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this is an article about identifying bullying.

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The current study aims to investigate the psychometric properties of the abbreviated version of the Negative Acts Questionnaire, also known as the SNAQ (Short Negative Acts Questionnaire). A Latent Class analysis of 7,790 observation from 38 Belgian organizations demonstrated that four latent classes of respondents can be distinguished in our data: 'not bullied', 'work-related criticism', 'occasionally bullied', and 'severe targets'. Like with the original full version, both occasionally bullied and the severe targets align with the theoretical definition of workplace bullying as exposure to repeated and systematic negative behavior. The extent to which these clusters report bullying does not only account for their difference, yet also the type of behavior sets the two categories apart. Whereas severe targets had a high probability to report social isolation, this type of social behaviors was more likely to be absent among the occasionally bullied group. The results from the HSD post-hoc test demonstrated that both occasionally bullied and severe targets experienced deteriorating health, more sickness absenteeism and lower for job satisfaction than the two other latent class clusters. Hence, the SNAQ seems to be a psychometrically sound and easy to use instrument to identify targets exposed to varying degrees of workplace bullying.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Workplace bullying: From mechanisms and moderators to problem treatment. Financed by Norwegian Research Council - NFR (grant number 250127).

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Measuring bullying at work with the short-negative acts questionnaire: identification of targets and criterion validity

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The current study aims to investigate the psychometric properties of the abbreviated version of the Negative Acts Questionnaire, also known as the SNAQ (Short Negative Acts Questionnaire). A Latent Class analysis of 7,790 observation from 38 Belgian organizations demonstrated that four latent classes of respondents can be distinguished in our data: 'not bullied', 'work-related criticism', 'occasionally bullied', and 'severe targets'.

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this is a article of josh getting bullied.

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In my first year of middle school, kids taunted me and spit on me in hallways. It didn't occur to me to tell my parents or teachers that I was being bullied at school. Finally, when a group of 20 kids threatened to beat me up at the carwash the next day, I told my older brother, who in turn informed my parents. My dad looked up my main tormentor's phone number in the phone book and told her dad to make his daughter stop or he'd contact the police. It worked.

Twenty years later, when my 11-year-old stepson, who I'll call Josh, came home with a sprained wrist and a head injury as a result of bullying, nothing seemed so simple. A true contemporary family - three parents with radically different parenting styles - we were all busy working and parenting other children, too. Who had the time to slow down, figure out what was happening, research solutions, decide what to do, call the school, and demand action? It was the beginning of Josh's sixth grade at a new school, so we didn't know anyone. Every night, as we listened to his stories of getting insulted and roughed up in hallways, we wondered: is this the new normal?

Bully pulpit

Since the days when I was bullied, there have been campaigns, dozens of books, a bumper crop of bullying experts, a presidential initiative, a feature-length documentary, and thousands of heartbreaking stories about kids whose bullying allegedly led to terrible consequences: suicide, mental illness, prison sentences. But the sad fact is that the very definition of bullying remains somewhat in dispute.

"We are all against bullying until we have to define it," writes bullying expert Deborah Temkin. "The division between 'normal' childhood conflict, joking around, and bullying is a very thin, ever-changing line."

Definitions of bullying vary, but the most commonly cited one comes from Dan Olweus, a Norweigan psychology professor who began studying bullying in the 1970s. He defines bullying as being "exposed, repeatedly and over time, to negative actions on the part of one or more other persons, and he or she has difficulty defending himself or herself." Olweus found that repeated abuse is what really affects kids. But Temkin warns against strict definitions. "[I]n bullying, as in any human rights violation, dismissing a person's reported trauma based on too strict a threshold can inflict further damage." In other words, it's the child's experience that matters.

Adding abuse to injury

Given my background of facing a leering mob in my middle school hallways, you might think I would have had the clarity of mind to be proactive when it came to Josh. But I hesitated. Josh had been excited to start middle school, so excited that the first Saturday after school started, he was disappointed to stay home. But then he started coming home with injuries from kids hurting him on the basketball court during lunch. Kids insulted him, he said, and after recess he'd find notes on his back saying, "kick me" or "loser." After being pelted with fruit in the cafeteria, he started eating lunch alone in the hallway. The third week of school, Josh came home with a broken foot. He said he slipped on the stairs, but his mom suspected he'd been pushed. Then Josh told us kids were trying to step on his broken foot or saying, "When that one heals, I'm gonna break the other one."

Like most of us living in this knowledge-obsessed Internet age, I tried to combat my fear with information. I learned that instead of focusing on punishing the kids who were bullying him, I should figure out how to help Josh and understand what the school could and could not do. I learned that schools can't disclose how they deal with other kids involved, and we should help Josh get involved in activities where he felt safe and could make new friends.

We tried to follow these directives. Josh's mom enrolled him in martial arts to build his confidence and teach him self-defense. Once his foot healed, he started playing soccer again. I told Josh about my bullying experiences. At times, he seemed happy to hear he wasn't alone. But other times he responded that there must be something wrong with him. I could see his confidence wither as abuse fueled his doubts.

According to statistics, approximately 77 percent of students have been physically or verbally bullied. But it was hard to tell if Josh was being targeted, exaggerating, or if this aggressive behavior was normal for sixth grade boys.

Why me?

A sensitive kid who is intelligent, handsome, and has always been a head taller than his classmates, Josh is often timid with other youths. He constantly asked for advice on how to feel. Sometimes he seemed to stick with kids who were mean to him, waiting for acceptance that would never come. I wondered if Josh was too comfortable in the victim role. Part of me was angry at him for being bullied and wondered why he couldn't just stand up for himself. I survived being bullied, I'd think; and then, I'd feel guilty. Even if only part of what he told us was true, it was awful.

I know now that certain kids are more likely to be bullied. Victims of bullying tend to have high levels of insecurity, depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem (all feelings I saw in Josh), but it's nearly impossible to tell if these feelings are the cause or the effect of bullying. The irony is that kids who bully often experience the same emotions and some 20 percent of kids who are bullied also bully others. Not surprisingly, these aggressor/victims have the highest rates of depression and anxiety.

Just make it stop

Josh's mother and father called the principal, vice principal, and school counselor repeatedly, but it took weeks to get them on the phone and schedule meetings. Josh's mom showed up at the counselor's office unannounced one day to discover that he had just put Josh and the boy who had given Josh a black eye the day before in mediation, asking them both to apologize - a tactic that took a high-minded "nobody's to blame" approach but left Josh even more demoralized. Josh started eating lunch with a group of eighth graders, doing their homework, and giving them his lunch in exchange for protection.

One afternoon in our kitchen, Josh described lying on the hall floor and being repeatedly kicked while other kids watched. We called the vice-principal, who apologized but said he didn't have footage of the beating on their video cameras and no other kids would corroborate Josh's story. According to statistics, more than half of the time, bullying stops if another kid intervenes, but no one stepped in to help Josh.

We weren't helping either. I was angry with Josh's dad (my partner) for not doing enough. Since I wasn't a biological parent, I was legally powerless to call the school. As a stepparent, I also felt I should take a back seat to Josh's mom and dad. We were all angry with the school, and our frustration seeped into our relationships with each other. Should we threaten these kids, tell Josh to fight, go to the police? At the end of a long day of working and parenting, my partner and I worriedly compared notes, decided who to call and what to ask for. Deep down, we all just wanted it to go away. Also, we felt bad about ourselves as parents. Had we raised Josh badly? Why did he seem to be everyone's punching bag? Every morning, it felt like we were sending him into a war zone with no protection.

One day, Josh said a boy called Omar knocked him down and started punching and kicking him in the face and body. A crowd of kids gathered and screamed at Omar, aggressively egging him on. "I was scared to fight back and get suspended," Josh told me. The next day, he told me he had fantasies about stabbing his bullies.

At almost 6 feet tall, Josh was far bigger than these kids. Though I knew it contradicted every piece of expert advice I'd read, I told him to defend himself. I was afraid for him, afraid of him being hurt, but even more afraid of what he was internalizing about himself. Josh would ask me if he was ugly or stupid, and when I said no, he'd ask why all the kids said so. When Emily Bazelon, author of Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy, interviewed adults who had been bullied, she found their experiences were still raw and painful, even years later. I didn't want Josh to have these memories.

In early March, a kid punched Josh in the face in gym class. The teacher separated the kids and told them to go back to "playing." Instead, the boy punched Josh again. The school expelled the boy - who had a history of violence and clearly needed support - from Josh's class. The vice principal and counselor met with Josh, developed safety plans and places for him during lunch, but the verbal and physical abuse continued. Two weeks later, two friends of the expelled boy cornered Josh in a stairwell and attacked him.

I had finally had enough. I sat down and wrote up a timeline of all the abuse Josh had experienced since September and our attempts to get support from the school. I sent the list to Josh's mom who filled in more detail. Josh's dad filed an official police report against Josh's primary tormentor, emailed the timeline to the superintendent of schools, and removed Josh from school citing physical assault. We were finally united as a team with the single goal of protecting Josh. We met with the superintendent, who was shocked by the abuse and lack of response we described, and requested an emergency safety transfer to a new middle school, which was granted.

Lessons learned

Two years later, I'm ashamed of how long it took me to take the abuse seriously, get the police involved, and pull Josh from that school. We learned that every school has a police officer assigned to it, and that those officers exist to help in these sorts of situations. Our fear of authority, concerns that Josh was lying or should toughen up, and lack of knowledge about his school life all contributed to our delay. We waited too long to intervene and allowed our own insecurities, poor communication, and confusion to get in the way.

I know now that Josh's experience is atypical. These days, many schools have systems and regulations in place that demand they act quickly, especially when bullying is physical. States and local lawmakers have enacted laws, usually through the education code, to protect children. In general, in-person bullying seems to be decreasing although other forms of harassment, such as cyberbullying, may be increasing. Josh's experience has changed all of us. I try to listen to Josh and his experiences without judgment, and now, with his dad's blessing, I am empowered to intervene on Josh's behalf. Josh, now 6'3" and weighing in at 200 pounds, just finished up at his new middle school and is excited for high school next year. Of course, rude, abusive kids haven't evaporated from Josh's life. Last week, he told us about a kid taunting him, making obscene remarks about what Josh and a friend liked to do with each other.

Josh's friend told Josh to "deal with the situation." Josh told his taunter to shut up, but the kid retaliated physically.

"He was punching me in the stomach, but it didn't hurt since he's tiny," Josh said.

"What did you do?" I asked.

"I told him to stop, but when he wouldn't, I hook punched him in the back of his head with medium force, but he fell on his ass anyway," Josh said.

"You should never hit someone on the head!" I exclaimed, horrified, realizing that my urging him to defend himself, and that he was taking his cues from a questionable friend, may have led to this.

"You could have killed him! You should have reacted defensively."

Josh shot me stricken look and stormed out.

Lines of communication

His dad watched him go, then turned to me: "If you react like that, he's going to stop confiding in us."

I sought Josh out and found him sitting on his bed.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I was really scared when you told me you punched that kid in the back of the head. My mind went to the worst case scenario."

"Everyone gives me different advice," Josh responded. "I told him to stop. If I ran away, everyone would have laughed at me because the kid is over a foot shorter than me."

Josh's actions made me nervous. The physically aggressive behavior worried me, and I didn't want Josh to be comfortable resorting to violence. Was this what Josh learned from being bullied? I wanted to control Josh's school experience: delete the meanness and make it all peaceful and happy. But even I know that isn't realistic. I could tell Josh to never to raise a hand, but is that truly the right answer for him? I don't know. And it isn't my fight. Josh's life will be full of tough decisions like the one he described.

"It's so hard to decide what to do on the spot like that. Do you think you made the right choice?"

"I do," he said.

I took a deep breath ... and kept silent. Real parenting is messy and doesn't follow textbook lines. I don't want Josh to learn to protect his honor with his fists. But this is his experience, not mine. Isn't my job to help him weigh his options, make a decision, and handle the consequences for himself?

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In my first year of middle school, kids taunted me and spit on me in hallways. It didn't occur to me to tell my parents or teachers that I was being bullied at school. Finally, when a group of 20 kids threatened to beat me up at the carwash the next day, I told my older brother, who in turn informed my parents.

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This is a girl that is getting talked behind her back on how she looks or her personality.

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When consumers care about being treated fairly: The interaction of relationship norms and fairness norms

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JavaScript is disabled on your browser. Please enable JavaScript to use all the features on this page. Prior research suggests that people assess overall fairness of an event by focusing on the distribution of the final outcome (distributive fairness) and on how they are treated by others during the conflict resolution process (interactional fairness).

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This is a picture is all the different tips of bullying.

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This is a picture of a kid that did nothing but someone put on his back kick me and someone did and he pushed him and he was getting yelled at by people.

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This is telling people to stop bullying and be friends to each other.

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For decades, people have argued that bullying is just a part of growing up, that parent - and educators - shouldn't worry too much about kids harassing other kids. "Stop panicking about bullies," read an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal a few years ago.

Certainly this was my view as a kid, and I remember being bullied, and bullying, as a normal part of what happened in schools. But a growing body of research shows that schools can prevent bullying - and ensure that all kids go to school each day without fear of being physically hurt or socially targeted.

The research on bullying builds on a substantial body of evidence around the importance of helping students develop social-emotional skills, and studies increasingly shows just how important these abilities are for a child's success. This is true for bullying and in many other aspects of life. Indeed, many scholars now believe that showing empathy for others is just important as learning algebra.

But helping students develop social-emotional skills can be challenging for some schools. For one, school leaders are under significant pressure to improve academic progress, and so many schools neglect the social and emotional side of learning. Plus, social-emotional skills may seem a little vague, and so educators do not get much guidance on what to teach or even how to teach it.

Some years ago, a team at the University of Virginia lead by Catherine Bradshaw decided to help educators understand how to help students develop better social-emotional skills in an effort to address bullying. After all, bullying can have very negative effects. In an extreme example, a teen stabbed and killed another teen in a New York City school over bullying last year.

So the UVA team leveraged the widely used school-wide prevention framework known as "Schoolwide Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports," which aims to improve school climate and student behavior across a range of outcomes like discipline and academics.

This framework is innovative for a number of reasons. First, it targets the entire school, and so all of the staff are involved in its implementation, developing a shared sense of norms around things like student engagement in the classroom and positive reinforcement for good behavior.

Second, the framework focuses on setting clear expectations for behavior around daily school interactions, and staff provide help to students who have trouble following the norms around everything from safety to teasing. This means that efforts are put in place to stop bullying before it even starts, catching it early instead of being allowed to fester.

Finally, the framework also provides tailored support for the both victims and bullies in each school. Specifically, the victims and bullies both get small group or individual counseling to develop stronger social-emotional skills and develop a richer sense of empathy, and alternative methods of coping with challenges.

This sort of targeted approach works, and schools that this framework had better climates and fewer student discipline issues. There were also much lower incidents of bullying.

Of course, there's no way to address every form of bullying in school. Because technology is so widespread, lots of bullying incidents happen privately on smart phones, far away from adults, and while this program might help even with technology, it simply can't address every issue. Plus, such approaches take time to implement well, and it can be difficult to get enough buy-in from the entire staff around key issues.

But what's clear is that bullying can be stopped. By learning better social-emotional skills and norms, students are far kinder to each other. In other words, when we understand and care about bullying, we begin to understand that there are actually strategies to stop bullying.

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For decades, people have argued that bullying is just a part of growing up, that parent - and educators - shouldn't worry too much about kids harassing other kids. "Stop panicking about bullies," read an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal a few years ago.

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this is a video about a kid that is getting bullied and he goes home and finds a gun and tries to kill him self.

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This is a picture of a kid getting bullied by a kid in class.

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Bullying can affect everyone-those who are bullied, those who bully, and those who witness bullying. Bullying is linked to many negative outcomes including impacts on mental health, substance use, and suicide. It is important to talk to kids to determine whether bullying-or something else-is a concern.

Kids Who are Bullied

Kids who are bullied can experience negative physical, social, emotional, academic, and mental health issues. Kids who are bullied are more likely to experience:

Depression and anxiety, increased feelings of sadness and loneliness, changes in sleep and eating patterns, and loss of interest in activities they used to enjoy. These issues may persist into adulthood.

Health complaints

Decreased academic achievement-GPA and standardized test scores-and school participation. They are more likely to miss, skip, or drop out of school.

A very small number of bullied children might retaliate through extremely violent measures. In 12 of 15 school shooting cases in the 1990s, the shooters had a history of being bullied.

Kids Who Bully Others

Kids who bully others can also engage in violent and other risky behaviors into adulthood. Kids who bully are more likely to:

Abuse alcohol and other drugs in adolescence and as adults

Get into fights, vandalize property, and drop out of school

Engage in early sexual activity

Have criminal convictions and traffic citations as adults

Be abusive toward their romantic partners, spouses, or children as adults

Bystanders

Kids who witness bullying are more likely to:

Have increased use of tobacco, alcohol, or other drugs

Have increased mental health problems, including depression and anxiety

Miss or skip school

The Relationship between Bullying and Suicide

Media reports often link bullying with suicide. However, most youth who are bullied do not have thoughts of suicide or engage in suicidal behaviors.

Although kids who are bullied are at risk of suicide, bullying alone is not the cause. Many issues contribute to suicide risk, including depression, problems at home, and trauma history. Additionally, specific groups have an increased risk of suicide, including American Indian and Alaskan Native, Asian American, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth. This risk can be increased further when these kids are not supported by parents, peers, and schools. Bullying can make an unsupportive situation worse.

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Bullying can affect everyone-those who are bullied, those who bully, and those who witness bullying. Bullying is linked to many negative outcomes including impacts on mental health, substance use, and suicide. It is important to talk to kids to determine whether bullying-or something else-is a concern.

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This video is all drawn by kids that been bullied and what happened to them when they were getting bullied.

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Together Against Bullying - National Bullying Prevention Center

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Animated video created from student drawings and writing, brought to life with the voices of youth. It poignantly provides insight into how painful bullying can feel, but also touchingly shows that kids want it to stop and want to be part of the solution.