Bullying: What could be the reason?

As a former bullying victim, I always thought that was my fault that I got bullied and that what my bullies said was probably right, so I always blamed myself for what happened. But after some years I realised that it is never the victim’s fault, but something they cannot control. After that I always wondered, what could drive a person to bully. And with that I made it my mission to figure out the reasons why someone would bully another person.

So first of all, let´s establish what bullying is. Bullying is a behaviour that´s been historically linked to kids on the playground, but it can happen to anyone at any age everywhere. There is no direct definition of what bullying is since it has many shapes, but simplified by ´Ditch The Label´, it´s seen as unwanted behaviour from one person to another, designed to cause harm, hurt or distress.

Now we´ll go over to the main point of this article: What are the reasons for people to start bully others? One reason might be that they are insecure themselves and target something that is unique about their victim and with that create new insecurities for them, making the bully feel better about themselves. Another reason could be that the bully tries to gain a feeling of power, purpose and control over the victim. Perchance the bully wants to deflect negative attention from themselves on to somebody else to avoid it. In contrary to that, some might bully to gain attention, especially on social media nowadays, without putting in much effort.

On social media it´s even easier to bully others, because of the anonymity, so they think they can spread hate without real consequences. Additionally, another research by ´Ditch The Label´ shows that those who experienced bullying are twice as likely to bully others, they use this as a defence mechanism, because they think that they´ll become immune to bullying that way.

On a more psychological note, recent data from the website ´Ditch the Label´ shows that bullies are far more likely to have experienced stress and trauma, so they bully others as a coping mechanism for the trauma or to relief stress. That shows that some people simply don’t know how to respond to trauma or stress. Correspondingly the bully might have a difficult home life, maybe receive feelings of rejection from their parents or even come from a violent household, so they don’t know any better and so they start bullying. Moreover, people like that perhaps feel like their relationship with a person is not secure, so they maybe get pressured into bullying because the other person wants them to.

In the end, all of the mentioned reasons above are not an excuse for bullying. Yes, the bully might have a difficult life or perhaps has other issues, but that does not give them a reason to make other people´s lives miserable, too. If people that bully have real problems, then they should really rethink their ways and possibly seek help somewhere and if they bully just for fun, well that´s another issue that they should deal with.

By: anonymous, picture: Vania Barbara