Last Updated on July 19, 2021 by sensation-experience
When you hear about bullying or harassment, what emotions do you immediately feel? It can vary widely based on your schemas and experiences. Regardless, you should know what’s happening by peering into the points of view of others that differ from your own. How and why this happens will be described to the best of human knowledge below.
First, bullying and harassment are not the same thing, although they may share similar meanings. Bullying refers to the constant act of picking on people who are believed to be inferior to the person doing it because they feel they possess a better status or trait than the victim. Things include age,intellect, gender, disability, race and ethnicity or nationality, even socioeconomic classes, and more subtle things like microagression, especially in patronising certain individuals in a professional context.
Harassment is a criminal offence when a person continually or repeatedly does something of which the victim has persistently asked and told the harasser to stop. This may be a result of them wanting to stalk the victim for whatever reason, or simply because they insist on doing something the other person didn’t want. This latter type of harassment is more of an indirect form than one that is deliberate. Both are equally devastating, and there has been efforts to criminalise bullying, as well. Nevertheless, there are a broad number of motives as to why one would want to bully and or harass someone else, and I can tell you that there is likely no way I can cover them all. Some state legislations have made it so that if a bully gets in trouble in school, their parents would be held criminally responsible.
How bullying and harassment affects a person in the long run depends on several factors of said person. If the person is mentally and emotionally stable, which is to say that they are totally self-confident and they have a positive outlook on their lives, they may feel somewhat impacted, but they would most likely vent and use other forms of expression to talk to other people to insure that the victim was not at fault. Others, however, may not have this kind of reaction, especially with those who have a lower intellect to emotion ratio. These type of people may suffer the most from an attack of a bully. Since they have little to no ability to reason and to think rationally, they often rely on their emotions to express how they feel and sometimes results in self-destructive behaviour. However, it is possible that a person could have their intellect reduced if the bully picked on the same person for an extended period of time. This type of change is called ‘neurosis’. If not treated, the person could end up sharing the traits of someone who would normally be a neurotic (more emotion than intellect). The opposite to neuroticism is psychopathy, which is someone who has more intellect and less emotion. It is also known that children who grow up with abusive parents may become abusive themselves, though they usually learn not to follow in their stead or follow the monkey see, monkey do model.
The remedies for dealing with a bully depends on the kind of person they are targetting, as well as the bully’s familial background, and possibly other things. you, the victim, are mostly psychopathic, you can find non-physical ways to intimidate the bully and make them submissive if possible. If you are primarily neurotic, however, you may have a harder time standing up to a bully since you would be too submissive, whereas the bully would usually dominate over you. Note that the majority of bullies are acting out of sheer cowardice and ignorance. However, there are things that you can do to help speak up for yourself and realise that there is nothing wrong with you, and that you will pull through. Be sure to address the situation at the micro-level if you can, rather than going all out and going to the macro level. Also, be sure to get plenty of evidence that would be significantly unfavourable to the bully, no matter how hard they would try and convince people that you were bullying them. This is often why telling on bullies backfires.
Things like mixed martial arts and other forms of sports (physical or mental) can be used to build confidence by stimulating all areas of a person’s brain, allowing for further development of intellect. Examples of when I was bullied or harassed and how I dealt with them are rather hard to find since I was able to get out of most situations quite easily. When I was younger, I was often made fun of because of my disabilities of blindness and severe hearing loss–even by people in the blind community! Some sighted children would make me bump into things, and they would laugh and taunt me. However, I did not experience a lot of emotions except for sadness and being upset in general. So, I thought of inflicting the same pain that the bully did to me, but I think that is normally not the best thing to do; I sometimes felt it would have been the right thing to do, because I wanted them to hurt just as they had hurt me. However, the line between wanting justice and revenge become blurred, and sometimes, whether you want to give someone a taste of their own medicine, two wrongs don’t always make a right. And, as aforementioned, hurting a bully first would be consider taking too big of a step… it should only be used if nothing else works.
The problem in many schools today is that both the bully and the victim end up getting suspension time because they have a zero tolerance policy for any physical violence. However, the law does authorise anyone to act in self-defence if the situation warranted it, and if the means of self-defence was proportionate to the offence. As an example, you cannot choke someone to the point of near death simply because they punched you a few times. However, the attitude must always be, ‘I do not want to fight, period.’ You should always maintain this attitude even if others will call you chicken or coward These are all forms of peer pressure used to get you to conform to a dominant culture, and possibly, at the subconscious level, because they want to get you in trouble for fighting with them.
In conclusion, bullies often have fears of their own. Fear and lack of understanding makes us do strange and irrational things. Nobody can control how they feel inside, but anybody can choose how to respond to these emotions. Knowing this can help you to a great extent to gain positive power to defend yourself rationally. As usual, new methods are continually being invented by psychologists and sociologists, as well as politicians and other legal personelle. All these things will hopefully prevent bullying and harassment. This kind of behaviour cannot only occur in children, but more often than not, it can just as well happen with adults, too, especially if they do not agree with one another on any given situation and who has no ability to control their anger and frustration. The best thing that can be done is to realise who will be their true friends, and who to stay away from. Visit the Stop Bullying web site for more information, and remember that there is always help. Simply dial +1(800) 275-8255 for the National Suicide Prevention Hotline. Two-one-one Info also provides resources for immediate need.
As always, stay safe!