Bullying in Schools Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Bullying in Schools - Essay Example By definition, the term bullying is used to describe a specific behavior pattern, usually found more among boys than among girls. â€Å"Bullying is characterized by bigger and stronger youngsters’ ‘victimizing’ their peers through the repeated use of negative actions, such as physical, verbal or relational aggression†. This gender difference is generally believed to be the result of a stronger male association with physical aggression as an appropriate means of establishing and maintaining peer status or dominance. For many of these children, whether victims or bullies, the patterns for their later treatment in school can be seen to be established to some extent at home. A study conducted by Schwartz, Dodge, Pettit, and Bates found that children who grew up to be aggressive victims in primary school had most often experienced punitive, hostile and abusive family relationships during their preschool years while those engaged in aggressive acts had witnessed greater incidences of adult aggression but had not experienced this aggression firsthand. However, those children who emerged as passive victims of bullying behavior in school demonstrated a little difference between their early home life with those children who were not victims. Early studies looking into the general category of what was initially termed ‘undesirable behavior’, which included acts of bullying, discovered that behavior problems such as bullying increased with age, reaching a peak between the ages of 9 and 13.