The challenging process of disclosing bullying victimization: A grounded theory study from the victim’s point of view

Data collection

The recruitment and interviews were carried out during a 9-month period (24 October 2014–11 August 2015), mainly in the second largest city in Sweden, Gothenburg, and neighboring regions. The intention of the research design was to include not only individuals who most often told adults about being bullied but also those who had never or almost never told anyone. The recruitment could thus not be carried out through adults such as teachers or school counselors since that would exclude victims they were not aware of. Instead, the recruitment focused directly on youth aged 15–24 years. The age limit was set for two reasons: (a) Swedish children aged younger than 15 years need their parents’ permission to participate in research, such permission would make it impossible to interview children whose parents were unaware of the bullying; (b) individuals aged over 24 years are not considered youth (the statistical definition used by the United Nations) and both the Swedish legislation and school anti-bullying strategies have changed significantly since their time in school. A total of 90 posters were set up at schools, in the youth section of libraries, and at youth clinics, sport centers, job market organizations that focus on young adults, and colleges. The poster’s heading stated “Have you been bullied?” and provided both brief information about the study and the link to a webpage providing more information about the study. A link to the webpage was also posted on the author’s Facebook page along with the comment “please share,” and was thus spread and shared on Twitter and Facebook.

Since a marked percentage of victims have not disclosed victimization to an adult, one challenge for this research design was to create conditions that paved the way for victims to talk, possibly for the first time, about victimization. One way to manage this was to use web-based techniques, which can provide access to hard-to-reach populations. Due to the anonymity of the survey situation, online research is particularly suitable for studies on sensitive topics (Lee and Lee, 2012; Mangan and Reips, 2007). Informants in the present study were able to choose between participating through e-mail/chat, via telephone, or by meeting face to face. A total of 16 individuals wanted to participate in the study, three of them where older than 24, but one of them participated in a pilot e-mail interview. One person withdrew before the interview took place since she thought it would be too difficult to talk about her victimization. Two people withdrew without notice. The data collection resulted in a final sample of 10 interviews. Four of the interviews were performed face to face, four were carried out over e-mail, one informant participated over the phone, and one informant participated both through e-mail and phone (Table 1).

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Table 1.

Participant characteristics.

Interview	Gender	Age (years)	Interview	Years as victim
1.	Female	18	E-mail and telephone	9.5
2.	Female	18	E-mail	9
3.	Female	20	E-mail	8
4.	Female	19	Face-to-face	5
5.	Male	23	Face-to-face	10
6.	Male	21	Face-to-face	4.5
7.	Female	23	Telephone	2.5
8.	Male	22	Face-to-face	9
9.	Female	20	E-mail	6
10.	Female	15	E-mail	6

Procedure

A semi-structured interview format was used in each interview. The participants were asked to talk/write about (a) their experiences of school bullying, (b) how other people had found out about the bullying and how they reacted, (c) relationships who were unaware of the bullying, and (d) situations where the victim did not disclose bullying. Informants who were interviewed face to face decided the location of the interview, resulting in three interviews conducted at Gothenburg University and one at the office of a job market organization. The face-to-face interviews lasted between 70 and 81 minutes and the telephone interviews lasted 30–34 minutes. The interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. One telephone interview had bad sound quality and could not be transcribed verbatim. Instead, a summary of the interview was written. The e-mail interviews lasted between 5.1 hours to 21 days, varying between 2 and 15 e-mails from each informant. The lengths of the e-mail interviews differed depending on whether the informant answered instantly and wrote shorter response, or the individual took time before answering and often wrote longer and more comprehensive e-mails. The informants were within the age span of 15–23 and had been bullied during specific periods in school or their entire time at school. The study was approved by the Ethical Review Board in Gothenburg, Sweden. Informed consent was obtained prior to the interviews.

Analysis

The present study was based on grounded theory methods, constantly moving between data collection and analysis. The analysis emphasized the victim’s point of view, as the individuals remembered it from the time when the bullying was occurring. Theoretical sampling was in one way established by adding new questions to the interview guide, but limited due to the difficulty in reaching the population. The final sample included a wide range of informants, from those who had never told an adult about being bullied to those who most often told an adult. Initially, parts of the interviews that held situations, thoughts, and actions related to disclosing bullying were selected. The coding steps of initial and focused coding described by Charmaz (2014) were used. The initial coding was performed line by line, where codes were constructed with focus on processes. The initial coding aimed to identify answers to analytical questions such as when, how, and with what consequences the individuals are acting. During the focused coding, the most significant and frequent codes identified in the initial coding were compared to each other and to memos that were written throughout the study. Throughout and after the focused coding was established, clustering described by Charmaz (2014) was used to understand and organize the data. Qualitative data were stored and analyzed using ATLAS.ti7. The identified categories were considered to have reached saturation, and were further interpreted with the concept of region (Goffman, 1959) and identity (Charon, 2009). A region could be defined as a place bound to barriers of perception. In the front region, things that would discredit the fostered impression of an individual’s action are suppressed. Things suppressed in the front region instead make an appearance in the back region (Goffman, 1959). When a student suppresses victimization, adults are often unaware of the ongoing bullying and the victimization remains hidden in the back region. In the interactionist perspective, identities are created in social interaction. An individual presents who they are to others, and others adjust their actions according to what they perceive to be the individual’s identity. The creation of an identity is an active negotiation process between how the individual presents who they think they are and who others tell them they are (Charon, 2009). Keeping the victimization hidden in the back region thus impacts the victim’s personal identity. Depending on whether adults in the front region perceive the student as a bullied individual or not, they behave differently. This is then reflected in the victim’s identity and self-perception.

Hidden victimization

Although how often the victims disclosed bullying differed, they all started at a point of hidden victimization. Adults were not present when the bullying occurred:

Gym especially was the worst. Because it was a different dressing room there. One part was the dressing room and one part was a shower room with a door in between. It was set up so you could turn off the lights from outside. And there was a thick, thick metal door. It had no windows; it was pitch black in there—no windows or nothing. And the bullies, they threw me in there, in to the shower and turned off the light. And blocked the door. And I heard those laughs from outside. (p. 8)

To adults, the victimization was thus hidden in what Goffman (1959) named the back region. In order for adults to be aware of the situation, the victim had to actively report the bullying. Some victims in this study always or most often disclosed bullying to adults. There were also individuals who had been bullied their entire childhood and almost never disclosed anything to anyone. All victims had at some point at least told something to someone about the situation—a teacher, parent, school nurse, school counselor, older sibling, or grandparent. Thus, no individual was captured in a state of hidden victimization; it changed over time and circumstances. For some individuals, it felt natural to tell an adult about being victimized. For others, disclosing victimization was the last hope in a helpless situation:

They [parents] have always been there as support. I have always been able to talk to them and so. I didn’t always want their support, and I sometimes didn’t want to talk to them. But they have, especially my father have always kind of, I’ve always been able to talk to him. He is the one I talked to the most. I could always come to him with problems. (p. 1)

Individuals who avoided disclosing bullying victimization did this for two main reasons—reasons associated with the personal identity and/or reasons originating from distrust of adults (Figure 2). Some individuals experienced an initial period of not understanding or denying that they were being bullied. After realizing what was happening, individuals were afraid of being seen as a victim by others, which would lead to them being labeled as different from their peers. Their identity would be negotiated from “normal” to “victim,” which is similar to what Thornberg (2015) identified in his research, named deviant and normal identity:

It really felt like I did not want any kind of label or something like that. And it was also that behavior I tried to be with everyone, so that, I really did not want to get that label. (p. 5)

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Figure 2.

Hidden victimization.

Some individuals felt ashamed about being a victim, and the bullying they were victims of was too shameful to disclose. According to the interactionist perspective of the identity, adults will adjust their actions in line with what they perceive to be the individual’s identity (Charon, 2009). Disclosing the shame of being a victim would thus affect adults’ view of the bullied individual. Adults would not only see the victim as the individual they used to be, but would also integrate the victimization into their perception. That change of view would eventually have an impact on the victim’s self-identity, causing them to identify themselves as a victim even in situations outside the bullying context:

Though some rumors, as you notice now, it was hard for me to say it. So I did not tell her [mother]. Because then she would have freaked out. (p. 8)

Victimization often remained hidden because of distrust of adults. In those situations, victims feared that adults would not take the bullying seriously, and would assume that the victim exaggerated the seriousness of the situation. The victims thought that some adults would accuse them of being part of the problem, implying that the victim’s actions in some ways justified the bullies’ behavior. Even if adults would take the bullying seriously, they would not try to help, and if they did try, it would not help anyway. In a worst-case scenario, the situation could even get worse:

I think he [father] maybe only had; “But why? What is the problem with you?” I feel, I don’t know, it feels like I had been blamed for it somehow. (p. 6)

Keeping control

The victims had little chance of taking control over the bullying. What they to some extent could control was instead who knew about the victimization. The victims controlled whether they let the victimization show in the front region, and carefully considered the risks of telling an adult. Not immediately disclosing the victimization and instead managing alone was one way to appear strong and in control. If the victimization remained hidden, parents and other significant persons would look at the victim the same way as before, unaware of the bullying. The victimization would thus affect the victim’s identity in relation to the bullies, but would be protected in relation to those without knowledge of the bullying:

I know I am a strong person but I am very weak too. But, I, I like to appear strong. I hate it still; I hate to talk about how I feel. I can talk about old things, but I do not want to talk about the current situation. It is always like that, I kind of want to appear as very happy and positive and strong. A strong person. (p. 6)

Keeping up a facade

As the bullying continued, signs that something was not right would eventually draw adult attention. What the victim said in the front region was not consistent with their appearance and actions. Although the victims said nothing or stated that everything was fine, their actions implied that something was wrong. Individuals who used to love school started to stay home due to stomachache and headache. Bruises, sadness, and dirty clothes were other signs that adults observed. Due to the worrying signs, adults asked questions regarding the school situation and classmates and sometimes even asked directly whether the victim was being bullied. To keep up the facade as not bullied, the victim had to lie and come up with other explanations or downplay the situation:

I became an expert at finding excuses to tell the teacher; “No, no, no, it’s nothing!” And keep up a facade. (p. 5)

When the bullying was long-lasting or escalated, it became difficult for the victims to keep up a facade that everything was all right. Eventually adults started to question the facade. The victims could explain away dirty clothes as the result of tripping, being chased home as play, and not seeing friends as preferring solitude. But the combination of dirty clothes, being chased, and never spending time with friends was not that easy to explain without admitting that at least something was wrong. Being bullied was perceived as a strong expression, and a middle ground was to disclose being teased. Adults who only learned that the victim was teased would thus not change their perception of the individual to the same extent as if they knew about the entire bullying. Admitting being teased was considered less stigmatizing than admitting being bullied, and while adults received an explanation to some of the worrying signs, they might not change their perception of the individual as much as if they knew about the entire bullying:

I have not talked about it and if I ever did, I used the word “teased” instead, which is milder. (p. 2)

The victims had two different roles, one in relation to school peers and one in relation to adults. The role acted with peers was related to the victimization, while the role acted in front of adults was the character as a non-bullied individual. Cracks in the facade occurred if the different audiences, peers and adults, entered the front region at the same time. In such situations, the victim had trouble keeping up a front to adults that everything was all right. It was difficult to explain to parents that everything was fine when peers wrote nasty things openly on Facebook, or when adults witnessed a bullying situation. Other hard things to explain were behaviors of self-harm and attempted suicide. When adults confronted the victim with their concerns, the victim either was forced to disclose the bullying or continued maintaining the facade of not being a victim:

And I did not tell my parents because I was ashamed. I do not know. I did not understand what was going on really. And then mother began to discover that because I had very long hair that she had to help me wash. And then she noticed that I had a lot of bruises and such things. I often came home with dirty clothes. I claimed that I fell. But in the end she got me to tell. (p. 4)

Open victimization—adults’ reaction

Open victimization belongs to the front region, where adults are aware of the bullying. This study identified two different paths from hidden to open victimization. The first path was when the victim told an adult about the bullying soon after it occurred. The second path was when the victim followed the steps of keeping control and keeping up a facade, illustrated in Figure 1. After the disclosure of the victimization, the victim’s experiences of adults’ reactions and actions could be placed on a continuum from positive to negative, with neutral or mixed experiences in the middle. Positive experiences were when the victim felt supported from the adult either emotionally or practically. It could be that the adult was listening, reassuring the victim that that there was nothing wrong with them. It could also be that the adult took over responsibility for the situation. In such situations, losing control meant giving the control to someone trustworthy who took action:

And that my parents constantly reminded me that there was something wrong with them [the bullies], not me. They were the stupid ones. And they were not entitled to it. Because I was often worried that it was something about me. And I did not understand why they suddenly went from being friends to being like that. So my parents had to support me a lot and tell me that there was not something wrong with me. (p. 4)

More neutral experiences were when adults gave some kind of reaction that did neither good nor bad. A common strategy from schools was to organize meetings with the bully/bullies, the victim, and their families. The meetings were in one way a sign that the school reacted; on the other hand, the meetings seldom helped the situation in any way. As often as the meetings gave neutral experiences, they also led to negative experiences. Sometimes the bullying continued during the meeting, and attending adults were unable to stop it. In some cases, the school did not see the seriousness of the situation at all and explained the bullying as accidents. Victims felt that the teachers ignored them, although they knew about the victimization:

No teacher helped me in any way really. It often seemed as if they closed their eyes when they saw me so they didn’t have to think about my situation. (p. 10)

Victims felt that adults often downplayed the seriousness of the situation or blamed the victim. In one case, the school took the bullying seriously, but the attempt to help only woke the victim’s fear of being labeled as different. Experiences of adults’ reactions were seldom unambiguously good or bad; it was common to have support from one special person, but have lost faith in other adults:

So when Mom found out how extensive the bullying was, then she simply asked me the night before: “Do you want me to call you in sick tomorrow?” And so we went over the schedule. “What classes do you have? Yes there is gym, you have to skip that one.” Because we discovered that the teachers could not do anything and they didn’t want to do anything. (p. 8)

The victim’s experiences of disclosing bullying to adults was guiding for how the individual reacted in forthcoming bullying situations. Individuals with mainly positive experiences tended to continue to disclose bullying. Individuals with negative experiences tended to go back to hiding the victimization again in an attempt to control the situation on their own. Some individuals could manage several negative experiences before they stopped telling adults. One individual only disclosed bullying once, and after a negative experience, he never talked about victimization again, although the bullying continued for several years.

There are similarities with the present study’s results and DeLara’s research regarding why victims do not disclose bullying to adults. In both studies, victims declined to confide in adults about bullying due to the ubiquitous nature of bullying, whereby the victims initially had trouble understanding that they were being bullied. Victims also declined to disclose bullying due to shame. In both studies, victims had strong concerns over the response of adults, but in one way, the concerns deviated. Adolescents in DeLara’s (2008) study often felt that adults expected them to sort things out themselves. Such answers were only mentioned once from victims in the present study. That might be due in part to the different American (New York) and Swedish context. Harassment in schools has been prohibited by Swedish law since 2006 and schools must actively work to prevent harassment. If a school fails, victims of school bullying are entitled to claim damages (The Swedish Education Act, 2006: 67, 2010: 800). School staff in Sweden might thus be encouraged or pressured to some kind of action when a student tells them about bullying. Similar legislation in public schools of New York has been implemented since 2012 (The Dignity Act, n.d.). Future research should study whether the legislation has had any effect on school staffs’ response to victims’ disclosure of bullying.

Limitations

There are some limitations to consider in this study. First, there might be a selection bias since informants were recruited with the sentence “Have you been bullied?” The informants had thus some characteristics in common; they acknowledged themselves as victims, had an interest in participating, and had the strength to talk about victimization. Second, the interviews were partly retrospective and some of the participants were no longer school aged, which could be a subject to recollection bias.