School Bullying: Types, Impacts, and Prevention

Running head: SOCIOLOGY
Foundations of Education
Name of the Student:
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2FOUNDATIONS OF EDUCATION
School bullying is one of the major issues taking place in the field of education.
Thousands of students are affected by this issue every year and go into huge clinical phases of
depression. School bullying takes place due to various reasons. However, it often takes place due
to the lack of proper awareness among students. Students often bully heir schoolmate or their
classmates with whom they are not able to connect properly. For instance, the native students of
USA might discriminate between themselves and the other non-native black-skinned students on
grounds of their races or skin color. This takes place mainly because they are not taught by their
parents or their school authorities regarding the harmful impacts of bullying.
As per the opinion of Gruber and Fineran (2016),) school bullying can take place in
different ways and different forms. There are different kinds of school bullying. There are also
no specific targets of these bullying that takes place in the schools. Sexual harassment is one of
the most commonly seen school bullying that victimizes students. Smith and Thompson (2017)
have argued that sexual harassment is much more severe than school bullying. However, he
agrees to the fact that any and every type of bullying like verbal, social or cyberbullying has a
very harmful impact on the minds of the children or the students. At the same time, he is of the
opinion that sexual bullying is much severe and often takes place for a very long time. A huge
amount of researches have been carried in the “question/response format” or “time frame”
formats in order to know the actual experiences of sexual harassments that the students have
undergone. One of the important aspects to be noted in this context is that the term sexual is
avoided by the experts or the researchers most of the times when they are enquiring from the
students regarding their experiences of sexual harassment.
The other forms of bullying are examined over a time frame of last 30 days whereas the
case of sexual harassment or sexual bullying is examined over the last 12 months. This shows

3FOUNDATIONS OF EDUCATION
that often students are unable to understand what is taking place with them and how can they
fight this issue. Sexual harassment often takes place for a long time period and both boys and
girls are the victims of this severe crime. As per the research carried by Gruber and Fineran
(2016) about 83 % of girls and 79% of boys suffer sexual harassments during the course of their
high school degrees. Bullying of this kind is often sex-specific. In other words, the girls tend to
bully other girls and the boys tend to bully other boys. Students are often threatened to not
disclose about whatever is happening to them. It has been seen that in many cases the students
try and fail to share about these incidents, Often the school authorities or the family members
neglect this aspect or fear to rake any strong steps to escape from getting negative or a bad
reputation.
The other kind of school bullying that severely affects school students is verbal bullying.
This often takes place on grounds of racial, ethnic or any kinds of social aspects. For instance,
the aspect of name calling or making any sexist comments by a certain student towards any other
student is seen as a form of verbal bullying. Ttofi et al. (2016) have suggested that bullying
cannot always be seen or it does not have to come in the form of physical abuse. A person can
severely get depressed and nervous by verbal bullying as well. For instance, a student who is
bulky or too thin might often be bullied by the other students of his or her class. The other
students might abuse them by calling them fatty, too thin or any other such names in order to
abandon and isolate them. This isolation has a very bad impact on the child who is being bullied
as it hurts their feelings and often acts as a great blow to their self-confidence. This might result
in severe and harmful health impacts like nervousness, lack of concentration, unmindful-ness and
also other such harmful impacts. Baumeister and Vohs (2018) have suggested that the best way
in which the verbal abuses or verbal bullying can be checked is by boosting up their self-