What does bullying really mean?

Summary

The first part of this short report looks at the problems of using the term ‘bullying’ across different cultures; and the difficulties in arriving at a definitive definition of what constitutes bullying among professional researchers and other adults. The second part looks at young children's perception of what bullying means to them, and draws on a small‐scale piece of recent research that formed part of an MA dissertation on the incidence of bullying in a junior school in Essex. The results suggested that pupils (and teachers) found the term ‘bullying’ rather ambiguous and difficult to define. Younger pupils were found to have a more extensive definition of the term, and a hypothesis was proposed that this might account for the higher levels of being bullied found in the lower school.

Key Words:

• bullying
• junior school
• pupils' perceptions