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Bullying Guide
Harassment and bullying can sometimes be confused; harassment is generally unwanted and offending behaviour usually on a racial or sexual theme. Sexual harassment occurs when the attacks happen based on your gender or sexual orientation. Racial harassment is when the attacks happen because of the colour of your skin, race or cultural background.
Bullying is persistent unwanted behaviour which hurts or threatens a person regardless of sex or race. Harassment is covered by the discrimination act and the protection from harassment act but bullying is not, so clear decisions have to be made to determine whether you are the victim of harassment or being bullied. The main differences between bullying in the workplace and harassment are:
Harassment
Usually has a physical edge to it such as touching, intrusion into your personal space and damage done to your possessions.
Bullying
Is mostly psychological for example criticism about work or stealing work from you to use as their ideas.
Pressure bullying or unwitting bullying
This type of bullying occurs when stress causes the behaviour to deteriorate and a person will become short tempered, maybe curse a lot and be easily irritated. Most of us will have felt like this at sometimes or other but we can usually deal with it and it has no serious consequences on others and once the pressure has passed our behaviour returns to normal.
We will often feel silly and apologise for our behaviour and any offence it caused others. The bully though will have no control of it and this behaviour happens more frequently and they take it out on people around them, they feel no remorse and the thought of an apology will never enter their heads.
Corporate bullying
This type of bullying in the workplace occurs when the employer abuses employees knowing full well that people will be afraid to stand up to them for fear of losing their job. Instances of corporate bullying are:
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Bullying Guide
Persistent bullying can have very serious consequences on the health; relentless bullying day after day causes stress and with stress comes effects on the health such as fatigue, depression, anxiety, phobias and panic attacks. Anyone who is being bullied will eventually find it stressful and symptoms will begin to show if they are continually faced with stressful situations day after day.
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Bullying Guide
There are many different forms of bullying, it isn’t all physical violence it is also verbal or social abuse, this can be by way of intimidation, making nasty comments and excluding the person. Bullying can consist of threatening, persistent teasing, name calling, ignoring, gossiping and spreading vicious rumours. This done day in day out over a long period of time can have serious effects on your child’s health both physically and mentally.
Stages of bullying
When your child first begins to be bullied the effects can be minor, your child will of course be upset at what is happening to them and may often come home tearful, and they will perhaps go off their food and can also begin to have sleepless nights or bad dreams. If the bullying continues your child will then come up with more and more excuses to not to go to school, they will say they have a stomach ache, headache or other minor illness.
Perhaps if the bullying is taking place in just one or two lessons say for instance PE then they will make excuses just on particular days when they have those lessons. Gradually over a period of time your child will begin to show signs of stress developing; they may look tired and drawn, not sleeping very well, be very nervous and jittery, refuse to go out after school or begin to have panic attacks.
Ideally the problem should never reach this stage because the effects of stress from bullying can lead to self harm and suicide. By this stage you will know something is seriously wrong with your child and probably school will have noticed a big difference in your child too as stress affects learning.
More often than not children are reluctant to tell if they are being bullied due to their own feelings of guilt and shame, only occasionally are they too afraid of the bullies threats to tell.
Bullying Guide
When we think of bullying we think of children in school, while it is true the majority of bullying does occur in school in the playgrounds it is something that happens in the workplace and in the home too. Bullying has also taken on a new form with the modern technology of today and is no longer confined just to the playground, bullying now occurs in cyber form via email and text messaging with cell phones.
Bullying in schools
Most bullying often occurs in playgrounds and at lunch breaks and can take on different forms such as your child being bullied for money at lunchtime or for sweets to more serious forms of continually hounding your child just for the sheer fun of it.
Bullying can also occur during lessons particularly in full classes or during sports lessons and isn’t confined in school bullies can also make your child’s life hell going to and from school. Sometimes bullying can also come from those we entrust our children’s safety to, teachers.
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Bullying Guide
When we think of bullying in school it is the children we think of as being the bullies against one another but a recent report showed that more and more teachers are being subjected to bullying in the classroom, this is usually in secondary schools but can also occur even in junior schools and sometimes the bullying doesn’t end when school is out but continues in the teachers’ home life too.
It is thought that half of all teachers in secondary schools have at some time or another been the victim of bullying by pupils. The incidents of bullying in the classroom range from violent behaviour against the teacher such as kicks and pushes to strong verbal abuse and general bad behaviour in the classroom.
Among those teachers that admitted to being bullied in the classroom over 10% of them said the bullying continued away from school and into their home life. Some cases of bullying had gotten so bad that the teacher had been forced to move away from the area due to the persistent harassment by pupils during weekends and evenings.
Bullying Guide
Anyone who is being bullied will eventually have feelings of shame, guilt and embarrassment, these feelings are only normal when you are being victimised day in and day out over a long period of time. The victim of the bully will eventually begin to ask themselves “why me” and will feel embarrassment, guilt and shame that they can’t stand up to the bully and deal with what is happening to them by themselves.
It is important to remember that in fact there are very few people who could deal with persistent bullying over long periods of time by themselves. Persistent bullies are also called serial bullies and there are primarily four different types of serial bully, the attention seeker, the wannabe, the guru and the sociopath:
The Attention seeker
The attention seeker will always want to be the focus of attention; they are control freaks who are excellent in manipulating people. Signs of the attention seeker are:
* Emotionally insecure and immature.
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Bullying Guide
We all know that our children can be bullied in school but when this happens it is usually a fellow pupil who is the culprit but now it seems that your child is vulnerable to another kind of bullying, by teachers. Bullying done in this form is all verbal and done to make your child look stupid amongst his/her classmates; this is usually by name calling such as telling the child they are stupid in front of the whole class.
There has not being much written on the topic of teachers bullying pupils for obvious reasons, but a recent survey came to light revealing that 25% of the teachers who were questioned about bullying admitted they had to some degree during their career with 2% stating they did it on a regular basis.
Signs to watch for in your child
When teachers are the ones who are bullying children, the children are even more reluctant to tell someone than if it is other children who are doing the bullying.