BULLYING, What Is The Impact?

BULLYING, What Is The Impact?

            Bullying is deliberately targeting someone who is different or vulnerable and intimidating them. Bullying is often repeated. It is aimed to belittle the other person and hurt them physically and emotionally. It is typically directed at certain groups or sorts of individuals such as a person from a certain background, race, religion or sexual orientation. Bullying has often been considered as something that someone experience at some point in their lives. This bullying carried out by children, teen and adults are increasingly prevalent so it has a long-term impact on the lives of someone who is being bullied.

            Bullying can make mental health problem. Dr Jean-Baptiste Pingault and his team at UCL found that bullying causes many mental health conditions, such as anxiety and depression, years later. Previous studies have shown that bullied children are more likely to suffer mental health issues. But it has been unclear whether this is because of the bullying or pre-existing issue like genetic influences or home life – are more likely to explain the relationship. This research provides robust new evidence to demonstrate the causal link. But the good news is that the results revealed that for some young people these detrimental mental health effects decreased over time, a discovery which could show that children exposed to bullying develop resilience. To gain these unprecedented insights, the researchers surveyed 11,108 participants from the Twins Early Development Study, a longitudinal study collecting data from sets of twins in the UK from early childhood through adolescence. By using twins, researchers were able to account for the confounding effects of their genes and shared environment because they studied both “identical” twins who have matching genes and home environments and “non-identical” twins, who don’t share all of their genes, but have matching home environments. Both children and their parents filled out questionnaires: at age 11 and 14 they were asked about bullying, and at 11 and 16 they were asked about mental health difficulties. Researchers found a causal link between exposure to bullying and mental health problems like anxiety, depression, hyperactivity and impulsivity, inattention, and conduct problems. Two years later, the impact of anxiety persisted. Five years later, many of these problems had improved, but 16-year-olds who had been bullied at age 11 remained more likely to have paranoid and disorganised thoughts.

                Bullies are more likely to experience physical health problems as adults, while bullies experience more protective health benefits. Usually the first thing that people think about bullying is the mental health and psychological condition of being a victim. A professor of psychiatry and behavioral science, William E. Copeland, PhD, at Duke conducted a study to see if there were biological consequences that we could measure over time. Copeland and his team have been following a large group of children in western North Carolina for more than 20 years. Using blood samples taken over time, they looked at C-reactive protein or CRP, an indicator of inflammation that has been linked to several diseases, including heart disease, in adulthood. “Victims of bullies had the highest levels of inflammation in adulthood,” he said. “This is a concern because it can be an indicator of future health risk.” Copeland and his team were surprised to find significantly lower CRP levels in the blood samples from bullies. The bullies’ CRP levels were even lower than levels found in people who had no involvement in bullying at all. “The experience of being a bully seems to exert a protective effect against the normal increase of inflammation we see across the population as a whole,” he said. With a link to physical health established, Copeland said the next step in his research will be to determine the impact bullying has on the aging process. “We want to see if the deterioration that goes along with aging is accelerated in people who are exposed to high levels of stress, such as victims of bullying,” he says.

            Students who bully others tend to have difficulties with other relationships, such as those with friends and parents. Targeting those relationships, as well as the problems children who bully have with aggression and morality, may offer ideas for intervention and prevention. Those are the findings of a new study that was conducted by scientists at York University and Queens University.  The researchers looked at 871 students (466 girls and 405 boys) for seven years from ages 10 to 18. Each year, they asked the children questions about their involvement in bullying or victimizing behavior, their relationships, and other positive and negative behaviors. Bullying is a behavior that most children engage in at some point during their school years, according to the study. Almost a tenth (9.9 percent) of the students said they engaged in consistently high levels of bullying from elementary through high school. Some 13.4 percent said they bullied at relatively high levels in elementary school but dropped to almost no bullying by the end of high school. Some 35.1 percent of the children said they bullied peers at moderate levels. And 41.6 percent almost never reported bullying across the adolescent years. The study also found that children who bullied tended to be aggressive and lacking in a moral compass and they experienced a lot of conflict in their relationships with their parents. In addition, their relationships with friends also were marked by a lot of conflict, and they tended to associate with others who bullied. The findings provide clear direction for prevention of persistent bullying problems, according to Debra Pepler, Distinguished Research Professor of Psychology at York University and Senior Associate Scientist at the Hospital for Sick Children. Pepler, who is the study's lead author, calls bullying "a relationship problem."

            As a result, bullying that can involve everyone such as children, teen and adults, has an impact that will affect their future, this is referred to as the long-term impact of bullying. Mental health problems, physical health problems and social relations problems with prompt and appropriate care and the support system available, victims can prevent some potential long-term consequences of intimidation. Bullying has a serious effect on someone's health and social long-term. Immediate intervention and long-term follow-up can help mediate some of these effects. It is very important that schools, families and communities work together to understand intimidation and its consequences and find ways to reduce, and hopefully eradicate, intimidation in both schools and the community.