Swedish study bullying victims themselves blame?

Swedish study: Bullying victims themselves blame?

(15.11.2010) Swedish scientists have found out in a comprehensive study that victims of bullying often carry their own complicity in such incidents. So at least the assessment of their peers.

Nearly 70 percent see the culprit as the culprit
In their study, researchers from Linköping University interviewed 176 high school students aged 15 to 16 years after the bullying incidents in their personal environment and the results in the current issue of the journal „Child & Youth Care Forum“ released. According to this, 69 percent of the respondents clearly identify the main culprit of bullying with the polluter and named character weaknesses such as insecurity, a lack of self-confidence or a pronounced need for power and power as the mainspring of his actions. Where more girls than boys evaluated the character weaknesses as the cause of bullying.

42 percent against mobbing victims a complicity
It was conspicuous in the eyes of the scientists that 42 percent of the young people interviewed gave the victims a complicity in the incidents, with the most frequent reasons being personal traits. Thus, relatively many adolescents who were bullying victims „different“ or „funny“ and have behaved differently from the norm. Boys are more likely to blame the victims, whereas girls tend to name the culprit rather than the obvious guilty party. The bullying by dominant groups or cliques played only a minor role in the investigation results. Only 21 percent of respondents said that bullying was caused by a class-dominant clique. The general school situation is therefore negligible, as it is held responsible only by seven percent of young people for any bullying attacks. In addition, hardly any young people saw the causes of bullying in society or human nature. „It becomes very clear that teenagers see the causes of bullying more in the personal sphere: Responsible is the bully or the victim himself, not the clique, the school or society“, said the scientists in the current „Child & Youth Care Forum“-items.

Conscious and constantly repeated or regular harassment, torture and mental injury is a huge burden for those concerned. Although the current study suggests that they should at least partially be responsible for the hostility, teachers and educators are urged to stop the mobbing classmates. Because the bad mood that is built here, not only burdened the learning behavior of the children, but the victims often suffer a lifetime of the consequences of massive hostility. The fact that the bullying attacks are often caused by a non-normative behavior, can actually teach us only one thing: the tolerance among the students is still considerably expandable. (Fp)

Picture credits: Gerd Altmann