Who are the Bullies?
Bullies
come in all shapes and sizes. There
is no way to tell who a bully is just
by looking at them. However,
you can
distinguish a bully by how they act.
According to Barbara Coloroso in her book The
Bully, the Bullied, and
the Bystander: From
Preschool to High
School—How Parents and Teachers Can Help Break the Cycle of
Violence,
bullies “have their lines and actions down; their roles are
often rehearsed at
home. Sometimes
they take their cue from
the movies they see, the games they play, the kids they hang with, the
school
they attend, and the culture that surrounds them.”(16)
Bullies
crave attention, and they like to control and use
people regardless of if they are hurt in the process to get that
attention. Bullies
are egocentric, they
only care about their own wants and needs and not about
others’ feelings. Bullies
are not empathetic, they have a
difficult time seeing things from the point of view of others. Bullies tend to bully
people who are weaker
then themselves, and they tend to do it under the radar of adults and
supervisors. Bullies
act in the moment,
they are shortsighted and unable to consider the consequences of their
actions.(17) Bullies
often learn bullying behavior by how
they have been treated by bigger or more powerful people in their
lives.(18)
Statistically
males are more likely than females to
bully—this includes cyber-bullying.(19)
Who are the Bullied?
 There
are no visible markings of what makes a person a
target of a bully. The
only thing that
puts a bullied person in the position of being bullied is the fact that
they
have been targeted by a bully. They
have
done nothing wrong to provoke such aggression.
As noted by Barbara Coloroso, each bullied
person “was singled out to be
the object of scorn and thus the recipient of verbal, physical, or
relational
aggression, merely because he or she was different in some way.
…[T]he
differences identified as the justifications for the attacks are
spurious at
best, contemptuous excuses at worst.”(20)
A
person may be targeted by a bully for being new to a
school, being younger or smaller than the bully, of a different race or
religion than the bully, rich or poor, smart or not as bright,
attractive, not
attractive, fat, thin, short, tall… the list could go on.
Whereas
males are typically more likely to be bullied, both
males and females are at equal risk of being cyber-bullied.(21)
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