Analyzing Long Term Impacts of Bullying

Long-Term Impacts of Bullying

Bullying

Bullying is an undesirable, hostile behavior exhibited by adolescents due to perceived and sometimes real power imbalance. This is a repeated behavior, or one that may be possibly repeated, as time goes on. Both the bullies and those bullied can develop long-term problems. For a child's behavior to be termed 'bullying', it must be a hostile behavior and include the following:

Power imbalance: Children who bully make use of their physical strengths, their access to information that could be considered embarrassing, or their popularity to harm or control the activities of other children. These imbalances in power can alter with time and circumstances, even when they involve the same set of people.

Repetition: These bullying behaviors do not occur just once, or can occur recurrently.

Bullying behaviors involve certain actions like threatening others, physical and verbal attacks, spreading rumors about someone, or leaving someone out of a group activity purposefully (Stopbullying.gov, n.d). It is hostile behavior, inflicting intentional and repeated harm in the form of injury or discomfort. Bullying can come as a physical contact, mere use of words or in subtle actions. Most times, the individual being bullied cannot protect himself or herself and often does nothing that could have triggered bullying (APA, 2016).

Bullying is a typical way of harming and humiliating others deliberately. It is a long-lasting behavioral style, mostly because the bullies often have their way-at least initially. Bullies are not born, they are made, and bullying begins at a very early age, once parents fail to handle the early hostility of a 2-year-old effectively. Without victims, there would be no bullies, and they do not bully just anybody they see; the victims are mostly people who appear scared even before they are bullied. Everyone hates the bully, but no one loves the natural-born victim either. Bullies cause problems in their place of work and relationships when they get older. Most experts are of the belief that bullying is becoming more rampant because more children grow up without having some unique experiences that help them develop some necessary social skills. lots of reports assert a decline in the rate of playing freely with peers; but it is a well-known fact that playing with their peers help children develop necessary skills that endear them to their age mates and help them learn how best to tackle social challenges (Understanding Bullying, 2016). School bullying has both short-term and long-term effects on the physical and mental health of children. There a number of new programs around the world channeled towards containing bullying. There is very limited previous work on the efforts made on preventing bullying, past narrative reviews, and past meta-analyses of the anti-bullying programs. The right definition for school bullying involves several major elements: verbal, physical, or intimidation or psychological attack aimed at causing fear, harm, or distress to the victim; a power imbalance (physical or psychological), with a stronger child or sometimes children, intimidating children who are less powerful; and recurrent events between the same set of children over a long time.

School bullying can take place in the school premises or while students are going to school or returning from school. When two people with the same strength (verbal, physical, or psychological) intimidate each other, it is no longer bullying (Farrington & Ttofi, 2010). This paper looks at the prolonged effect of bullying, results, and impacts.

Long-term impacts of bullying

The experience one gets from being bullied can cause lots of long-term damage to the victims. This is self-sustaining, and can also be supported with different researches by different bodies. Suffering physical harm with the aim of avoiding prolonged harm is not necessary. Using mere words and common gestures are enough. As a matter of fact, the age-long saying that sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never be able to harm me, can be said to be more or less precisely backwards. For most parts, any physical damage inflicted on a victim during a fistfight heals quickly, especially if the damage is inflicted on the victim during the growing years. The primary wounds suffered by bullying victims is the most difficult to mend because it inflicts damage on their self-concepts and, their personalities and identities. Bullying is simply an effort to instill self-hatred and fear. Being the victim of repeated bullying destroys one's ability to see oneself as a capable, desirable and efficient individual (Dombeck, 2014). There are two main undesirable outcomes that emanate from learning to see yourself as undesirable and incapable person. The first undesirable outcome is that it becomes less likely that you will be more susceptible to depression, angry or bitter. Becoming a victim of bullying makes you feel undesirable (to yourself), and that the world can't keep you safe.

Being a victim of bullying lowers self-confidence and conviction in abilities, makes one feel unsafe in the world,,(when you are bullied by people who are physically stronger than you) that you lack the required power for self-defense when you are repeatedly forced to think about your obvious inability to reduce or stop the bullying, Learned Helplessness is setting you up (e.g., where you are made to believe that there is little or nothing you can do to help yourself no matter how hard you try even when this is so untrue), and this sets you up for depression and helplessness. Simultaneously, you start accepting how helpless and hopeless you are, you equally get to learn how bullies see you, which means you get to learn that others see you as pathetic, weak, and a loser. By the way identity works, you are set up with the belief that whatever the bullies say about you has got to be true. It would have been great if everyone possessed a great deal of self-confidence, but identity just does not work this way. Identity is just a social phenomenon. Others make meaningful contributions to it. Especially when people are still very young and are yet to survive a handful of life's challenges, it is not easy for people to understand their capabilities and strengths and what they can achieve. Much of what the society sees as identity among young people, and even among the older generation is really a sort of other-confidence, which means that the confidence of most people is strengthened continuously by the people surrounding them and what they make them believe about how good and worthy they are in both subtle and overt ways. This is the main reason why most people love being members of certain groups-it gives them positive feelings about themselves. Bullying makes people feel they do not belong to groups; and makes them believe that they are inferior to others in many different ways.

Doubting the stark reality of not being better than an outsider or outcast on being beaten or humiliated publicly becomes a bit harder. Only the exceptionally confident or well-supported individual can hold back from internalizing what bullies say to him/her and start bullying himself/herself the same way bullies do to him/her and start thinking like a real failure. Conversely, it is quite easy for victims to start thinking of themselves as worthless, pathetic, weak, and incompetent. These are the types of thoughts that can make you depressed, or, when combined with fantasies of revenge, to rage and retribution (Dombeck, 2014).

Where the first undesirable result of bullying opens up almost immediately as a wounded self-concept, the second undesirable outcome manifests much slowly with time. It is hard for you to believe in yourself with a wounded self-concept, and once you find it hard to believe in yourself, you will have a more difficult time triumphing during hard times and difficult situations. Low academic performances can occur easily when victims of bullying give in to depression or get demoralized. They also occur when the victims start avoiding school to avoid being bullied. These low academic performances are not the major problems. The main problem is that once these low academic performances become too pronounced or happen for a very long time, the victims can lose advancement opportunities to further their studies, and eventually, employment. I have gone through retrospective works where there were reports of people leaving school to avoid being bullied continuously, and this must have limited the employment prospects open to them as qualified adults. Dropping out from school may be one dramatic example of how bullying can affect an adolescent's early life, but there are definitely other ways depression and anger as a result of bullying can harm and cause developmental delays in people's progress.

Unavoidably, the sensitive kids are always singled out for mockery; the kids who easily cry; are always the easiest targets. They are targets due to the way they are, most sensitive kids start thinking about their sensitivity as a very negative thing and make efforts to avoid being sensitive, or channel their sensitivity towards anger or revenge. When you are a kid, this does not work out. Reinventing yourself without first moving to a new place is always difficult, and it can affect one's adult life quite negatively, when these same kids, now adults, have grown up to be avoidant, cynical or angry, suddenly find themselves experiencing difficulties in their romantic relationships. A related type of damage occurs when these bullied kids internalize these negative behaviors concerning aspects of their lives that make them different from other people, like their membership in minority groups, their sexual orientations, or religious affiliations. In these situations, bullying creates a peer pressure to reject every aspect of an individual's life, which are not despicable, yet which set up a possibly lifelong tension in the person. If there is anyone who has a good idea on how to become a Jewish-hating Jewish or homosexual-hating homosexual, or any other such self-contradicting personality, I would be glad to know about the person. The list below, gathered from my research on the topic, gives a summary of some of the impacts of bullying on then bullied individuals:

Short-term:

Anger

Greater cases of illnesses

Anxious

Evasion of circumstances where bullying may take place.

Poor grades than peers who are not victims of bullying.

Suicidal feelings and thoughts (In one of the British studies, bullying accounted for about 20% of the participants who attempted suicide after being bullied as compared to the 3% of participants who attempted suicide without being bullied).

Long-term:

Minimized job opportunities

Lingering feelings of bitterness and anger, leading to a desire to seek revenge.

Difficulty placing trust on people

Interpersonal difficulties, which includes avoidance and fear of emerging social conditions

Higher tendency to be alone most times

Seeing self as an easy victim, excessively sensitive, and hardened

Self-esteem issues (inability to think of self in positive light)

Higher incidence of incessant victimization and bullying (Dombeck, 2014)

Everyone can be affected by bullying -- the bully, the bullied, and witnesses. Bullying is related to a number of negative results such as its effect on substance use, mental health, and suicide. It is necessary to speak to kids to find out whether bullying-or any other aspect-is of concern to them.

Kids who are bullied

Kids who are victims of bullying experience negative physical, and mental health problems. Bullied kids are most likely to have the following experiences:

Anxiety and depression, increased feelings of loneliness and sadness, changes in eating and sleep patterns, and lack of interests in things that were once their favorite activities. Some of these issues may continue long into adulthood.

Complaints concerning health

Reduced academic results-CGPA and standard test results -- and participation in school activities. They are most likely to skip, miss, or leave school.

A few of the children can seek revenge through very violent means. In about 12-15 cases of shooting in schools in the 90s, most of the shooters have had issues of bullying at a younger age.

Kids who bully others

Kids who form the habit of bullying other kids are similarly likely to take part in some other risky and violent behaviors well into their adult life. Kids who bully other kids are most likely to do the following:

Abuse drugs and alcohol in their adolescence years and adult life

Vandalize property, get into dirty fights, and leave school

Indulge in sexual experiments early in life

Have traffic citations and criminal convictions as adults

Abuse their romantic mates, spouses of children when they become adults

Bystanders

Kids who observe bullying are most likely to:

Have higher use of alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs

Have higher cases of mental health issues, including anxiety and depression

Skip or miss school (Stopbullying.gov, 2016).

The Relationship between Bullying and Suicide

Most times, media reports link bullying cases with suicide. Nevertheless, most bullied youths never think of suicide or take suicidal actions. However, kids who become victims of bullying are at a higher risk of suicide, but bullying alone cannot be said to be the cause. A number of issues contribute to these suicide risks, which includes depression, home problems, and history of trauma. In addition, some specific groups have higher suicide risks, which includes Alaskan natives, American Indian, Asian-American, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender youth. When these kids fail to get adequate support from their parents, schools and peers, the risk is further increased. Bullying can worsen an unsupportive situation.

Positive outcomes for those overcoming bullying

Perception of Control

According to a 2004 Spanish college student sample research, a direct link exists between the perception of victim of the control they have over the experiences they accrued from bullying and the degree of long-term challenges they encounter due to bullying. These bullied students who thought their ability to escape or influence their bullies recorded lesser negative prolonged effects of being victims of bulling than the students who were so helpless that they could not do anything to escape or influence their bullies while they were being bullied.

Social Support

Finally, several researchers suggest that a good social support network have great protective effect when it comes to the long-term results of bullying on the victims. Having your friends and family members who can support the victim and give valuable advice after the bullying help reduce the effects of the bullying.

Several reasons make these supportive social network quite helpful, but one deserves to be explicitly named. Namely, that when the victim is surrounded by a very supportive network, they get a lot of positive messages about how valuable they are from other members of their network, and therefore, fewer opportunities exist for the negative messages from the bullies to gain ground and overshadow the victim's self-esteem (Dombeck, 2014).

Consequences of bullying

Social

Several studies have reviewed the psychological effects following incessant bullying. Compromised social development is one of such studies. In a study by Korean 7th and 8th grade students, researchers discovered that being a victim of bullying was responsible for higher risk of social troubles (Kim, Leventhal, & Koh, 2006). According to this study, some of such social troubles included acting younger than the victim's real age, depending on adults excessively, and behaving in a way that could be considered socially immature-every factor that raise the risk of social isolation in the peer group. In a study carried out in Italy, Gini discovered similarly that bullied students experienced greater social challenges with their peers (Gini, 2007). Apart from social difficulties, both children and adolescents who get bullied repetitively may end up having some internalizing symptoms (Peskin, Tortolero, & Markham, 2007). For instance, in a study conducted among more than 7,000 mostly middle and high class school students of African-American and Hispanic origin, Peskin and his colleagues discovered that the victims of bullying reported persistent sadness, worries, fearfulness, and nervousness (Sansone & Sansone, 2008).