CHAPTER 1

THE PROBLEM AND ITS SCOPE

Introduction

School are said to be the place where students learn and mold themselves into someone

they wanted to be, but that is not the only condition or situation that schools can give, it can also

be a battle field, a place of survival where famous and beautiful are honored and be respect while

those poor little once are bullied.

Bullying has become one type of violence that threatens a young person's wellbeing both

in schools and in the neighborhood. Bullying affects individuals, families, schools, and the

society as whole and it may result in the young people feeling powerless, intimidated and

humiliated by the aggressive deeds of fellow mates. Bullying is unwanted, aggressive behavior

among school aged children that involves a real or perceived power imbalance. The behavior is

repeated over time. Bullying includes actions such as making threats, spreading rumors,

attacking someone physically or verbally and excluding someone from a group a purpose. There

are also four types of bullying which is the verbal, physical, social/emotional and cyberbullying.

School bullying generally harms children's ability to learn at school and it is also contributed to

the dropout rates of the schools.

We are conducting this research because bullying is now a big problem in our society and

in our school. We take interest of this topic because we also personally undergone through some

levels of mild high school bullying at the same time.

Bullying, long tolerated by many as a rite of passage into adulthood, is now recognized as

a major and preventable public health problem, one that can have long-lasting consequences

(McDougall and Vaillancourt, 2015; Wolke and Lereya, 2015). Those consequences—for those

who are bullied, for the perpetrators of bullying, and for witnesses who are present during a

bullying event—include poor school performance, anxiety, depression, and future delinquent and

aggressive behavior.

Federal, state, and local governments have responded by adopting laws and

implementing programs to prevent bullying and deal with its consequences. However, many of

these responses have been undertaken with little attention to what is known about bullying and

its effects. Even the definition of bullying varies among both researchers and lawmakers, though

it generally includes physical and verbal behavior, behavior leading to social isolation, and

behavior that uses digital communications technology (cyberbullying). This report adopts the

term “bullying behavior,” which is frequently used in the research field, to cover all of these

behaviors.

Bullying behavior is evident as early as preschool, although it peaks during the middle

school years (Currie et al., 2012; Vaillancourt et al., 2010). It can occur in diverse social settings,

including classrooms, school gyms and cafeterias, on school buses, and online. Bullying

behavior affects not only the children and youth who are bullied, who bully, and who are both

bullied and bully others but also bystanders to bullying incidents. Given the myriad situations in

which bullying can occur and the many people who may be involved, identifying effective

prevention programs and policies is challenging, and it is unlikely that any one approach will be

appropriate in all situations. Commonly used bullying prevention approaches include policies
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regarding acceptable behavior in schools and behavioral interventions to promote positive

cultural norms.

Bullying starts in early age. Child starts to build an initial concept of bullying. Then, it

starts increasing and continues until it reaches its peak in the basic phase stage (4, 5, and 6). It

continues in higher basic stage, and then started to decline at secondary level (Dickerson, 2005).

Bullying is considered a common form of violence in schools. Various studies indicated that

bullying makes schools to be unsafe places for schools’ students and it contributes in the belief

that some schools are become not safe anymore (Maliki et al., 2009).

Shahria et al. (2015) reported that bullying is deemed as a serious problem in academic

settings in all parts of the world. They found that bullying has negative impact on academic

performance. Females were more affected than males by bullying. Bullying constitutes a

complex problem in school kids lives. It is a problem that affects all students, both bullies or

victims, and those who attended interpersonal violence. Bullying may involve many sections

verbal, physical assaults, threats, jokes or language, and criticizing. All of such factors affect

individually, or collectively, and contributes in child’s bullying. It is well known that bullying is

difficult to eliminate or to stop it in schools because it is used by students.

Alison (2016) stated that bullying is considered as global problem that affect emotional,

social, and physical wellbeing of school-age children worldwide Shafqat (2015, p. 45) argued

that bullying in schools occurs in any place either in school building or around school building

and may occur in bathrooms, school buses and during waiting for school buses, and in classes

which may require group work or after school activities. School bullying is a widespread issue
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that affects school students in many parts of their lives such as; psychologically, educationally

and professionally.

Sekol and Farrington (2016) found that bullies, compared to non-bullies have been

bullied before, bullying at school affects academic achievement since bullied children feel fear

and weak and in the same time it affects students’ personality traits and self-confidence.

Therefore, such situation makes bullied students unable to follow or to pay attention for their

study well and even they might do not like to go to school. Moreover, they miss opportunities to

participate with their colloquies or even enjoy school activities. Many researchers found that

there is a strong relationship between bullying academic achievement, Students lose

concentration when they are attending their classes.