What is Bullying?

Bullying is an ongoing, aggressive behavior that is used to intimidate or oppress a victim which involves a power imbalance. The behavior is repeated, or has the potential to be repeated, over time. It is a misuse of power in a relationship through targetted verbal, physical, cyber and social behaviour. Bullying can cause physical or psychological harm. Bullying can be either a single person, overt or covert, as a group. However, a one time incident is not Bullying, it is only considered bullying when it a repeated occurance.

Types of Bullying

• Physical Bullying

  Hurting a person's body or possessions. Examples include hitting, kicking, pushing, shoving, spitting, tripping, and taking or breaking someone's things. This type of bullying is often the most visible, but it's not the only type.
  
  When someone is physically bullied, they are victimized in multiple ways. They are hurt, there are injury concerns, there is mental illness or concern over mental illness, and a psychological component occurs. Victims suffer from anxiety and depression with a subsequently lowered sense of self. They avoid school and friends because they fear being hurt and, eventually, remove themselves from the social setting due to intervention. Similarly, it creates an undesirable environment for the bully's classmates and the larger school environment.

• Verbal Bullying

  Saying or writing mean things. Verbal bullying includes teasing, name-calling, inappropriate comments, taunting, and threatening to cause harm. It can leave severe emotional harm to the victim.
  
  The psychological and emotional impact from verbal bullying is a sense of worthlessness, ongoing anxiety worrying that someone will talk to or approach them, and depression from being insulted so often. This is compounded by the fact that bullying makes people feel as if they are no good and that they are nothing, and the emotional ramifications force students to not want to make eye contact in class and be unable to pay attention, which, in turn, complicates their lives even more when they start to get bad grades. Ultimately, verbal bullying inhibits people from being social and trusting others.

• Social Bullying

  Sometimes called relational bullying, this involves hurting someone's reputation or relationships. It includes leaving someone out on purpose, telling other children not to be friends with someone, spreading rumors, and embarrassing someone in public. This can be very subtle and insidious.
  
  Social bullying thus greatly affects social well-being, with later emotional issues originating from such a disrupted social atmosphere. For example, a socially bullied person may feel isolated, unwelcome, and unwanted. They might have difficulty creating or maintaining friendships since people are either too scared to befriend them, or they're so bullied into shyness that they don't want to talk to anyone. Socially bullied persons worry that they'll be excluded from special events, which only creates more anxiousness for any planned events on the horizon. They develop depression when they realize they're not invited to events—and that people don't like them enough to include them in their social experiences. Ultimately, social bullying can lead to more of an emotional impact when people feel so low that the only way to fix such embarrassment and exclusion is to inflict mental and physical pain on themselves.

• Cyberbullying

  Any form of bullying that occurs online or via a mobile device. It can be verbal or written, and can include threats of violence as well as images, videos, and audio. It can happen anytime, which is also why Cyberbullying is considered the most impactful since it is the faster and easiest to spread.
  
  Cyberbullying affects victims nearly every step of the way, mental health suffers due to continuous torment. Victims experience increased anxiety, depression, feelings of loneliness, and isolation. They struggle to sleep, pay attention, and maintain passing grades. They believe they have no safe haven because the torment never stops, it comes to school with them and back home afterward.

• Mental Bullying

  Mental bullying is the use of words to isolate, mock, or tease another individual. Mental bullying targets an individual's emotions, confidence, and self-worth. This can make the victim to be extremely fragile to any comment and can have a severe impact on the victm
  
  Mental bullying critically and irreparably alters a victim's mental health and life. Victims experience depression, anxiety, and low self image, in addition to an inability to concentrate on school, difficulty sleeping, and avoiding public spaces. The trauma is so impactful that it brings a new sense of hopelessness and helplessness to one's already challenged state some victims are bullied so severely that they self harm. In addition, mental bullying transcends the classroom and impacts a victim's ability to engage socially with peers, as they either avoid groups or have extreme trust issues with anyone.

• Emotional Bullying

  Emotional Bullying includes non-physical behaviors that are meant to control, isolate, or frighten you. This may present in romantic relationships as threats, insults, constant monitoring, excessive jealousy, manipulation, humiliation and intimidation. Can result in the victim feeling worthless and also quite fragile.
  
  The consequences of emotional bullying are catastrophic and transformative, leading to worsened mental wellness and emotional stability. Victims suffer from heightened anxiety, episodes of depression, and an inability to grasp what healthy self esteem feels like; they either give too much to others out of fear of being emotional bullies themselves or lash out unjustly at others because they cannot manage their trust and attachment issues. In the worst-case scenario, the ongoing guilt inflicted upon them or their sense of hopelessness turns them to self harm. Emotional bullying makes sensorial, cultural engagement and educational opportunities more challenging, as victims no longer frequent their once favorite places.

• Spritual Bullying

  Involves online or in-person bullying based on the target's race, ethnicity or religion. It is based on stereotypes and prejudice. This can degrade the confidence of the victim on their beliefs.
  
  Spiritual bullying affects a person's sense of self and ethics through adverse, demeaning encounters that question one's connection to spirituality or system of beliefs. For example, someone spiritually bullied may feel like a bad person and feel guilty about who they are or their systems of belief, subsequently becoming confused, isolated, anxious, or depressed. When people attack someone's belief system through bullying, whether in the form of a joke once or a consistent cruel bullying methodology, the fluctuating victim finds it challenging to operate in society or coexist with peers. Such incidents foster a negative culture either for one specific victim or for many.