Bully/Victim Problems Among Middle School Children

Following the innovative research by Olweus (1978), there has been a growing concern among educators and researchers with bully-victim problems during childhood. Bullying, as a class of behaviors, can be conceptualized in a number of different ways. In this article, we agree with the way it is viewed by Smith and Thompson (1991). They stated, "bullying … can be taken to be a subset of aggressive behavior. As with aggressive behavior generally, bullying intentionally causes hurt to the recipient. This hurt can be both physical or psychological" (p. 1). In addition, they stated that three further criteria particularly distinguish bullying—that it is unprovoked, that it occurs repeatedly, and that the bully is stronger than the victim or is perceived to be stronger. Quantitative data on the extent of such problems in various European countries and elsewhere are disturbing. For example, Olweus (1987) developed an anonymous questionnaire, and in an extensive study involving 140,000 Norwegian students aged between 8 and 16 years found that about 9 percent reported bullied and about 7 percent reported bullying others "now and then" or more frequently. Age was found to influence the extent to which children reported being bullied: Among primary school children (8-12 years), the figure was around 12 percent, but this dropped to about 4 percent for junior high school students (13-16 years). This age trend was not apparent in terms of the reported incidence of bullying others: It was about 7 percent in both cases.