Systemic patterns in bullying and victimization

Using a new non-anonymous questionnaire and a nomination method by which victims were asked to name their aggressors, Chan (2002) collated the responses from individual victims to produce name-clusters that were studied for systemic patterns of bullying and victimization within the whole-school community. Three such patterns emerged: serial bullying, multiple victimization and the familial pattern in bullying. Serial bullying is the situation where one perpetrator preys on two or more victims, often traversing a broad range of classes and grades to target his/her victims. Although relatively fewer in number, this group of serial bullies was found to be responsible for a sizeable percentage of the bullying problems in the schools sampled. The data obtained support the notion that concentrating intervention,efforts on this group will reap tremendous payoffs, by effectively eliminating the origin of much of the school's various forms of violence. The converse of serial bullying is multiple victimization, that is, more than one perpetrator can converge on one victim. The reasons why some children are chronically victimized and attract attack from multiple sources was discussed in the context of personality dispositions, peer-relational and family-relational factors, as well as its developmental links with workplace victim status in adulthood. The third pattern studied by Chan (2002) involved cases where children in the same family (i.e. siblings) turned up being named as bullies by their peers. Family influences (e.g. rearing practices, parental modelling) on aggressive behaviour in children have long been known. But transmission of influences between siblings, through acting as 'key pathogens' and/or 'partners in crime' is also responsible for the aggregation of delinquent behaviour. The familial pattern in bullying found in Chan's (2002) study is consistent with such transmission pathways. The ability to reveal the hidden patterns of interaction and links amongst bullies and victims in the context of the whole-school community attests to the significance and practical use of the SLS peer nomination method of asking victims to name the perpetrators of bullying. It makes possible the tracking of bullies and victims beyond class boundaries, thereby providing information that goes beyond individual data and incidence rates. What is more important, intervention and treatment can be more effectively implemented in a systems-wide approach, when there is integrated information from various key sources.