The Bully And The Damage Done

By Michael Schwarzchild, PhD

Family Counseling Center Board of Directors

I’m a clinical psychologist and I provide psychotherapy for adults, adolescents, and children. In my 20 years of practice, I’ve worked with children who are bullied, with their parents, with adults who were bullied as children, and with children who bully others. Most people do not understand the profound damage that is one through bullying. It can literally destroy someone’s entire life. And, although my sympathy is always more with the victims, there is damage done to the bullies and their families as well.

The Connecticut Governor’s Prevention Partnership Bullying Task Force provided this definition of bullying: “A person is being bullied when he or she is the target, repeatedly and over time, of negative actions undertaken by one or several other individuals who are more powerful than the target in some way. Negative actions, which can begin with name calling, or social isolation, and can build to actual attacks and/or attempts to injure another person, include physical and verbal aggression, social alienation, intimidation, racial and ethnic harassment, and sexual harassment.”

For many practitioners, myself included, the process of psychotherapy often involves searching through an individual’s past for clues about current emotional or behavioral problems. It is always tragic to discover that an adult patient, who has sought treatment for a lifetime of depressive symptoms, for feelings of helplessness, hopelessness, loneliness, and sadness, for excessive anxiety and worry, or for severely low self-esteem, began this career of unhappiness as the victim of childhood bullying.

And it happens all the time. Although the problems is frequently ignored, it is easy enough for most of us to see the results of school bullying on our children. They experience and display fear. They often avoid certain areas in the school, skip school altogether, play sick, or actually become sick. Other classmates are frequently traumatized by witnessing the bullying as well. Fear spreads and children withdraw, developing a deep-seated sense of impotence and a belief that the world is not a safe place. When the adults in their lives cannot or will not protect them, when the children are told that they should ignore the problem or that they should be able to handle it themselves, when grown-ups assume that bullying is a normal part of childhood and that kids will just be kids, the children are truly hurt. They are sometimes hurt to the point that, even as children, they require the professional services of people like me. And, if they do not receive such help, these hurt children often mature into hurt adults, adults who are not as effective in their functioning as they might have been, adults who suffer from psychological problems that they might otherwise not have experienced, adults who have struggled with these problems for many years and who may, therefore, require much higher levels of service to address them. The emotional costs, the social costs, and the financial costs of bullying are huge, and they have largely been ignored.

The 2001 report of the Connecticut Governor’s Prevention Partnership Bullying Task Force, “Brave Enough To Be Kind,” presented the following facts about school bullying:

*Bullying and aggression are common in Connecticut’s elementary schools, with bullying incidents occurring in nearly nine out of ten.

*The frequency of name-calling, teasing, hitting, and socially isolating others increases from grades one through five.

*More than 60 percent of teachers devote fewer than 10 classroom periods per year to teaching violence prevention curricula.

*Most elementary schools have not conducted a recent evaluation of the prevalence of aggression and bullying or the effectiveness of anti-bullying programs.

*By age 24, bullies identified after the age of seven are six times more likely than nonbullies to be convicted of a crime; by age 30, they are four times to have accrued three criminal convictions.

*In the United States, 20 to 30 percent of school children are directly involved in bully/target problems.

*In a Midwestern study, one-fifth of fourth through eighth graders reported academic difficulties resulting from bullying.

*Targets of bullying are far more likely to bring a weapon to school than children who are not targets.

*Nationally, 29 percent of targets have brought a weapon to school.

*Schools that address bullying effectively can reduce behaviors by more than 50 percent and these schools also see a decrease in other types of undesirable activities such as truancy, vandalism, shoplifting, and underage drinking.

It is clearly time to address the problem of school bullying through meaningful and effective interventions. The Family Counseling Center plans to hold a regional symposium on this issue in the fall and your participation and input are welcomed. For information, call Terry Blackmer, executive director, at 426-8103.