Learn How To Deal With Bullying - Causes And Effects

Bullying refers to school harassment experienced by some children and adolescents by other classmates, which consists of different types of offenses or humiliations. Bullying, or school bullying, is, in this sense, the aggressive behavior that an individual has toward another and that is accompanied by physical, verbal or psychological abuse, which is repeated frequently to generate damage.

This type of harassment is experienced by many students, usually during the adolescent stage, and can be motivated by various reasons such as physical appearance, religion or the origin of the victim. The aggressions derived from bullying seek to maintain the subjection on the other person so that they feel a constant sense of fear or danger as a result of the mockery, harassment and aggressions received. This type of violence can extend for months and even years. The victims of bullying are usually solitary young people, of few friends, who are characterized by being withdrawn. In fact, bullying can encourage social exclusion and, in some cases, can even lead the victim to suicide.

In general, the causes or factors that cause bullying are usually for personal, family and scholar issues. Personally, the harasser or the “bully” thinks of himself as superior, either because he has the support of other attackers, or because the victim is someone with very little capacity to respond to his aggressions. In most cases, the harasser wants to see that the harassed is having a bad time. But, after all, why does all of this happen?

Today, we tell you what are the main causes of bullying, so stay tuned:

Bullying can occur in any type of school, public or private, but according to some experts, the bigger the school, the more risk there is of bullying. We must add the lack of physical control and surveillance in bigger or public schools, too. It would be advisable that in this cases there would always be someone in the hallways, teachers or caregivers, to attend and inspect the students and situations between them.

In the familiar field, the origin of the violence in kids can reside in the absence of a parent or in the presence of a violent one. This situation can generate aggressive behavior in children and lead to violence when they are teenagers. In addition, marital tensions, or socioeconomic status can also contribute to aggressive behavior.

In summary, the causes of bullying can reside in educational models that are a reference for children, in the absence of values, limits, and rules of coexistence; in receiving punishments through violence or intimidation and in learning to solve problems and difficulties with violence.

When a child is constantly exposed to these situations, he ends up automatically recording everything in his memory, externalizing it when they see fit. For the child who practices bullying, violence is only an instrument of intimidation. They are accustomed to seeing violence as something natural, beyond which they also suffer, and repeat these experiences in school.

With regard to personal causes, usually, the child who exercises bullying over another does so because he feels superior, either because he has the support of others in the school or because the victim who suffers bullying has very little capacity to respond to the aggressions done by him.

The consequences of bullying are very serious in some cases. They can even be physical but especially psychological, and some people can even develop traumas throughout life because of it. Want to know more about the bullying causes? Keep reading!

About 33% of cases of depression in young adults would be caused by bullying or bullying suffered during adolescence.

These are the conclusions of an investigation carried out by the University of Oxford, in the United Kingdom. The analysis was done with 3,998 people for five years. When they started the study, they were 13 years old.

The research, published in the British Medical Journal, indicated that of the 683 adolescents who reported experiencing bullying at least once a week, 14.8% had depression at 18 years of age. In addition, 10.1% had a depressive episode that lasted more than two years.

There is still more: young people who reported bullying frequently were twice as likely to suffer depression when they reached adulthood than those who did not. This feature was seen in both men and women.

On the other hand, of the 1,446 adolescents who reported having had at least one episode of bullying a year, 7.1% were depressed at 18 years of age.

I can assure you that all of these statistics repeat themselves in every single country in the world, because after all, it is proven that bullying does cause depression on this huge scale.

In addition to the greater likelihood of psychiatric disorders, there are numerous other conditions suffered by children who experienced bullying throughout their lives. One of these is anxiety. It is actually the most common sequel in adults who were bullied when children.

In fact, it is the most difficult one to eliminate and, in many cases, leads directly to substance abuse. It is common for alcohol or cocaine abuse to have as an underlying cause of school bullying during childhood, as the anxiety caused by it can be numbed with these type of drugs. Having said all of this, I think you can have an idea of how dangerous anxiety is because of bullying.

The habit of self-injury is increasing. Teens and young adults hurt themselves because they do not know any other way to express their feelings, they do not know how to manage their emotions, and they can not communicate or express them. But let's look at the subject in depth.

These are adolescents who release their emotional anguish by cutting their arms, thighs or abdomen with knives, scissors or cutting. They do not seek for attention or to commit suicide; but to be relieved. Why do many teens find this need?

The studies that have been done up to now assure that these young people self-injure because they can not channel the emotional pressure in another way. The adolescence is precisely the age at which this behavior usually appears since during this stage, the emotional pressure is very big. Some of them do not know how to handle that pressure, or any other pain they feel, due to a multitude of causes. Bullying is one of the most common causes of this feeling and actions taken by teenagers nowadays. It seems that somehow the physical pain that is inflicted, would mitigate the psychic pain caused by others to them. On many occasions, adolescents who self-injure because of bullying also have mental illness such as depression, anorexia or others; which according to some studies, occurs in more than 60% of cases.

It is not a game. Sexual abuse and bullying are not only the worst offenses, but they are also a factor that increases the risk of suicide in young people in an exponential way nowadays.

In fact, when a child is a victim of sexual abuse and/or bullying, he 10 times more risk of committing suicide when they reach youth or adulthood, according to a study conducted by the Hospital del Mar Institute of Medical Research ( IMIM) in Spain. Young people who suffer from any type of interpersonal violence during their development will have a greater risk of dying by suicide, or, if it fails, trying it in their future.

Suicide is the actual leading cause of death in the world among young people between 15 and 19 years of age, according to data released by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). The consequences of exposure to an event that causes physical, psychological or sexual damage at an early age are particularly suffered by young people and young adults, aged between 12 and 26 years old. Among the sequels, there remain multiple emotional and behavioral problems that lead to greater vulnerability, suicidal behavior, and even death by suicide. 

I think you can now see how serious bullying is.

We can now all agree that bullying is a serious issue that people do suffer from on the daily. It is not something that we can let pass or not pay attention at, as it actually takes lives. No one deserves to feel the way bullying makes you feel and no one deserves to face the consequence of bullying. As you have seen, it literally screws people up, which I am sure is something many of us don't want to happen. 

Now that you have all the information on its causes and consequences, you can be more aware of its existence.  You may be able to identify it and help someone combat it. We can all do so, stopping bullying once and for all.