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Bullying is defined as a repetitive attack in verbal and physical means. This can include verbal attacks, physical attacks and relational aggressions. Bullying behaviors are typically carried out to youths that are more vulnerable than the bullies, and may cause great deals of psychological and physical damage (Psychology Today). Many studies have been targeting the issue of bullying worldwide to analyze their causes and influences, and several organizations are designated to research on the current severity of the problem. In 2017, 1 of the 5 students in the US reported themselves as victims of school bullying (Seldin et al., 2019). Also, 41% of them stated that they are concerned that such issue may happen again (Seldin et al., 2019). From these data, it is not hard to see that the issue of bullying is exceptionally severe in the current society, and are extremely harmful to students’ physical health and mental states. The causes and effects of bullying actions are actually varied in many scopes and perspectives. In the same research, the authors got the conclusion that the factors that contributed to the phenomenon is the deficits in appearances, races, genders, disabilities and sexual orientation of the victims (Seldin et al., 2019).That is to say, bullying is a key factor in the victims’ lose of confidence and depression. In their perspective, the victims’ mental struggles between fighting back and staying silent can be an orientation of research and included in one of the scopes of certain people towards the problem of bullying. This essay would analyze the effects bullying can have on the victims and methods we can intervene in the issue.

The effects of being bullied on mental health

The effects of bullying can be evaluated in several perspectives since it induces both physical and mental damages. The populations involved in bullying scenes are classified into 4 parts, including pure bullies, pure victims, bully-victims and neutrals (Haynie et al., 2001). The author conducted a survey to all the students in a school and asked them whether bullying or being bullied, and found that a lot of bullies are or were victims of bullying, so that concluded the 3 types of the whole population. The pure bullies refers to teenagers that bully others but have not been treated harshly by others. The pure victims, in the contrary, refers to the victims that have not bullied anyone else. The neutrals are referred to those who are not involved in the bullying issue, such as the bystanders, who are neither bullies nor victims. The special group is the bully-victims, they are the people who was bullied and turned to bully others (Haynie et al., 2001). All the classifications except neutral generates negative effects, but the bully-victims generate the most(Olweus, 2008). The effects of bullying on the mental health can be talked about with respect to each of the populations.  

In the perspective of pure bullies, they are not completely benefited from their identity as bullies. In some cases, they suffer from their own deeds. Although the bullies experience little insecurity and anxiety, the bullies are found to have poor psychosocial functioning ability (Byrne, 1994; Craig, 1998; Olweus, 1995). The bullies are found to be unpopular among the students or the society, although having a higher status than their victims (Haynie et al., 2001). It causes an inferior loop that the bullies keep bullying, becoming unpopular, and kept bullying to gain a relatively high status to make less people dare to do things against their wills. The continuing of the loop may cause more victims to appear. Moreover, the bullies are comparatively more often than others to commit serious abusing in the future (Cook et al., 2010), and to encourage internal conflicts between their own victims (Caravita et al., 2010).

In terms of the victims, they are the most harmed population. As mentioned above in the section of bullies, the victims suffer more in terms of losing the original status they had when they weren’t bullied. This is possible to induce lose in confidence, self-doubt and depression (Haynie et al., 2001). To be divided into different kinds of harm, the physical harms, including kicking and hitting the victims, not only causes physical injuries, but also leaves stress to the victims due to physical damages and biological disorders(Swearer & Hymel, 2015). This also affects their social interaction capabilities and makes them less able to communicate with others, when asking for help or comfort(Swearer & Hymel, 2015). In another perspective, the verbal harms would include name calling, spreading rumors and a large range of bullying methods that involves humiliating the victims. As researched, this is the most common type of bullying nowadays since physical contacts are too explicit and easy to be spotted(Wang et al., 2009). In the victims’ perspectives, making fun of others is not as inferior as bullying, which is often defined as dominating or manipulating one’s actions at one’s own will to gain a higher status(Cook et al., 2010). So, it is very possible that the bullies are not just making fun of their victims and unintentionally let them hurt, but are serious about harming the victims in terms of their mental health and their reputations. It is researched that  the victims of bullying had been diagnosed to be suffering from food disorders and loss of positive emotions. They also had social skills and reputations under average and perform worse in their tasks(Farrow & Fox, 2011; Kuyendall, 2012). The scholars also suggest that a problem in this is the internalization of the bullying issue. The children may blame themselves for being bullied because of their deficits in skills, appearance or their families (Cook et al., 2010). 

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How can we intervene to Reduce bullying

In order to stop bullying, there are several ways people can intervene, which can be divided intomethods in terms of large scale and small scale. The large scale methods involve implementing regulations and laws to restrict the behavior, and the small scale methods mainly focuses on comforting the individuals and leave choices to smaller institutions like schools and parents. Between the two, the small scaled projects are mostly studied by most people since they are more varied compared to the large scaled ones. Most of the small scaled actions take place in schools, which is believed to be highly influential to students. Also, schools are believed to be a reflection of the real society, and would have reflected most social conflicts as bullying(Hazler, 1996).About the specific solutions, many schools had set up classroom and school wide rules to restrict bullying behaviors. They have also tried to offer lectures involving the bullying contents as well as meeting the different populations of bullying with their own mentors in order to improve their recognition towards the problem(Wurf, 2012, Kärnä et al., 2011, Salmivalli C, Poskiparta E. , 2012, Bauer et al., 2007, Stevens et al., 2000, Olweus, 1997). These steps aim to create a positive school environment and to improve the students’ relationships in the school atmosphere (Bauer et al., 2007, Stevens et al., 2000, Olweus, 1997). It turned out that in the macro perspective, the action had a positive value, however, it also causes unintentional harm to the mental states towards certain students that are different in terms of gender, religions and ethics (Bauer et al., 2007). Another school based method is to offer social skills training, which is SST. The SST method is defined as any forms of training programs involving to enhance one’s ability to socialize and to communicate. This is expected to be helpful to prevent students to become bullies because of inferior communication skills and ask for help if needed (Byrne, 1994; Craig, 1998; Olweus, 1995). The SST method was only implemented in a small amount of schools, so it may not be the most feasible solution in the current situation(DeRosier, 2004). However, it turned out that students have decreased bullying phenomenon in the schools that implemented the method, and it appears to be better compared to the original one in the schools in US, as researched(Wölfer & Scheithauer, 2014, Ando et al., 2007). However, in some schools in other cultures, this measure turned out less effective, one of the cases is a Japaese school, which SST program only decreased 9 victims of bullying(Ando et al., 2007). From these, we see that the school methods can be effective, but it may depend on the culture it is used to determine how effective they are, and this cannot offer a certainly universal solution to all students in all countries, it is important to consider each culture, each school or even each family’s youth separately, so another perspective of small scale solution is the family solution. Family solutions involves the interventions of family members of the bullies or the victims, which are more convenient and easy to carry out. Actually, family members, especially parents who are closer to the youth, are likely to be involved in the bullying issues(Brock et al., 2012). That is to say, parents are possible to induce their children to become bullies or to make them victims(Nickerson & Osborne-Oliver, 2009). In contrary, appropriate education, intervention and caring to the children can control the effect of bullying on the children and control the effect. In a research conducted by researchers, they found that inferior parenting styles and low tendency to solve the problem as well as lack of supervision and even family abusing can be harmful to children and pose risk factors in bullying behaviors, but vice versa, a good parenting style and caring to children can prevent this from happening(Bowes et al., 2010). The aim of the family method would focus on this: to educate the parents about how to prevent their children from booming bullies or being bullied, and to give caring so that they can react to their elders about the matters. The parents would also learn how to deal with the problem , which involves telling the issue to the authority like school or police and how to comfort their children’s feelings after the issue. Through a meta-analysis, it is already justified that parents can have large positive impacts on the victims’ mental states(Lereya et al., 2013). In the study, the researchers collected articles published from 1970 to 2002 using qualified key words like “bully”, “victim” that resemble children along with “parents”, “authoritative” that refer to parents in order to find the most supported conclusions about the relationships of the two. The research eventually selected 6123 articles from three platforms, PsychINFO, Eric, and EMBASE, and the total amount of papers they examined was 11741 articles. The three criteria of their selection are: The studies must include direct relationships between parents, children, schools and bullying behaviors. The authors should offer specific statistical results of their studies, and should come from published and credible sources. Using a method called MOOSE, the meta-analysis coded different behaviors of the children, and analyzed the papers mentioning the effect of them in terms of Age range, Victimization informants,  Victimization subtypes, Victimization status, Designs and Parenting behavior variable. The final conclusion is that parents’ behaviors can both positively and negatively affect the children in terms of facing or carrying out bullying behaviors, and are of very great importance(Lereya et al., 2013). In a research, the author put forward the FSFF method  for family to intervene. FSFF stands for Friendly Schools Friendly Families, and refers to training the whole school and families to build an environment to prevent bullying. The FSFF method was applied to a school for 3 years for this project, and it involved over 1400 families, and they get information about how to prevent bullying. Finally, the method appeared to be useful in controlling such behavior(Lester et al., 2017). A family solution seems to be useful, but it would be not feasible to assemble all students and parents to teach such knowledge. Considering cultural and budget factors, many schools and parents are not keen on fixing psychological or interpersonal problems of students. In many schools in China, for example, students get refused several times when asking for help after being bullied, often find psychological aids useless or be seen as weak and timid and refused to help by their parents. For instance, according to local institutions in Zhengzhou, a city in China, there are already over 13 percent of students feeling reluctant to go to school in the fourth grade, and the stat kept growing to about 27.8 percent in tenth grade. Apart from this, in the tenth grade, over 87 percent of students developed reluctance to study(Jin & Zhu, 2021). The feeling is likely caused by many factors. They may include pressure from the peers, society and parents, and certainly, bullying. According to surveys, the development of the feeling may be caused by the over justification of study and great emphasis of scores in schools, causing students to form classes according to the scores they have because that would determine how teachers judge a student’s trait and shape the teachers’ preference. However, schools typically place little attention on the psychological states of the students, especially those with low grades(Lu et al., 2024). That is a consequence of a major tendency of many people neglecting the influences bullying can have to one, and that psychological problems are important enough  to be considered in one’s life. Here, we would need to offer large scale solutions: solutions based on all population in a society, and is able to generate a large influence. In some places, the major departments already takes step to ensure the students’ studying conditions, and the people didn’t stay idle and actively asked the institutions for requests of actions. In Hong Kong, the institution EDB had received a total of 35 requests that asked for actions to reduce bullying although the schools are said to handle all matters well, and they posed zero tolerance to such behavior. In order to counter this behavior, the government encouraged schools to design certain curriculums, activities and departments to reduce bullying. This includes a campaign with the theme of “Harmonious School – Anti-bullying”, and offering “Information Literacy for Hong Kong Students” learning network for the schools and the students to protect their personal information for real and cyber bullying. The institution EDB also cooperated with the government and non-government institutions to join forces to solve the problem. Specifically, one of the non-government institutions offered a telephone hotline support to all students in the local area to report about bullying issues, which strongly boosted the progress of the action. Moreover, Hong Kong government not only had soft solutions, but also hard ones. This include employing police forces to enforce the regulations of bullying behavior. The government employed police for each school that specialize in solving problems of bullying and defending the mental states of the students. Not only real bullying, even cyberbullying behaviors can be accused and found using the police forces. The police are also in charge of preventing crimes developed from bullying, and also rising the awareness of society about crimes(The Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, 2023). However, it appears to be rare that a government can be so efficient and able to spend such resources on the bullying interventions, a rather loose method, like pure online education, is put forward in some districts, but appeared not useful. A proper large scale solution should still be considered for a longer time. 

How to improve the mental states of the bullied population.

The methods of recovery for the adolescents to be freed from the shadow of bullying would mostly involve the support from family, therapy and change in recognition of the problem. Since bullying may generate large problems, it is urgent for us to comfort the feelings of these people and help them regain their confidence. A framework called developmental assets framework highlights several protective factors that buffers negative influences to one’s mind and thinking process, this includes support from parents or other adults outside the family; supportive and caring school environment; feeling safe at home and in school; school and family environment that has clear and consistent guidelines for behaviour; engagement and bonding with school; social competencies; and high self-esteem (Scales et al., 2004, Leffert et al., 1998). A rejected individual would be in strong desire of belonging and acceptance, and it is possible that they became bullies later on, which emerges the bully-victim population mentioned in the former parts(Downey & Feldman, 1996). It is important to create senses of safety and security among these bullied population. As mentioned above, creating an appropriate and safe school environment would work to comfort the victims, and also, at a smaller scale, parents may also provide such feelings. To be specific, the sense of safety is more likely to be developed from parents of certain styles, like supportive ones offering constant cares(Kerig et al., 2014). One of the methods is to resolve the problem in terms of social network. This would have to find someone that are sympathetic of the victims and establish conversations. Studies have proved that the victims having friends to talk to are more outgoing than those who don’t(Kochenderfer‐Ladd, 2004, Smith et al., 2004). Another feasible methods is the SST method. SST focuses on training the skills of the victims to communicate with people, by improving social skills, they would be able to rebuild confidence and self-esteem, therefore face the society with more positive attitudes. SST can change one’s definition of oneself, and alleviate their anxious feeling about this (Blakeney et al., 2005; Edwards et al., 2011). In the study conducted by Maddern and his colleges, the combined method of CBT and SST made a monumental success on the improvements of the mental states of the subjects, who were faced by serious mental illnesses(Maddern et al., 2006). 

Conclusion

From the contents discussed, we knew how the bullies and the victims get psychologically wounded, ways to reduce the bullying phenomenon and how to comfort the feelings of ones that are already bullied. Surprisingly, in the articles we have found, the methods to reduce the effect have a lot of similarities and relationships with the means to comfort the feelings of the victims. For example, Improving home and school environments can not only prevent bullying, but also increase confidence of the bullied population and comfort them. This may mean that if we can control the situation, not only would the phenomenon of bullying be reduced, but also the victims can face their lives more positively under such environments. The scars of bullying would eventually diminish due to changes in the people and society. Specifically, the consequences of being bullied would be reflected on both the bullies and the victims, especially in terms of socializing skills and social grades. It is hard but urgent to offer a solution. In terms of the methods to reduce it, many schools, families and government are not acting out as well to limit this phenomenon, and it would be needed for schools, families, governments and organizations to join forces to make a difference. As it comes to comforting the victims, it is highly linked with the environment, if bullying phenomenon is still present, it would be still possible that new bullies may emerge from the victims. In contract, with the phenomenon controlled, the number of bullies would not expand as much, and the victims can feel secure and walk out from the shadows. To draw a conclusion, all the progress depends on how people counteract and discourage the behavior of bullying. People have to acknowledge the negative sides of this behavior and to stop it with full strength. One is unable to do it alone, and it requires the awareness of individuals, families, governments and schools.

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