Search

As contemporary research explores the social and cultural dynamics of school bullying, notions of space and time provide avenues to unpack youth-centred insights into students' bullying experiences. Furthermore, spatiotemporal analysis demonstrates the links between similar experiences, such as bullying and relationship violence, that are often siloed in research and policy. Yet, within this converging field, there are contradictory accounts, from both young people and researchers, of the school as both a non-violent space and a space filled with unseen violence. In this paper, I argue that this contradiction reveals an essential aspect of young people's experience of bullying in schools. To develop this approach, school bullying is conceptualised in this paper as 'social violence' with a momentum that can linger and become institutionalised in the architecture of schools.

In this paper, we draw on the concepts of figurations, capital, and hegemonic masculinity to analyse a bullying relation involving two fifth-grade boys at a Swedish comprehensive school. The findings are based on ethnographic fieldwork, which included participant observations and group interviews with eight teachers and fourteen students (seven girls and seven boys) from the same class. Our findings demonstrate the complexity of the relation between the boys and suggest that rather than constituting a straight-forward bullying "situation" involving a problematically aggressive 'bully' targeting a less powerful 'victim', it is part of a more complex "figuration" involving interdependent social relations that are tenuously balanced in terms of power dynamics and where the boys position themselves and are positioned in relation to the long-term symbolic norms of status dominant within their specific school field.

In this paper, we contribute to the understandings of young masculinities by turning attention to the South African schooling primary school context. In the context of scarcity of interventions around violence in the primary school, we focus on how young boys construct, negotiate and experience violence. Notwithstanding dominant discourses around childhood innocence we argue that young boys are active participants in violent gendered cultures at school. We show how boys' bodies are key sites for the enactment of violence and is especially a valuable resource in the context of food insecurity. The paper also shows the fluidity of masculinity as boys who are regarded as 'victims' can also defend and resuscitate masculinity that endorses violence. Implications for addressing young masculinities in the primary school within local context are considered in the conclusion of the paper.

This paper explores the first-hand accounts of disablist school violence experienced by young people with dwarfism during their secondary education in the United Kingdom. A narrative, qualitative methodology was utilised, which turned nineteen young people with dwarfism into the storytellers of their schooling experiences. Drawing together a poststructuralist approach to bullying and Critical Disability Studies, it presents and discusses stories of physical, cultural and systemic violence they experienced, as well as their resistance to it. In doing so, it challenges dominant discourses around disability and school violence, including the representation of disabled young people as 'passive victims' of school violence or disability being the trigger of such violence. Finally, it provides a sociological analysis of such violence, shifting the focus from the individualistic blame to the cultural, institutional and systemic underpinnings of such violence and the role of disablism in its perpetuation.

The present paper explores the conceptual limitations of the bully discourses that ground UK anti-bullying policy frameworks and psychological research literatures on school bullying, suggesting they largely ignore gender, (hetero)sexuality and the social, cultural and subjective dynamics of conflict and aggression among teen-aged girls. To explore the limitations of bully discourses in practice, the paper draws on a pilot, interview-based study of girls' experiences of aggression and bullying, illustrating how friendships and conflicts among the girls are thoroughly heterosexualized, en-cultured and classed. Drawing on girls and parent interview narratives, I also trace some of the effects of bully discourses set in motion in schools to intervene into conflicts among girls. I suggest these practices miss the complexity of the dynamics at play among girls and also neglect the power relations of parenting, ethnicity, class and school choice, which can inform how, why and when bullying discourses are mobilized. (Contains 9 notes.)

In this paper the four authors explore the experience of school bullying, drawing on stories of bullying generated in a collective biography workshop and on fictional accounts of bullying. They counter the current trend of reading bullying as individual or family pathology with a post-structuralist analysis of subjectification and power.

This paper examines the discourses of morality drawn on by secondary school teachers in England to describe their attitudes to pupils' developing sexual identities. Although teachers recognized their own formative role in the sexual socialization of pupils and identified homophobic attitudes among boys, they were ambivalent about how far they could intervene in homophobic bulling in school. However, they failed even to recognize the widespread misogynistic bullying of girls by boys as a problem. Teachers expressed anxieties about girls' ownership of sexual knowledge and sexual agency while perceiving boys to be sexually immature and less 'responsible'. We explore possible reasons for teachers' neglect of misogynistic bullying and their labelling of girls as sexually precocious. We argue that the discourses shaping teachers' attitudes to sexual morality and sex education were largely embedded in a form of liberal individualism that impeded them from confronting the structurally reproduced relations of gender domination.

In this paper, we draw on the concepts of figurations, capital, and hegemonic masculinity to analyse a bullying relation involving two fifth-grade boys at a Swedish comprehensive school. The findings are based on ethnographic fieldwork, which included participant observations and group interviews with eight teachers and fourteen students (seven girls and seven boys) from the same class. Our findings demonstrate the complexity of the relation between the boys and suggest that rather than constituting a straight-forward bullying situation involving a problematically aggressive 'bully' targeting a less powerful 'victim', it is part of a more complex figuration involving interdependent social relations that are tenuously balanced in terms of power dynamics and where the boys position themselves and are positioned in relation to the long-term symbolic norms of status dominant within their specific school field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies on bullying at school proliferate, but the discourse is seriously lacking in sociological perspective. The explanation as to why some students bully others has been sought primarily within the personal attributes of the bully and the victim. Despite the fact that the school is the place where most bullying occurs, school factors that are correlated with the prevalence of bullying have been under-investigated. In Japan, however, schools have been subject to great scrutiny. By reviewing the Japanese literature on bullying (ijime), this paper discusses factors that appear to contribute to the school climate in which bullying among students becomes commonplace. These include authoritarian, hierarchical, and power-dominant human relationships, alienating modes of learning, high levels of regimentation, dehumanising methods of discipline, and highly interventionist human relationships in an excessively group-oriented social environment. The paper suggests the paradigm of student bullying needs to be re-thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores 5th and 6th grade pupils' reflections on why pupils may refrain from intervening in bullying, despite understanding that bullying is wrong. The findings are based on focus group interviews conducted with 74 Swedish school pupils, who were asked for their perspectives on the various participant roles depicted in a bullying vignette. The findings were analysed using methods from constructivist grounded theory and through the theoretical lens of Goffman's concept of social stigma. The interviewees emphasised the implications of being positioned as the 'victim', including being socially stigmatised, isolated, denigrated and further bullied, and suggested that the fear of being 'singled out' would be a main concern for pupils, and hence the driving force behind why they may refrain from intervening in defence of a victimised peer. The study thus highlights the associated processes of social stigmatisation and the non-intervention of pupils in school bullying situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article sets out discursive issues surrounding bullying and harassment against teachers. This problematic phenomenon of teachers being bullied by students does not have the discursive policy framework to realistically and even-handedly enable discussion in the public arena or political and policy environments. This discussion chronicles our journey towards greater conceptual clarity and appropriate nomenclature about bullying and harassing behaviours directed against teachers. International studies have identified teacher-targeted bullying by students as a real and detrimental issue for teacher wellbeing. We present a sampling of international research that grapples with the challenge of defining the phenomenon of teachers as targets of intentional bullying and harassment by students. We consider Australian studies conducted in the past twenty years that address teachers' perceptions of being bullied. Finally, we propose that this phenomenon is likely to continue until there is sufficient support to start a cultural shift towards more respectful treatment of teachers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the late 1990s, increased public and academic attention has been focused on topics related to bullying and peer aggression in schools, yet these behaviors have proven difficult for schools to address. Using data from an ethnographic study of two rural elementary schools in the Midwestern United States, I make both methodological and theoretical contributions to the literature on this topic. Methodologically, I show that examining 'minor' aggressive behaviors in schools reveals the way that more serious issues are also normalized. Theoretically, I show that students and adults actively construct shared understandings in these schools regarding the normalization of aggression, increasing the frequency of these behaviors, limiting the ability of adults to effectively deal with them, and contributing to the stigmatization of students who do not accept them. These findings add to our understandings of bullying and aggression in schools and the relationship between school cultures and peer cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I develop a new conceptual framework, a new thinking technology, for understanding the bullying that takes place between children in schools. In addition, I propose a new definition of bullying. This new thinking technology reflects a shift in focus from individual characteristics to the social processes that may lead to bullying. The social approach theorises bullying as one of many reactions to particular kinds of social insecurity. The concepts I develop include the necessity of belonging, social exclusion anxiety and the production of contempt and dignity by both children and adults. I also draw on Judith Butler’s concept of abjection. In the last part of the article, I employ Karen Barad’s theory of agential realism, focusing specifically on her concept of intra-acting enacting forces. The entry to the theoretical development is based on empirical data generated in Denmark during a comprehensive five-year study of bullying. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]