Oh yeah, that’s a very real thing. I tried to do my Master’s thesis on the psychological effects of bullying but when I got a look at the statistics I basically had a wee little breakdown and had to change my degree.
Because the statistics basically say: In a given year, about 5-10% of children are bullied. Very specifically: Your average classroom of 30 kids will, with stunning regularity, choose about 1-3 children and ostracize them. When we get students to rank-order the popularity of their classmates, that is a very effective way to predict who the bottom tier will be, the 1-3 kids with 0 friends. (In lower grades of elementary it’s rare for those 1-3 kids to band together, and if they do, it actually sinks their social status with everyone else even deeper) Bullying interventions that work on identifying that bottom tier of kids and work on getting them as many as one or two friends in the rest of the class, their mental health outcomes improve significantly.
So basically, in elementary school, a bullied kid is always “not like the other kids” because the statistical experience of being bullied is being trapped every day for a year in a room full of kids who almost uniformly hate you. In effect, bullied elementary kids have been traditionally kept in parallel prison cells, unable to see each other’s suffering.
It is sad, MASSIVELY sad, that a lot of bullying victims come out of their experiences hostile and unready to trust anyone else. It’s also massively sad that a lot of them come up with dysfunctional and, yes, oppressive theories to explain what happened, like, “The other girls hate me because other girls are shallow bitches.”
That especially happens to white kids–kids from minority groups are often more resilient to bullying (though other life forces might tank their mental health) because their parents were more likely to sit them down at a very early age and say, “Look, sometimes people are going to hate you and treat you horribly. They’re wrong, you don’t deserve it, and don’t take it personally.” Meanwhile white parents are more likely (although not the only ones) to go, “Well what did you Do Specifically to Make them bully you? 🙃 This is a totally individual problem independent of any larger social forces and also quite likely your fault.” And if all the adults are saying that, a kid is generally forced to conclude that it IS them, personally, and/or, find something or someone else to blame for what’s happening, and most of the available theories about Why People Suck are… really shitty to the people they’re describing.
IT’S FUCKED UP. It’s a regular ongoing tragedy. Which is rather more preventable than we like to think, if there was the time/money/social willpower to prevent it. 🙃 But “anti-bullying campaign” tends to mean “bring in a guest speaker once a year” not “permanently halve class sizes”.
