Our biggest goal this month is to teach adults about the difference between bullying and drama. Over the past few years, it seems that everything has become labeled as bullying. As the month progresses, we will share more tips and strategies to address drama, conflict, bullying and cyberbullying. Let’s dig a little deeper and learn more about bullying definitions and the different forms it might take.
What you need to know:
- Bullying is when a person uses their power, over a period of time, to emotionally or physically hurt someone on purpose. Power is your physical strength, words, social status, popularity and friends. Hurting others can be done through words, pushing, shoving, kicking, and tripping is using your power.
- Physical Bullying is pushing, shoving, kicking, spitting, hair pulling, book checking, tugging, checking each other, tripping and doing it repetitively!
- Relational aggression is a social emotional aggression between people in relationships, whereby “the group” is used as a weapon to hurt others that is done over a period of time with a differentiation in power. Relational aggression is a type of aggression that aims to hurt others through repetitively excluding, teasing, gossiping, and spreading rumors about someone.
- Cyberbullying is when someone is using the Internet as a channel of communication to bully someone else. It is using online popularity or social media status to intentionally harm another individual emotionally over a period of time.
We hope that these definitions help you to recognize bullying as educators in order to prevent it from spreading.
Love,
Bulldog