Bullying: What leaders need to know.

Is It *Really* Bullying?

Picture this.

You’re working remotely, and your Internet is on the fritz. You’ve tried to fix it several times, but your camera keeps freezing on video calls with your team. Next thing you know, you receive a notification. It’s a meme of your face, frozen on camera in a silly expression, and it’s been shared with your entire team.

Is this an example of bullying? It’s all about context. You might ask yourself:

• What was my initial reaction to the meme?
• What kind of relationship do I have with the person who shared the meme?
• Do I feel comfortable with this person’s actions?
• Has this person done something like this before to elicit the same reaction?

If you think the meme is funny, have a friendly relationship with the person who shared it, and feel comfortable with this person’s actions, sharing the meme could be considered teasing. Teasing is a normal peer interaction, and it’s good for our relationships. It’s a “harmless and playful” way for us to bond with each other. When we engage in teasing, we show each other that we can joke around and still have a positive relationship.¹

However, teasing can quickly become a symptom of bullying. If you feel violated and hurt by the meme, have a distant relationship with the person who shared it, and feel uncomfortable with this person’s actions, sharing the meme could be considered something more severe than teasing. When teasing is one-sided like this, particularly when it happens repeatedly over time, it’s a sign of bullying. If the person who shared the meme has a history of repeated, unwanted actions like this that have negatively affected you, sharing the meme is an example of bullying.

What is Bullying?

Bullying is not a normal peer interaction, and it’s always harmful to our relationships. Bullying occurs “when someone aggressively uses their ‘power’ to target another individual with repeated, unwanted words or actions,” inflicting physical and emotional harm upon those who are targeted.²

What feels like bullying to one person might not feel like bullying to someone else. We all have an individual sense of what behaviors violate our boundaries depending on our personal experiences with conflict. We can also sense this collectively; different generations, for instance, sometimes have unaligned understandings of the line between teasing and bullying. Left unaddressed, the blurry line of what constitutes bullying can lead to unnecessary misunderstandings and tension.

We can generally identify a behavior as “bullying” when:

• It is clearly meant to be hurtful and threatening to the person being targeted.
• It inflicts physical or emotional harm on the person being targeted.
• It is one-sided, as in the person being targeted is not subjecting the person targeting them to the same behavior.
• It involves an imbalance of power between the person being targeted and the person targeting them.
• It happens repeatedly over time.
• The person being targeted is having difficulty stopping the behavior.³

Bullying can take many forms. Direct bullying is obvious to anyone who witnesses it, while indirect bullying is more subtle and more difficult to identify as bullying.⁴ Both direct and indirect forms of bullying can happen anywhere we spend our time—in-person or virtually.

Cyberbullying is a form of bullying that occurs through digital communication tools such as text messages, social media, the Internet, online games, etc.⁵ It’s just as harmful as any other form of bullying, and it disproportionately affects young adults across the globe. In 2019, a UNICEF poll found that “one in three young people in 30 countries said they have been a victim of online bullying."⁶ Clearly, cyberbullying is a pervasive global issue.

Why Does Bullying Matter?

Left unchecked, bullying can spiral into other severe, and even unlawful, forms of conflict like prejudice, discrimination, hate speech and hate actions. For example, microaggressions—the everyday slights and insults experienced by members of marginalized groups—are a form of indirect bullying motivated by prejudice.⁷ And when microaggressions escalate from repeated, unwanted words to repeated, unwanted actions, bullying motivated by prejudice becomes discrimination.

In the United States, bullying overlaps with unlawful discrimination when behaviors target a protected class, including race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, and disability.⁸ Hate speech and hate actions are extreme forms of discrimination that publicly target individuals or groups who belong to a protected class.⁹ In this way, bullying behaviors can feed into the social justice conflicts that shape our lived experiences. Translation: Bullying matters.

How Can We Help?

Bullying not only harms the individuals being targeted but also poisons our global community. As members of the Blanchard Community, we stand for empathy, equity, inclusion, and belonging. Unrestrained, bullying threatens all that we value most. As leaders, it’s our responsibility to take an active stance against bullying—and it starts with joining the conversation.

What is your experience with bullying?

• Have you been targeted by bullying?
• Have you targeted someone with bullying behaviors?
• Have you been a bystander to direct bullying?
• Have you advocated for someone who was being targeted by bullying?

Be a part of our mission. Share your story in this anonymous survey or in the comments.

- Written by Lucy Dannewitz

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