Bullying: Is It the Victim’s Fault?

Sometimes we will notice that a particular child (or adult for that matter) is bullied in various environments during many parts of their life. Doesn’t this mean that this child is doing something to provoke the bullying?


Scientists, parents, and the rest of us often notice commonalities among children who are bullied. This is understandable when the motivation is to try to teach children how to be less vulnerable to bullying, how to stand up for themselves when bullied, and how to send a socially acceptable signals to others. Researchers have even discovered that certain behaviors in children are often met with bullying and harassment from others.


From this kind of information, we will ultimately glean ways that victims can empower themselves. This is good. But we’re forgetting someone here.


If we forget the child who bullies, we risk not solving the problem. First of all, the child who bullies needs help. Second, the child who bullies is misbehaving. Third, the misbehavior is often group sanctioned.


On the first point, empowering victims while punishing bullies is still a somewhat popular way to intervene in schools. While some children who bully enjoy hurting others, many are children who have been hurt themselves, and their bullying is a sign that they need care. They need behavioral change and emotional nurturing. Training the victim to be less victimizable does nothing to satisfy the deeper needs of the "bully."  Even if one victim no longer succumbs, the bullying child will just find another.


In addition, when one child bullies another, blaming the victim—even partially—represents a loss of contact with reality. Don’t get me wrong, people can be provocative. Some children’s behavior makes it easy for others to respond in unhealthy, aggressive ways. But the child who is bullied has absolutely no control over the actions of the child who does the bullying. The perpetrator is absolutely the only person in a position to choose not to perpetrate. Suggesting responsibility in the victim for the aggressor's actions disempowers the aggressor to make change and constitutes an additional assault on the victim.


Finally, bullying is a group process. There is much evidence to suggest that bullying is a socially condoned activity. Peers are present in a vast majority of bullying situations. They often fail to intervene and quite often encourage the bullying. Teachers around the nation admit, when asked anonymously, to bullying certain children in their classes. Many children grow up in homes filled with tension and violence. Considering these influences, the absence and not the presence of bullying in schools would be surprising.


In order to create safety in schools, we will have to make it the business of schools to teach positive social behaviors as an academic subject. These citizenry skills need to have equal place in the curriculum with the traditional paper-and-pencil subjects we teach our kids. Furthermore, we must recognize that families, teachers, and administrators need a lot more support than they receive from the broader society just to make it through the week, let alone to rear healthy children.


Blaming the victim, even the bully, has not really made a difference. Taking ownership of the problem as a nation will.

The Superhuman Fantasy

The fear that one will be discovered for the unworthy, incapable soul that one truly is has been identified in people often enough that it has been given a name: Fraud Syndrome. It is also called Impostor Syndrome. Like many social ills, I believe it stems from what I call the Superhuman Ideal.

After decades of watching polished personas on TV and in the movies, after centuries of reading fiercely edited texts of writers trying to make specific points, after millennia of watching specialists doing their jobs very well, we humans have developed the delusion that some people are perfect, or at least that their work is perfect. Unless we notice a flaw in the work of others, we tend to believe there isn’t one. Unless we see the mess backstage, we tend to believe that the show went off without a hitch from conception to closing night.

The belief that the good works or admirable personalities we perceive in others are more than just good—that they are perfect—creates in us a ridiculous standard. Our standards become perfectionistic. We create Superhuman criteria for humans because we believe we have seen proof. Some examples of the “evidence” for perfect humanity are:

George Washington was honest to the core.
Abraham Lincoln was honest to the core.
Ghandi was consistently peaceful.
The Beatles could not make bad music.
The World War II generation had ideal ideals.
Warren Buffett makes no business errors.
Rush is right.

When we observe the accomplishments of others, we tend to believe that they are more capable than us, that their accomplishments come easy for them, and that they have never created an abysmal mess for themselves at any point in their lives. But when we look at ourselves, we see the mess backstage. Seeing the flaws in ourselves, we feel anxious about the admiration we receive from others. Dialogues like this occur:

Other: “Oh, you were fabulous in the church choir.”
Self: “No, I messed up a couple of times.”

Other: “Your daughter is so well behaved.”
Self: “That’s what you think.”

Other: “Your house is beautiful.”
Self: “Oh my gosh no. It’s a mess.”

Even if we do not say these things aloud, we may be thinking them inside. The idea is that no matter what we have accomplished, we believe that if people got a look backstage at our lives or our personalities, they would see we’ve been faking it. We fail to accept ourselves as accomplished. We have set a Superhuman standard for ourselves.

This self-imposed standard not only causes us to hurt ourselves, but we soon find ourselves imposing it on others. So, if we like another person’s work, we see it as perfect; but when we see a few flaws in another person’s work, we may become very critical. Good enough is never good enough.

It is difficult to get past this illusion because society supports this incredible standard by highlighting the lives of child prodigies and accentuating the successes of our beloved heroes.

To dismantle this absurd standard, it is necessary to create a human standard that concedes incredible weakness, mountains of mistakes, intermittent immorality, and major messes in all humans. Then we need to adore accomplishments, celebrate baby steps, and honor late bloomings where we see them.

Of course, this shift to viewing ourselves and others as perfectly imperfect may be difficult or even impossible—but hey, we can fudge it. No one will notice.

Tender Loving Care: Rinse and Repeat

I often teach people mental health exercises to help them accomplish certain goals, like anxiety relief and better focus. I personally use some of the exercises that I teach. But I have learned that many people will cease to practice these exercises when they feel better. That’s when I think about the bathtub.

Many of us treat mental health problems like we, regrettably, treat weight problems. We do what’s necessary to get rid of the obvious problems and then we return to our previous life patterns.

Eventually, though, old problems rise again or life throws a new curve. Sometimes this will bring us back to our mental health “workouts.” But quite often we’ll get stuck first in a quagmire of self-doubt and recrimination, saying things to ourselves like, “What’s wrong with me? I thought I was all better. I fixed this aspect of myself. I cleared that demon!”

Truth is, the exercises are not only for "unhealthy" people. Just like physical exercises, mental and emotional health exercises are for everybody. Mental and emotional health don’t just arise out of nowhere. They have to be cultivated, nurtured, and maintained. I don’t care how together other people look to you, they need the exercises just as much as you do.

Equating emotional health to physical health, however, doesn’t always help make the necessity of regular nurturance clear to most people because it’s easy for many of us to view a life without continual physical exercise as normal.

But it’s a lot harder for us to imagine a life without regular bathing. So I suggest thinking of mental and physical health practices as we think about taking care of our bodily hygiene. Think of how your body feels every time you finish a shower. Think of the smell of soap in the air. Think of the way your skin feels when the sweat, dead skin, and day-old oil is rinsed away. Fresh. Then think of the way it must feel after days of not bathing—the stickiness, the stinkiness, the rashes (not that any of us would know this from experience).

Most people would not go without cleansing the exterior of their persons for more than a day or so, but we tend to think that our minds are self-maintaining machines. Our minds are a lot more like our bodies than we tend to think. They do not necessarily have the ability to take care of themselves.

Much like parents exist to take care of babies, and automobile technicians exist to take care of cars, there is a deeper, more mysterious part of us that exists to take care of our minds and hearts—daily.