School Bullying

There has been much public concern lately regarding bullying within schools, the safety of students and their learning development (Rigby, 2003). Solutions for school-based bullying are not easy to identify or to explain (Smith & Brain, 2000). Practical implications for this vein of research include the psychological welfare of the students, teachers and parents, as well as the wider community. Hence there is a growing emphasis to rectify the limited research into evaluation of anti-bullying interventions in schools (Smith & Sharp, 1994; Rigby, 2003).

Power relationships are characteristic of human interactions, although they do not have to, and usually do not, include an abuse of that power. No universal definition of bullying exists (Smith & Brain, 2000), yet it is agreed that bullying can be either direct (physical, verbal) or indirect (social exclusion, rumor mongering). A review of the last two decades of research into bullying in schools accounted for data across 16 European countries, as well as Australia, New Zealand, Japan, the USA and Canada. It was concluded that the bullying relationships cross-culturally, had a similarity of structure (Smith & Brain, 2000). The consensus being that bullying is not solely a bully-victim relationship. Rather, bullying is seen as a violent group process, where participants reinforce each other's behavior. The collective nature of bullying means that social relationships within the group greatly influence the bullying process. As a social problem, it has been established that school bullying is a systematic abuse of power, involving three dominant factors: a bully, a victim, and by-standers (Smith & Sharp, 1994).