Healing from Bullying in Early Adolescent Boys: The Positive Impact of Both Forgiveness and Revenge Fantasies

Bullying is a pervasive and debilitating issue for youth that can lead to substance abuse, worse outcomes at school, mental and physical health problems, and in some instances serious acts of school violence. There are three criteria that must be present in order to be classified as bullying: Repetition, intentionality, and imbalance of power. Most efforts in this area have focused on reducing bullying behavior, with both whole of school and targeted approaches showing some success. However, a meta-analytic review of bullying interventions revealed that on average, school-based interventions led to only a small decrease in bullying (20-23%) and an even smaller decrease in victimization (17-20%) while programs that worked with peers actually led to an increase in victimization. One therapeutic technique that may help to reduce negative emotional outcomes for victims is encouraging forgiveness. The aim of this study was to determine the effects of imagery re-scripting terminating in images of either forgiveness or revenge of a bullying victimization scenario on affect and evaluative responses to the bullying.