Bullies
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Thanks for downloading this edition of The Why Factor from the BBC, a program that seeks to find out why we do the things we do. I hope you enjoy it. I am a bully. I am a bully. I am a bully. Often when the subject of bullying comes up, it is seen through the eyes of those who have been bullied. I think that everyone is subconsciously a bully.

But people are less willing to talk about being a bully. I feel like we hurt people and then we walk away and we don't even think about it. This is the BBC World Service. I'm Shivani Kohok and in this edition of The Why Factor, I'm asking, why do bullies do what they do?

My name is Dunia Zayer. I'm ethnically from Morocco, but I grew up in New York. I'm 18 years old. That's Dunia, who you heard in a YouTube clip admitting to being a bully. We'll hear more of her story later on.

Bullying is really about getting access to resources. That's Tito Walker. He's a professor of psychology at Warwick University in England. It always occurs in situations where you're put together with people you haven't chosen to be with. That would be either in the family because you can't choose your siblings, it can be at school, they're not all your friends, but you're put together, or it can be at the workplace.

And the aim is really to get high in the hierarchy of dominance and to have access to resources like, for example, in preschool, it can be to the favorite toy, to friends, to get invited to parties.

But it increases again in early adolescence when the new resources, access to romantic partners. And for that, it's very important to be cool, to be up in the tree, to be socially liked and to be popular. And bullying is one vehicle to get there.

It actually starts already in the family. You find that sibling rivalry is very normal. Someone else comes into the family and there's a fight about resources like the favorite toy, the attention of the parents.

There's one group which very often, let's say in the public view, they think it's a person who doesn't know anything else and they use aggression or they try to exclude people. And these are called bully victims or sometimes called provocative victims. So they get victimized themselves and try to fight back, but are very unsuccessful. In fact, these are the least popular and the most disliked children, for example, in the schools.

With your words like knives and swords And weapons that you use against me In the past, I felt the need to get back at the people who did me wrong. I wanted to show them that they hurt me by hurting them. Dunia's admission was the end of a process which started years earlier. You know, I was too out there and too hyper and too, you know, just over the top, so it made me a bit of a target. You can take me down

Just one single blow And students started spreading rumors, very terrible rumors, like I smoke or I'm a lesbian, etc., etc. And because you're in middle school, those things bother you, you know. When you reach high school, everyone comes out of the closet and everybody smokes and it's no big deal. But when you're in middle school, the moment someone calls you something that you're not or says that you do something that you're not, you automatically take it to heart. All you're ever

Why you gotta be so mean? I'm a Muslim, and I also have a lot of health issues. And those two things made it so people had a lot of things to make fun of. When I was in middle school is when Osama bin Laden was a thing. I remember people used to write on the bathroom walls like, Dear Dunya, Osama bin Laden's dead, you're next. I would go to the bathroom with a bottle of Clorox and try to wash away the things that people were writing about me on the bathroom stalls. It got to the point where, um...

Instead of going to the cafeteria, people would come up to me and be like, oh, are you Dunia? Like, are you that girl that everybody's always talking about? Did this ever end or was there a turning point? No, I left the school. I had to run away.

Then there is another group of bullies, which we call the ringleader bullies, who never get victimized by others, who don't get into trouble, but use it as a very strategic way. And they're hardly ever discovered, for example, by the teachers because they have got a very good social understanding, but they're callous and unemotional in pursuing their strategy.

There's a real stigma attached to being a bully. That's Natasha Devon. She's a mental health campaigner who visits schools and colleges in the UK. There's an exercise that I do where I ask a class to raise their hand if either they have experienced bullying directly or they know someone who has and every hand goes up. And then I ask them to raise their hand if they have bullied someone and more often than not, none of the hands go up.

And of course, that's a problem because if somebody is caught out for bullying, they will try and defend themselves. Nobody wants to think of themselves as a bully. So they'll say that it's the other person's problem for being too sensitive or that they only meant it as banter. They'll try and justify their behavior. And in doing so, they'll often perpetuate that behavior. So it actually stops us from resolving the issue.

Ian Rivers is a professor of education for social change at Strathclyde University in Scotland. We did one study in a local authority where we asked, it was 2,002 children, why they bullied others. And we got about 184 kids who agreed to tell us about the reasons that they bullied others. And part of that was to do with trying to understand how school dynamics work.

play out. Bullying is very much a relational issue. It's kids in the same class or in the same year group. And so we wanted to know what were the features that kids identified that made others stand out and be of less value in the school. And so some of them reported that some of their victims were poorer because they didn't dress as well, because they weren't particularly good at academic work.

And, you know, there was some really, really awful reasons such as, well, we wanted to bully them because their mum had died.

So quite often we will find that people who perpetrate bullying pick up on social messages about the value of others. So they might identify people who are different from them in a number of ways. So they might have a disability, a special educational need, they might be of a different sexuality or a different race and culture or indeed a different faith.

And there is a value judgment that a bully makes about the worth of that person. It sounds very constructed, but of course, lots of the decisions that a bully makes about why they're going to bully a person is born out of the social circumstances in which they live, the prejudices that are within society.

and also the injustices that they perceive to have happened to them or to others like them. It was never really physical, I mean one or two occasions. Sam is someone who's willing to talk about why he bullied people when he was at school.

It's some time ago now, and he can look back on it with real clarity. Most of the time it was just like name-calling. So I'd find something about someone that was different, whether that was they were more of a feminine guy or whether they were short or just anything, really. When you were bullying, you were aware that you were hurting these people, right?

I was aware that it probably wasn't the best behaviour, but at the time I wasn't really taking into consideration how this made other people feel. How did it make you feel? I was quite numb to feeling, so I wasn't really taking into consideration what I was doing or how I was feeling or anything like that. I just kind of did it in a hope that someone would ask me how I was or...

speak to me instead of just isolating me and kicking me out the classroom. The reasons why people bully have been explored in surveys. Liam Hackett is the chief executive of the pro-equality and anti-bullying charity, Ditch the Label. We found that those who bully are far more likely to experience something stressful or traumatic such as bereavement, divorce,

strained relationships with their family members. They're also far more likely to have lower self-esteem, which is actually fascinating because what we consistently find at Ditch the Label is that one of the highest rates of bullying is appearance-based bullying. Now, if you have a generation of young people who are very self-critical and don't necessarily feel good about themselves,

it's quite often that they project those feelings of insecurity onto other people which does result in appearance-based bullying. If you're confident, happy, you do not feel the need to go out of your way to try and bring others down. You don't get that. So there's got to be a root issue and we're not going to find that root issue or help that young person stop perpetrating bullying behaviours by punishing and demonising them.

These are victim bullies, almost. There are certain circumstances which have caused them to be in a place where they feel insecure and then end up bullying. Have you done any research about ringleader bullying as part of your work in the area?

So what we actually know from our research is that anybody who has experienced bullying are twice as likely to go on and perpetrate the bullying of others. And anecdotally, bullying can be used to establish somebody's position within a social hierarchy. So if a young person feels perhaps like they don't have unconditional friendships in their lives and that their friendships are based on

on the condition that they behave in a certain way, then this can often result upon perpetration of bullying behaviours in order to fit into a crowd, which is why we see quite often young people can consider themselves to be the outspoken, the funny one in the classroom. And it's often a fight for survival almost because they want to be accepted and they almost are trying to insulate themselves from being victimised to bullying themselves.

The online world provides a different dimension for bullies. Justin Patchen is the co-director of the Cyber Bullying Institute and professor of criminal justice at the University of Wisconsin in the USA. With technology, you can perhaps set up a fake profile and target that person from afar and

try to cloak your identity to some extent. And so there's kind of that unique aspect to it. Another unique aspect, I guess, of the face-to-face bullying is it could be physical, right? So you don't have that in the online world. So whether it's pushing someone or hitting them or even threatening violence, I suppose you could threaten violence online and off, so there's some overlap there. So in short, the

The methods and the mechanisms and the types of harassment do show some similarity from online and off.

When something is posted online, certainly more people can see it more quickly. The other thing is the perception for the target of the harassment is that everyone has seen that and everybody's in on the joke. So if one person says a mean thing to another person face-to-face at school, maybe just that person saw it or experienced it. And so other kids could...

maybe spread rumors about what happened, but when something is posted online, particularly a public forum, then everybody has access to it. And even if only one or two people saw it, the perception is that everybody saw it, everybody's behind it. So it definitely amplifies the potential for harm. Why you gotta be so mean?

And it was to the online world that Dunia turned after she had left the school where she had been bullied. I made my Instagram where I started making posts to try to speak up for people. I wanted to show them that bullying happens to so many people, like to so many. And the people who are bullying them don't acknowledge it. You know, after I left the school that had so many horrible things that happened, I

I mostly wanted the people from that school because I knew they followed me on Instagram. I wanted them to know just what they had caused and what they were doing because you never know what someone's going through. Peter Harrison-Evans from the UK think tank Demos explains the results of a survey of 16 to 18-year-olds' online experiences.

We found that just over a quarter of 16 to 18 year olds say that they have insulted or bullied someone online. And a further 15% saying they have joined in with others to quote unquote troll a celebrity or public figure. I am a bully. I'm a bully.

When I said I am a bully, it wasn't because I was going out of my way to make fun of specific students in school. Once I got big on Instagram, I had some issues with some of my friends. I had gone live and was talking about it because I talked to my followers about everything. But what I had failed to acknowledge is that

I was speaking ill of these people in front of thousands and thousands of people. I've had 150,000 followers. And speaking ill of anybody, even if you didn't have the intention of people making fun of them, it's going to happen. You know, I would go live and I would talk about these people who did me wrong because I was hurt. And, you know, sometimes I would say mean things about them just because I wanted everybody to not like them, just because I didn't like them. I didn't even think that I was literally doing what other people did to me.

It's a phenomena that Justin Patchen has observed in his studies of why people resort to cyberbullying. Sometimes the...

you know, have been bullied or cyber bullied themselves is a common reason. So it's kind of like revenge or they feel like they're being mistreated and nobody has done anything to hold accountable the person who was mistreating them. And so they feel like they can do it themselves. They can get away with it. There won't be any accountability or they're frustrated at the fact that the school or the

the person doing the bullying, their parents haven't done anything. So they're basically getting revenge. So that's very common. But Justin says there is also another reason why some people engage in bullying.

It may be surprising to you. Probably the number one reason we hear, at least from students, for why they engage in bullying and cyberbullying is they just think it's funny, particularly when it comes to online variants. They're just, you know, they're trying to have a laugh. Maybe they're trying to...

fit in with the friends that they're around, and so they're targeting somebody else, directing that hurtful content towards somebody else so that maybe they won't be targeted, but they just think it's funny. Away from the online world, there's another world where the bully is at work.

literally in the workplace. The term that we use in research is called abusive supervision, but in the common vernacular, we might call it bullying or bully supervisors. And it would take the form of taking credit for somebody else's work, verbally abusing them, embarrassing them in front of other people, blaming them for things that they didn't do.

to the things that people that engage in domestic violence do from a psychological perspective but a non-physical. Sherry Moss is a professor at Wake Forest University in North Carolina in the U.S. It doesn't make a lot of sense that bosses would bully their best performers. In general, bosses will tend to bully subordinates who are provocative in some way or who are weak in some way. So typically bosses

bosses will bully poor performers. And you can imagine, not to ever justify abusive supervision, but poor performers are frustrating and annoying, and they make you angry. And so very often, you have this hot kind of abuse toward a poor performer, or perhaps somebody who shows weakness in some way. And so people that will tend to bully will choose a victim that is a

provocative and in one of those ways. So you wouldn't think that a high performer would be bullied. Certain kinds of bosses may bully their high performers. And we explain this through something called social dominance theory.

And social dominance theory suggests that there are hierarchies in society. And there are differences among people in those different levels of the hierarchy. And those that are in higher places in the hierarchy want to sustain the status and privilege that they have from their place in society.

And so when somebody from a lower rung on the ladder attempts in some way to move up or shows signs of acquiring resources or gaining status that somebody of a higher place should have, then the people in the higher place feel threatened. And when they feel threatened, then they will turn around and be abusive or victimize those from a lower status.

Sam, who used to be a bully in his school days, only came to realise he was a bully when he talked about his future with one of his teachers. We were having a conversation and she said to me, because she didn't know that this is what I was doing, so we sat down and we had a conversation and she was like, what do you want to do when you leave school? Because you've only got like a year and a half or something left.

what do you want to do when you leave school? And I literally sat there and I said, I have no idea. I was like, I don't know what I want to do. I don't know where I want to go. And then she started listing off qualities that I had within me, like things that she thought were good qualities of things that I could do.

which then I was like, okay, if someone can see this within me, then I might have a chance of actually making a better future for myself.

There's one guy who, about two months ago, I sent him a message basically apologising for everything that I did and giving him a bit of a backstory of what was going on at the time. And then he was like totally cool with it. He was like, we're grown up now, we don't need to worry about that. Everything's cool.

We've always branded these people as bullies. And I get that. I was bullied myself for 10 years and I was angry for a very long time. And I think the narrative surrounding bullying is actually quite toxic because me as a young child and many of the young people we help, they blame themselves. They think the reason they're being bullied is because of the colour of their skin or their sexuality or how they look or

And instantly to know that the reason you're being bullied isn't because of you, it's because of the young person who is attacking you is an incredibly empowering thing because we put the emphasis on the person victimized to it and inevitably they want to change themselves. Now we need to move that emphasis onto the person who is perpetrating the bullying.

And I'm not saying there's no role for punishment because to an extent there is. But what I am saying is we need to be moving away from that, trying to understand what that young person has got going on in their lives to make them want to use their disposable time to try and bring other people down. I'm Shivani Kohuk. You have been listening to The Why Factor on the BBC World Service.

You can listen again on the website and if you have enjoyed this episode of The Y Factor, you can find more subjects such as hypnotism, dreaming and alcohol addiction. We'd love to hear your ideas too for future topics. Email us at they're mean because they're mad inside and they don't know how to express it so they're mean to others. They don't even realise they do it and then when they do realise, they want to change themselves.

Thanks for listening to The Why Factor. If you'd like to hear more episodes, there's a wide range of options on our website. There are other podcasts from the BBC World Service you might like. I recommend The Inquiry, which asks four experts to get to grips with one pressing question from the news. I hope you enjoy it.