14 DAY TRIAL // Investigators have recently determined in a new study that children who tend to bully others at school select their “victims” from a group of unpopular children. This is done so that the prospective victim would have no one to jump to their aid, since no one wants to be friends with them. This approach is very effective on the part of the bullies, and it implies that authorities wanting to fix the situation and eradicate this phenomenon from schools will need to develop very savvy programs of doing this.
The investigation has also determined that, in the case of elementary school bullying, children only tend to care about what their same-gender peers think. In other words, if a boy decides to pick on another, more unpopular boy, then the aggressor does not care what the girls in the classroom think, and is only privy to the influence of the other males and their beliefs. The investigation that arrived at these conclusions was conducted by a team of researchers from the University of Groningen, in the Netherlands, that was led by sociology professor Rene Veenstra, LiveScience reports.
Bullies “aren't interested in the opinion to the whole classroom, only those in their in-group. In elementary school the in-group is often people from the same [gender]. Boys are interested in the opinion of other boys in whether they choose the right target or not, and girls are interested in what other girls think,” the team leader says. It is widely estimated that around 15 percent of all children in the world attending school fall victims to bullying, a phenomenon that leads to some fairly destructive consequences. Researchers have been trying to get to the root of the problem for many years.
Some of the most wide-spread effects that bullying can cause later on in life include anxiety, depression, feelings of loneliness as well as to a host of very negative side-effects. Only a very small percentage of those who are subjected to this type of treatment emerge from school stronger and better prepared to take on life and its challenges. On the other hand, the aggressors themselves do not fare significantly better. Previous studies have associated bullying with an increased chance of developing anti-social behaviors later in life. Increased levels of delinquency and substance abuse are also possible.
“Bullies do it so strategically that if there is not a good program at the school nothing will change. They won't change their behavior by themselves, because it gives them a lot of advantages. You really need a good program that changes the attitude of all the kids in the classroom that makes clear to children that if they want the bully to stop they all have to be part, take joint action. They have to understand if they assist or reinforce the bully or are just bystanders that is what drives the bullying,” Veenstra says.