questioned how often the kind of all-against-one situations implied in mobbing actually occur in school. If harassment by a small group or by a single individual were the more frequent type in our schools, the concept of mobbing might result, for example, in teachers having difficulty noting the phenomenon right in front of their noses. In addition, the concept of mobbing will almost automatically place responsibility for "possible problems" with the recipient of the collective aggression, the victim, who is seen as irritating or provoking the majority of "normal" students in one way or another.

Use of the concept of mobbing might also lead to an overemphasis on temporary and situationally determined circumstances: "The mob, suddenly and unpredictably, seized by the mood of the moment, turns on a single individual, who for some reason or other has attracted the group's irritation and hostility" (Olweus, 1978, p. 5). Although such temporary emotional outbreaks from a group of children may occur, I considered it more important to direct attention to another kind of possible situation, in which an individual student is exposed to aggression systematically and over longer periods of time whether from another individual, a small group, or a whole class (Olweus, 1973a, 1978, p. 5).

I think it is fair to say that research conducted in the 1970s and later (see, for example, Olweus, 1978, 1993a, 1994a; Farrington, 1993) has shown that these concerns were justified. For example, there is no doubt that students in a class vary markedly in their degree or level of aggressiveness and that these individual differences tend to be quite stable over time, often over several years (Olweus, 1977, 1978, 1979). Similarly, the research clearly shows that a relatively small number of students in a class are usually much more actively engaged in bullying than others, often the great majority of the students in the class, who are not involved in bullying at all or only in marginal roles. Data from our Bergen study (below) indicate that, in the majority of cases, the victim of bullying is harassed by a small group of two or three students, often with a negative leader. A considerable proportion of the victims, some 25—40 percent, report, however, that they are mainly bullied by a single student (Olweus, 1988).

The research-based picture of peer harassment in school is obviously a far cry from what is generally implied in the social psychological or ethological concepts of mobbing. In addition, the actual use of the term mobbing (and derivatives of it) by Scandinavians has certainly come to deviate from both the scientific and the ordinary English "root" meaning of the term. This is particularly evident when we hear a (Scandinavian) student saying "he/she mobbed me today," and also find (above) that about one-fourth or one-third of the students report being mobbed primarily by an individual student. Obviously, the word mobbing has gradually, and in part on the basis of highly publicized research findings, acquired a new meaning in Scandinavian everyday language, loosely implying relatively systematic, repetitive harassment of an individual (or possibly a group) by one or more other individuals (usually but not necessarily by a peer/peers). This new meaning of the word is now well established in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, and there are of course no grounds for trying to change this usage.

At the same time it was clear at an early stage that, for an English-speaking audience, the terms mob and mobbing are not very useful in denoting the phenomenon of concern; they typically elicit associations in the direction of the social psychological/ethological concepts and the original meaning of the word mob. On the basis of experiences along these lines, I tended to use the term bully/victim (or whipping boy) problems (instead of, or in addition to, mobbing) in my early writings in English (e.g. Olweus, 1978). Nowadays, the terms "bullying," "bully/victim problems," and "victimization" seem to have gained general international acceptance (in English-speaking countries) to denote the kind of peer harassment we Scandinavians, somewhat inappropriately from a linguistic point of view, call mobbing.

Definition of bullying

With this discussion as a background, it is now appropriate to give a more stringent definition of the term bullying. I usually define school bullying or victimization in the following general way: A student is being bullied or victimized when he or she is exposed, repeatedly and over time, to negative actions on the part of one or more other students. It is a negative action when someone intentionally inflicts, or attempts to inflict, injury or discomfort upon another - basically what is implied in the definition of aggressive behavior (Olweus, 1973b; Berkowitz, 1993). Negative actions can be carried out by physical contact, by words, or in other ways, such as making faces or mean gestures, and intentional exclusion from a group. Although children or youths who engage in bullying very likely vary in their degree of awareness of how the bullying is perceived by the victim, most or all of them probably realize that their behavior is at least somewhat painful or unpleasant for the victim. (The ways in which this general definition of bullying has been "operationalized" in the Olweus student questionnaire on bully/victim problems are described in the country report on Norway, pp. 30—31, this volume.)

Even if a single instance of more serious harassment can be regarded as bullying under certain circumstances, the definition given above emphasizes negative actions that are carried out "repeatedly and over time." The intent is to exclude occasional non-serious negative actions that are directed against one person at one time and against another on a different occasion.

In order to use the term bullying, there should also be an imbalance in strength (an asymmetric power relationship): the student who is exposed to negative actions has difficulty in defending himself or herself and is somewhat helpless against the student or students who harass. The actual and/or perceived imbalance in strength or power may come about in several different ways. The target of bullying may actually be physically weaker, or may simply perceive himself or herself as physically or mentally weaker than the perpetrator(s); or there may be a difference in numbers, with several students ganging up on a single victim. A somewhat different kind of imbalance may be achieved, when the "source" of the negative actions is difficult to identify or confront as in social exclusion from the group, backtalking, or when a student is being sent anonymous mean notes. In line with this reasoning, we do not talk about bullying when there is a conflict or aggressive interchange between two persons of approximately the same physical or mental strength.

In this context, it is also natural to consider briefly the relationship between bullying and teasing. In the everyday social interactions among peers in school, there occurs a good deal of (also recurrent) teasing of a playful and relatively friendly nature - which in most cases cannot be considered bullying. On the other hand, when the repeated teasing is of a degrading and offensive character, and, in particular, is continued in spite of clear signs of distress or opposit...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Europe
• Part II North America
• Part III Pacific Rim
• Part IV The developing world
• Name index
• Subject index