Repetition,Power Imbalance,and Intentionality

Abstract

The criteria that researchers use to classify aggressive behaviour as bullying are ‘repetition’, ‘power imbalance’, and ‘intent to hurt’. However, studies that have analyzed adolescents’ perceptions of bullying find that most adolescents do not simultaneously consider these three criteria. This paper examines adolescents’ perceptions of bullying and of the different forms it takes, and whether these perceptions vary according to the teen’s role of victim, aggressor, or witness in a bullying situation. The data acquisition instrument was a questionnaire applied to a sample of 2295 teenagers. The results show that none of these three groups considered the criterion of repetition to be important to define bullying. A further conclusion was that both aggressors and witnesses used the criteria of ‘power imbalance’ and ‘intent to hurt’ to identify a situation of bullying, although the aggressors placed especial emphasis on the superiority of power over the victim, while the witnesses emphasized the intent to hurt the victim. One noteworthy finding was that victims do not consider the factor ‘power imbalance’. The factor that determined their perceptions was the ‘intent to hurt’. Finally, some modes of bullying were seen as forms of typical teen social interactions, and the perception depended significantly on the adolescent’s role as aggressor, victim, or witness.

Keywords

bullying mental health and violence treatment/intervention youth violence

Despite the more than 30 years of research on bullying, the field has yet to reach unanimous agreement on its definition. The principal achievement would seem to be general agreement on three criteria that distinguish bullying from aggressive behavior. These criteria may be summarized as follows: power imbalance in favor of the aggressor, with the victim of bullying finding him- or herself in an inferior status that makes it very difficult to put up any defense (Schwartz, Gorman, Nakamato, & McKay, 2006), intent to cause another person physical, social, or psychological harm (Erling & Hwang, 2004; Olweus, 1993), and repetition of aggressive behavior (Arora, 1996).

With respect to the modes of bullying, these comprise direct physical abuse (hitting, pushing, insulting) and indirect aggression related to social exclusion (shunning a person, spreading false rumors about someone; Solberg & Olweus, 2003).

Pupils’ Perceptions of Bullying

Studies that have analyzed the perceptions of the concept that pupils give find that a major proportion of teenagers do not simultaneously apply the criteria of intent to hurt, repetition, and power imbalance (Frisén, Holmqvist, & Oscarsson, 2008; Guerin & Hannessey, 2002; Madsen, 1996; Naylor, Cowie, Cossins, Bettencourt, & Lemme, 2006; Vaillancourt et al., 2008).

In relation to the criterion of repetition, the work of Madsen (1996) found that only 3% of teenagers allude to the criterion of repetition. The work of Naylor et al. (2006), in which there participated a sample of teenagers aged 11 to 14 years (n = 1,820), raised this proportion to 9%. Vaillancourt et al. (2008) reported similar results in analyzing the differences between the definition given by researchers on bullying and the definitions of 1,767 Canadian teens of from 8 to 18 years old. Only 6% of the boys and girls mentioned the repetition criterion, with this percentage being lower in the 8-year-olds (4%) than in the 18-year-olds (8%). In contrast, the figure reported by Guerin & Hannessey (2002) with teenagers aged 10 to 13 years was 27.7%.

Frisén et al. (2008) found a similar percentage in a study of the perceptions of bullying of 877 Swedish 13-year-olds, with 30% of the participants referring to the criterion of repetition.

With respect to the notion of the intent to hurt others, Everett & Price (1995) on teenagers’ perceptions of the causes of school violence find that only 17% of the 726 adolescents surveyed perceive the intention to hurt in the aggressor. Other studies found the proportion of teenagers who apply the criterion of intent to hurt to classify aggressive behavior as bullying to be 1.7% (Vaillancourt et al., 2008), 3.9% (Naylor et al., 2006), 5% (Madsen, 1996), or 13% (Guerin & Hennessey, 2002).

Finally, the criterion of power imbalance is related to coercion (Schwarzwald, Koslowsky, & Brody-Shamir, 2006) and to the perceived legitimacy of the abuse of power (Raven, 1992). In the school context, the transition from one educational stage to another is one of the moments where power imbalance among peers is especially noticeable and legitimized (Pellegrini & Long, 2002; Schwartz et al., 2006; Schwarzwald et al., 2006). Such teenagers do not define these aggressions as bullying, probably because they perceive them as transitory, that is, these situations will tend to disappear as the school course advances and they become familiar with the new context and establish relationships with their peers (Quinn, Bell-Ellison, Loomis, & Tucci, 2007).

In this sense, the proportion of teenagers who consider the power imbalance between aggressor and victim ranges from 16% (Madsen, 1996), 19% (Frisén et al., 2008), 26% (Vaillancourt et al., 2008), to 40% (Guerin & Hennessey, 2002; Naylor et al., 2006).

Some studies indicate that teenagers’ perception of the various modes of bullying is very limited, generally being restricted to physical and verbal abuse (Boulton, Trueman, & Flemington, 2002; Quinn et al., 2007; Vaillancourt et al., 2008). Nevertheless, the older the young, the more complex their perceptions of bullying and the better they discriminate situations of abuse from other forms of aggression (Menesini, Fonzi, & Smith, 2002; Smith, Cowie, Ólafsson, & Liefooghe, 2002; Vaillancourt et al., 2008). We reviewed the studies analyzing the modes of bullying perceived by adolescents. Boulton et al. (2002) studied 600 teenagers of 11 to 16 years old, and found that about 4 out of every 5 mention bullying situations that involve fighting and pushing (82.9%), threats (82.9%), and forcing someone to do things against their will (78.2%), and somewhat smaller proportions mention giving offensive nicknames (65.9%), stealing someone’s personal belongings (59.4%), spreading false rumors (54.1%), and making fun of others (41.8%). Only 20.6%, however, identified social exclusion as a manifestation of bullying.

Menesini et al. (2002) found that 97% of their teenagers included physical abuse and 90.5% verbal types of abuse. But, unlike the aforementioned study of Boulton et al. (2002), 95.9% and 88.6% regarded as bullying behaviors that cause social and gender exclusion, respectively. Guerin & Hennessey (2002) describe results that are more in line with Boulton et al.’s study, with only 13% of the adolescents defining social exclusion as bullying and 19% including threats.

In Naylor et al. (2006), 65% of their teenagers mentioned physical abuse, and about 60% verbal abuse, but less than 5% referred to social exclusion. In more recent studies, Frisén et al. (2008) reported that the teenagers of their study regarded as bullying verbal abuse (57%), indirect aggression such as social exclusion or spreading false rumors (40%), physical abuse (33%), and sexual harassment (25%).

The explanation of the discrepancies in these results may be the use of different questionnaires and the disparity of the samples, among other factors.

The Present Study

Although there has been a growth in research on adolescents’ perceptions of bullying, there still remain many questions unanswered. One such question has to do with the similarities and differences found in the perceptions of bullying of pupils who have different roles in situations of abuse: victim, aggressor, and witness or bystander.

According to Smith (2003), and Astor, Benbenishty, Vinokur, and Zeira (2006), having lived through bullying situations directly or indirectly leads to pupils who have been in schools where there were frequent aggressive situations among peers (regardless of the role they themselves played in those situations) tend to have a fuller and more consistent definition of this phenomenon than those who went to other less conflictive schools. Those studies, however, do not provide any data on the extent and direction of the variation in perceptions resulting from the adolescents’ experiences as victims, aggressors, or witnesses of peer abuse themselves. The work of Monks & Smith (2006) addressed this issue, analyzing in a sample of 99 children 4 to 6 years old the influence of the role they had played in such situations on their perception of bullying. There were no significant differences between children in involved (aggressor, victim, or defender) or uninvolved (bystander) roles. The few differences that were observed the authors put down to differences in age and cognitive development. In contrast, teenagers have already formed an idea on this topic, and it would be useful to know whether the role they played in a bullying situation (aggressor, victim, or witnesses) affects their perception of the phenomenon. It is precisely this question that is the focus of our inquiry.

Method

Sample

The sample consisted of 2,295 teenagers (54.3% boys and 45.7% girls; SD = .4) aged between 12 and 16 years (M = 13.8; SD = 1.4). This sample represents 5.47% of the total number of pupils enrolled in compulsory secondary education (CSE) of Extremadura (Spain).

To select the sample, we applied to the state schools that teach CSE a stratified multistage, approximately proportional, sampling design, with clustering and random selection of groups. The strata considered were the provinces and geographical zones of the Region of Extremadura (Spain), from which towns were selected in the north, south, west, and east of the Region, bearing in mind the need to consider the various sociocultural contexts of the population. The clustering used corresponded to the secondary schools themselves, in each of which a random selection was made of one class of each of the 4 years of CSE (1st: ages 12-13 years; 2nd: age 14 years; 3rd: age 15 years; and 4th: age 16 years) until the desired sample size was reached as determined in 2,000 participants. This number was covered by a selection of 24 schools. However, four more were added to allow for cases that may have made it impossible to achieve the desired sample size—for example, absence of the pupil from school on the day the questionnaires were given, or the refusal of pupils or their parents to agree to participate in the study. The total number of pupils invited to participate was 2,449, and the final proportion of participation was 93.7%.

How are you being treated by your peers continually since the start of the school year? Complete all the rows and mark with a cross how you feel.
	Never	Sometimes	Often	Always
Ignoring me
Not letting me participate
Insulting me
Making fun of me or name-calling
Speaking bad about me
Hiding my things
Breaking my things
Stealing from me
Hitting me
Threatening me to scare me
Making me do things by threats
Threatening me with weapons
Harassing me sexually

Measures

The instrument used for data acquisition was a questionnaire designed and validated for this study. The questionnaire consisted of 30 questions. The first three were designed to identify aggressors, victims, and witnesses, and were taken verbatim from the questionnaire on bullying of Spain’s Ombudsman and the UNICEF (Defensor del Pueblo/UNICEF, 2007), patterned on the bully/victim questionnaire of Olweus (1996) and Solberg and Olweus (2003). These items have been used in previous studies for the identification of victims, bullies, and witnesses (Cuadrado & Fernández, 2009; Fernández, Cuadrado, & Cadet, 2008). An example is the following question:

For each of these items, the adolescents have to indicate how often they commit, suffer, or observe each type of abuse. The scale used consisted of four values: never, sometimes, often, and always. Based on these questions, the identification of bully, victim, or witness is made when the respondent indicates for any of the modes of mistreatment referred to that they have been the object of attack, that they have made such an attack, or that they have witnessed situations of mistreatment occurring continually with frequency “sometimes,” “often,” or “always.”

What is bullying for you?
	1	2	3	4	5
Aggression by someone against a weaker person
Negative behavior intended to hurt someone else
Aggression that may be just a one-time occurrence but causes long-lasting harm in the other person
Aggression that occurs repeatedly against someone
Making fun of someone else so as to make them feel ridiculous
Hitting someone that they have tried to make fun of before
Excluding someone from the group
A form of interacting with your friends that other people don’t understand
When someone feels attacked even though the other person had no intention of hurting them
A form of fun typical of teenagers

The remaining 27 questions were oriented toward analyzing the teenagers’ different perceptions of bullying and of the different forms in which it appears. Each question was accompanied by different, not mutually exclusive, response options that introduced the notions of repetition, intent to hurt, power imbalance, and other notions related to revenge, forms of social relationships and communication, and forms of amusement, among others. The response requested from the adolescent consist of indicating their degree of agreement with each of the options or situations presented: strongly agree (1), agree (2), neither agree nor disagree (3), don’t really agree (4), and disagree (5).

The questions in this part were grouped into four categories:

Questions of a definition type such as “For you, what constitute nicknames?” “What do you understand by insult?” “What does excluding someone mean for you?” An example of this type of question would be as follows:

Questions to identify the perception of the reasons behind one or another form of bullying (Why do you think some classmates push or kick other children?). Within this category, there are questions about the mode of bullying (physical, verbal, social) and about direct and indirect forms of aggressive behavior.

Questions that examine the perception of the consequences of bullying (How do you think others feel when their classmates insult them?). Questions of this type are repeated with the other modes of bullying analyzed.

Questions that identify the forms of bullying that adolescents consider. These questions are followed by others aimed at evoking the teens’ ideas about the different modes of bullying analyzed. An example of this type of question would be as follows:

For you is it an act of bullying to continually ridicule or ignore another person?
	1	2	3	4	5
No, this is normal among teens
No, it is a common way we have of relating with each other
No, if the other person does not feel rejected or hurt
No, if it occurs just sporadically
No, if the person who ignores me is not someone important for me
Yes, if it hurts the other person
Yes, it is a form of revenge against others who you dislike or have been nasty to you
Yes, if the person who does it is somebody popular

Procedure

As this was a study involving minors, it was necessary to obtain parental consent and the approval of the Regional Administration’s school inspectors and of the management staff of the schools. To obtain the parents’ consent, they were sent a letter describing the nature of the study, the use that would be made of the data, and the researchers’ commitment to confidentiality and anonymity. This letter was accompanied by an opt-out document for the parents to send to the school if they did not want their children to participate in the study. The school inspectors and management teams were sent a memorandum detailing the research objectives, the procedures to be used, and the guarantee of ensuring the anonymity of the participants. The study hence complied with the ethical norms governing the operation of schools.

The procedure followed to acquire the data consisted of the researchers visiting each of the selected schools. The researchers themselves were responsible for distributing the questionnaires in each classroom and remained there until the questionnaires had been completed.

Data Analysis

The data were processed and analyzed using the statistical package SPSS 18.0. This analysis was split into two phases. The first consisted of a factor analysis to reduce the number of variables for study and to determine their relative importance, their interrelationships, and the principal factors explaining their variability. The second phase consisted of identifying the pupils categorized as aggressor, victim, or witness, and performing a new exploratory factor analysis to determine whether the adolescents’ perceptions depended on the role they play in the different situations of bullying they experience in their schools.

Results

The Adolescents’ Perceptions of Bullying

An exploratory factor analysis was performed on the entire data set. The Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin (KMO) measure of sample adequacy was 0.82, and the Bartlett sphericity test significance level was 0.001, ensuring the suitability of applying a factor analysis. The factors were then extracted using a principal component analysis. The results showed three factors to explain the variability of the adolescents’ responses (Table 1).

Factor 1. A form of social interaction. This factor encompasses bullying situations that the teenagers interpreted as a form of amusement and peer relationships. It explained 48.68% of the variance (Table 1), and had a moderate internal reliability (α = .61) and a mean factor loading of 0.54.

Factor 2. Intent to hurt. This factor includes the responses in which the teens considered the intent to cause physical, social, or psychological harm to others as a necessary condition for aggression to be classified as bullying. It explained 22.56% of the variance (Table 1), and had an internal reliability of α = .69 and a mean factor loading of 0.52.

Factor 3. Power imbalance. This factor includes behaviors that the teenagers classified as bullying and in which they perceive the aggressor to have some superiority over the victim. It explained 12.6% of the variance (Table 1), and had a high internal reliability (α = .85) and a mean factor loading of 0.77.

Table 1.

Total Variance Explained by the Components

	Initial Eigenvalues			Sum of the Squared Saturations of the Extraction
Component	Total	% of Variance	Accumulated %	Total	% of Variance	Accumulated %
1	5.93	48.68	48.68	5.93	48.68	48.68
2	2.75	22.56	71.23	2.75	22.56	71.23
3	1.53	12.6	83.83	1.53	12.6	83.83
4	0.91	7.47	91.3
5	0.74	6.11	97.41
6	0.22	1.77	99.19
7	0.1	0.82	100

Note: Extraction method: principal component analysis.

Role Differences (Victim, Aggressor, or Witness) in Adolescents’ Perceptions of Bullying

The results indicate that 18.8% of adolescents have felt mistreated by their peers in school, independently of the intensity of the abuse they received. This percentage includes those teens who report having been mistreated “sometimes” (15.8%) or “very often” (3%). With respect to the role of witnesses, 71.1% of adolescents stated they had witnessed situations of bullying among peers, either “sometimes” (44.5%) or “always” (26.6%). Finally, 17.6% of teens surveyed came into the category of aggressors, either “sometimes” (15.5%) or “always” (2.1%).

One observes from these data that 7.5% of the sample state that they have played more than one of the roles. To avoid contaminating the results in this section, we decided to eliminate the data of this 7.5% of teens and consider just those who described playing a single role. The distribution of this final sample is presented in Table 2.

Table 2.

Distribution of the Sample According to the Role Played

		Gender
		Boy	Girl	Total	Mean	SD
Role played	Victim	173	183	356	178	.50
	Aggressor	199	125	324	162	.49
	Witness	758	685	1,443	721.5	.50
Total		1,130	993	2,123	1,061.5	.50

The analysis of the definitions showed that there are three common factors regardless of the role the pupil plays: as a form of social interaction and fun, intent to hurt, and power imbalance. The KMO sample adequacy was 0.68 for aggressors, 0.81 for victims, and 0.77 for witnesses. The value obtained in the Bartlett sphericity test for each of the groups was 0.001.

With respect to the aggressors’ perception of bullying, the results showed the factor power imbalance to be present significantly when they define bullying generically (0.801) and when they consider certain of the forms of bullying: direct physical aggression (0.984), threats, both as intimidation (0.904) and as forcing others to do things against their will (0.913), and verbal abuse, specifically the use of negative criticism (0.481) (Table 3).

Table 3.

The Aggressors’ Perception of Bullying. Rotated Component Matrix

	Components
	1	2	3
Definition of bullying		.575	.801
Social isolation	.464
Not letting the other participate in class	.529
Insults	.496		.331
Spreading false rumors	.420
Nicknames	.673
Negative criticisms		.481
Ridiculing others			.512
Hiding things	.323
Stealing or breaking things	.437
Direct physical aggression		.626	.984
Intimidation			.904
Forcing others to do things against their will			.913

Note: Extraction method: principal component analysis. Rotation method: Varimax. The rotation converged in 3 iterations.

Similarly, for the aggressors the factor intent to hurt is associated both with the general definition of bullying (0.575) and the following aggressive behaviors: insults (0.331), ridiculing others (0.512), and direct physical aggression (0.626) (Table 8). Finally, the factor a form of social interaction defines the following forms of aggression: social exclusion, both as isolation (0.464) and not allowing the other to participate in class (0.529), verbal abuse, both as spreading false rumors (0.420) and assigning nicknames (0.673), and indirect physical aggression, whether hiding things (0.323) or stealing or breaking things (0.437).

The above results for the victim group differ significantly from those for the aggressor group. In this case, the factor intent to hurt had the greatest significance, and predominated in these adolescents’ perceptions in both the general definition of bullying (0.809) and in other specific forms of bullying (Table 4).

Table 4.

The Victims’ Perception of Bullying. Rotated Component Matrix

	Components
	1	2	3
Definition of bullying		.809
Social isolation		.740
Not letting the other participate in class	.311	.617
Insults		.579
Spreading false rumors	.421
Nicknames	.481	.437
Negative criticisms	.570	.333
Ridiculing others		.788
Hiding things	.442
Stealing or breaking things		.387
Direct physical aggression		.775	.699
Intimidation			.816
Forcing others to do things against their will			.736

Note: Extraction method: principal component analysis. Rotation method: Varimax. The rotation converged in 4 iterations.

Indeed, this group considers the behaviors associated with social isolation (0.740), insults (0.579), ridiculing others (0.788), and stealing or breaking personal items (0.387) to be forms of bullying primarily because they see them as committed with intent to hurt. However, other behaviors such as not allowing the other to participate in class, the assignment of nicknames, and negative criticism are sometimes perceived by victims as forms of social interaction between teens.

The victims did not mention the factor power imbalance in their definition of bullying. Neither did they include it in the forms of aggression corresponding to indirect physical aggression, verbal abuse, and social exclusion (Table 4). They only allude to this factor when it comes to forms of bullying related to direct physical aggression such as kicking or pushing (0.699), or threats as both intimidation (0.816) and forcing others to do things against their will (0.736).

Finally, the results for the witness group showed perceptions again quite different from those presented by the victims. Their perceptions of bullying are closer to those of the aggressors although they differ in some respects. Most notable is that, while they perceive bullying as abuses committed by the aggressor with the intention of hurting someone (0.789) whom they perceive as weaker (0.433), the two factors are not present together in any of the specific forms of bullying (Table 5).

Table 5.

The Witnesses’ Perception of Bullying. Rotated Component Matrix

	Components
	1	2	3
Definition of bullying		.789	.433
Social isolation	.307
Not letting the other participate in class	.564
Insults	.398	.435
Spreading false rumors	.615
Nicknames	.792
Negative criticisms	.564
Ridiculing others		.480
Hiding things	.671
Stealing or breaking things	.395
Direct physical aggression			.674
Intimidation			.737
Forcing others to do things against their will			.800

Note: Extraction method: principal component analysis. Rotation method: Varimax. The rotation converged in 2 iterations.

These results take on even more relevance when one considers that several of the forms of bullying analyzed are not perceived as aggression but rather as behavior that promotes, facilitates, or explains teens’ social relationships (Table 5). The witness group sees insults as teens’ own forms of interaction and communication which at times, but not necessarily, may occur with the intent to hurt. The factor power imbalance is associated, as for the previous two groups, with threats and direct physical aggression.

Discussion

The results of the present study show that when we talk about bullying, researchers and teens are thinking about quite different realities and are making quite different basic assumptions. Very few of the respondents consider repetition, intent to hurt, and abuse of power simultaneously as criteria to classify aggressive behavior as bullying. Approximately 55% believe that for a situation of aggression to be defined as bullying there must be intent to hurt. Although this figure is much higher than those obtained in other studies such as Guerin and Hennessey (2002), Naylor et al. (2006), or Vaillancourt et al. (2008), it indicates that 45% of teens still think that bullying is any behavior that hurts somebody else even though the aggressor did not mean to do so. One can induce from these data that some adolescents might label as bullies classmates who have inadvertently caused some harm to others. It could therefore be a form of resolving conflicts of interest.

Only 30% of the teens perceived the bully as someone who is more powerful physically, psychologically, or socially, and who abuses this power in attacks on his or her victims. This is consistent with the findings of Guerin and Hennessey (2002), Naylor et al. (2006), and Vaillancourt et al. (2008), and shows that most teens believe that the victims need not perceive their aggressor as more powerful than they. New questions thus arise about the personal and social characteristics that adolescents attribute to the figures of aggressor and victim, and one might ask what is the real effectiveness of those antibullying programs that are based on the use and management of the power struggles and relationships among adolescents (Twemlow & Sacco, 2008).

Finally, only 3% of the teens explicitly say that there needs to be ongoing aggression to speak of bullying. As other studies have noted (Guerin & Hennessey, 2002; Hunter, Boyle, & Warden, 2007), teens may consider isolated, one-off aggressive acts to be bullying.

These results alert one to the need to induce a change in the perceptions that adolescents have about this phenomenon—a responsibility that falls largely on adults, specifically on parents and teachers. The problem is, however, that studies that have analyzed the perceptions that these groups of adults have of bullying show them to be different in major respects from those of teenagers but that it is very difficult to determine which of these two sets of perceptions is the more accurate (Menesini et al., 2002; Smorti, Menesini, & Smith, 2003). The education that teachers receive in antibullying programs is a variable that significantly influences their development of a fuller perception more closely adapted to the reality of the process. However, other variables such as the experiences of bullying and victimization they themselves have lived through may condition this perception despite the specific education and information they have received (Naylor et al., 2006).

In the case of parents, as well as such personal experiences with bullying, other variables may be involved such as which role their children play in situations of peer violence. One might ask whether parents’ perception of bullying varies when they are informed or they realize that their child is a bully or a victim. Clearly studies are needed to analyze in depth which variables or factors shape the perception of bullying and the influence that parents and teachers can have on the genesis and evolution of teenagers’ perceptions of the phenomenon.

But the implications that represent one of the main contributions of the present work correspond to the different perceptions that teens have of bullying according to whether their own role is one of aggressor, victim, or witness. None of these three groups considered the criterion of repetition to be important to define bullying.

Regarding the aggressor’s perception, it appears that the criterion to which they attach greatest importance to define and identify a situation of bullying is “power imbalance.” For these teens, being an aggressor is tantamount to being powerful, and their abuse of weaker peers is a demonstration of their power to others. The need they have for social recognition leads them to attack others to confirm and strengthen their perception of physical or psychological superiority (Schwarzwald et al., 2006). But besides this “power imbalance” criterion, aggressors simultaneously consider the criterion “intent to harm.” It seems as if the perception that others may have of them as powerful people were determined by the severity of the harm they can consciously cause weaker peers. The thinking that appears to guide their actions might be put into the following words: “I deliberately hurt others who are weaker to demonstrate how powerful I am and to maintain my status of superiority over others.” The emergence of this type of thinking requires that intervention be focused on managing the relationships and power struggles among adolescents (Twemlow & Sacco, 2008). Furthermore, social power theory, which has been applied primarily in organizational contexts, could be transferred to the educational context to facilitate the identification of factors affecting the change of power in situations of violence among teens (Raven, 1992).

In the case of the witnesses, both the above criteria, “imbalance” and “intent,” were observed to be present, but the emphasis is manifestly on the “intent to harm.” Hence, witnesses may consider bullying to be any aggressive behavior in which they perceive a purpose of hurting others. The fear they feel of themselves being harmed causes them to react by staying out of situations of violence that they observe (Gini, Pozzoli, Borghi, & Franzoni, 2008). Their thinking seems to be as follows:

There are classmates who enjoy hurting others, or who do so to prove they are more powerful than others. If I intervene to stop it, I may be the one who ends up harmed, so I do not get involved.

Or else,

I have to hide my weaknesses and keep as low a profile as possible so that the bullies do not pay any attention to me and attack me. So when they are bullying others, it is best not to intervene.

The prevention of bullying will require this passive attitude and behavior of the witnessing students to be abandoned and replaced by a willingness to report occurrences of bullying and put a stop to them as far as possible. To this end, intervention is needed to deal with this fear of harm that witnesses feel with the application of programs to improve cognitive empathy that promote awareness of the pain that the victims suffer and to foster the learning of the social skills that will allow them to assertively confront aggressors (Cuadrado, 2010).

With respect to the victims’ perception of bullying, the variable that summarizes almost the entirety of their perceptions is intent to hurt. Doubtless, their own experience of aggression, and the physical, psychological, or social pain it caused them to a good part determined this result. One noteworthy finding was that victims do not consider the factor power imbalance. This may be due either to their internalization of an acceptance that they are relatively defenseless, with less power than their peers, or to problems of psychosocial adjustment that they present, and which lead them to legitimate and rationalize the aggression they receive, and find justification for the behavior of the aggressors without the need to attribute any superiority to them (Chan, 2009; Felix, Furlong, & Austin, 2009; Frisen, Johnson, & Persson, 2007). For example, teenagers with poor self-esteem and a maladapted image of themselves may think that it is normal for others to abuse them because they are not as attractive, outgoing, or fun to be with as their peers. The results show that victims do not perceive bullying attacks as chance events but as having a clear intention to cause harm. This could explain why some victims think that a peer who attacks them does so deliberately so that they will realize how ugly, timid, or boring they are. Faced with this kind of situation and perception, priority needs to be given to intervention directed toward improving victims’ self-image and self-esteem, and toward developing an autonomous morality (Ttofi & Farrington, 2009).

But while it is important to know what pupils understand by bullying, it is equally interesting to know which behaviors they classify as such, and whether these correspond to the forms of bullying analyzed in epidemiological studies and in studies designed to detect peer abuse. In this sense, our results point to the presence of a new factor, which we have denoted a form of social interaction, which explains the use of certain antisocial behaviors.

The results showed aggressors to have very simplifying (distorted) forms of thinking, with disintegrative emotions (anger, imitation, etc.) that lead them to believe that their aggressive behaviors are “normal” ways to resolve transient problems with no further repercussions. This belief is especially marked in modes of bullying related to social exclusion, verbal abuse, and indirect physical aggression (7 of the 12 modes analyzed score on the factor forms of relating socially). Such adoption of antisocial behavior to interact with others denotes a lack of social skills, the assumption of relatively unassertive models of getting on together with others probably inherited from their family background or from the peer group from which they hope to get some type of recognition or acceptance, and, as indicated by Menesini et al. (2003), an imbalance in their moral development that makes it hard for them to understand the seriousness of their actions and the harm they cause to others. In this sense, one needs to know whether the use of and exposure to these behaviors throughout adolescence and perhaps during childhood leads to their internalization, with the result that, once past this developmental stage, young people will continue using these behaviors to interact with others (Huesmann, Dubow, & Boxer, 2009).

However, the aggressors’ perception of violent behavior depends on the mode in which this behavior is manifest. When it is the form of threats, the aggressors tend to perceive it as a sign of dominance and power over others (“only the strongest can threaten others; if I intimidate the weak, I prove how powerful I am”). In the case of direct physical aggression, the aggressors’ perception combines two criteria: “imbalance” and “intentionality.” It seems as if physical attacks are used as a dominance display mechanism in which power is measured according to the harm caused to others.

Other modes of behavior, such as ridiculing peers, are exclusively interpreted as only being possible for those who are powerful to remind the weak of this superiority and also that this superiority gives them the right to mock others. This variability in perceptions highlights the need to implement differentiated programs and measures of intervention based on the forms of aggressive behavior that occur in school.

With respect to the victims’ perceptions of the various forms of bullying, for 8 of the 12 of these forms analyzed, this group believes that there exists a manifest intent to hurt others. Doubtless, their experiences of victimization and the hurt they have been subjected to would largely explain the scores for this factor. Nonetheless, some of these modes, mainly verbal aggression, also interact with the factor forms of relating socially. One possible reason for the existence of this duality could be the influence of the social context on the perception of aggression (Lawrence & Green, 2005), with the adolescent perceiving aggressive behaviors either as a “standardized” pattern or as an effort to hurt others depending on his or her current social context and the people he or she is interacting with. For example, nicknames are seen both as a harmless mechanism of peer interaction, and as behavior that is intended to hurt the recipient. Whether one or the other perception arises is probably conditioned by the person who uses the nickname, or by the peers who are present when it is used, to mention just two possible situations. These results provide a warning that programs of prevention and intervention against bullying cannot be restricted to the purely personal plane but must be extended to cover a study of the contexts of the school, the family, and the social environment that is closest to these adolescents, and how they themselves perceive these contexts (Snyder, Horsch, & Childs, 1997). Victims have no such duality of perception of other forms of bullying such as social exclusion, however. They are convinced that the purpose behind this type of behavior is indeed to hurt and that there is nothing harmless about it. Their perception might be put into words as follows: “They isolate me because they do not like me, and that is how they show me.” In the case of threats, the perception of “power imbalance” is foremost (“Those who intimidate me are stronger than me, and they do it to prove to me that I am weak”), while in direct physical aggression there coexist the two criteria of “intentionality” and “imbalance” (“They hit me because they do not like me and that is how they show others how little I am worth, and how weak I am”). These results indicate that the experiences of being bullied will determine the specific type of action that will need to be carried out with each of the victims. One also concludes that the measures to implement must be based on a prior analysis of the processes of bullying, attribution styles, and decision making.

Finally, the study of the witnesses’ perceptions showed most of the forms of bullying involving social, verbal, and indirect physical abuse to be perceived as behaviors that teens use to interact with their peers and that are not aimed at hurting anybody. These data suggest that teens may be adopting patterns of behavior and social interaction that involve a high risk to their personal, moral, and social development.

In contrast, threats and direct physical attacks are interpreted as behavior that occurs to display the power they some of their classmates have.

The lack of personal experiences of bullying, of the capacity for empathy, and of self-confidence, together with the fear of becoming victims themselves, are the possible causes for witnesses not classifying any of the violent forms of behavior analyzed as manifestations of bullying. In this sense, one can say that the passive attitude of witnesses indirectly enhances both the actions of the bully and the feeling of helplessness of the victims.

Pragmatic view of the study

The present results are directed toward improving programs for intervention and prevention of violent behavior. In this sense, it must be noted that these programs need to place particular emphasis on modifying the participants’ maladjusted perceptions concerning interpersonal relationships, on intervening in attributional styles, and on developing awareness of the potential consequences of their actions for people who do not share their ways of relating with others (Eron et al., 2002). In light of the results of the study, our proposal focuses on the importance of considering cognitive and emotional mediation of the subject in whichever of the roles. This would allow direct intervention on the victim’s internalization of the bullying, on the aggressor’s distorted thinking and moral imbalance, and on the witness’s difficulty in overcoming the fear of exclusion. For the optimization of this prevention and intervention, it would be advisable to consider involving those members of the community who are most significant for the adolescent (family, friends, school, etc.) since the behavior of these young people extends across all their social environments.

Suggestions for Further Work in the Field

The results generate new questions that could guide future work focused on the study of adolescents’ perceptions about bullying. One of these questions relates to the variability that may be found in the perception of bullying according to the type of abuse committed, suffered, or observed and to its intensity: Do past or present victims of social exclusion have the same perception of bullying as those who have been the target of ridicule and insults? This type of question is of course extensible to the other modes and manifestations of bullying. Also with respect to the victims, it would be interesting to know whether those who have received assistance to overcome these situations have a different perception of bullying from those who have never faced this problem.

Footnotes

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Bios

Isabel Cuadrado-Gordillo is PhD in Psychology and Professor at the University of Extremadura (Spain). Coordinator of the Educational Innovation and Research Group (GRIE) of the University of Extremadura. Member of the Regional Observatory on School Sociability.

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