Long-Term Impacts of Bullying Bullying

Bullying is an undesirable, hostile behavior exhibited by adolescents due to perceived and sometimes real power imbalance. This is a repeated behavior, or one that may be possibly repeated, as time goes on. Both the bullies and those bullied can develop long-term problems. For a child's behavior to be termed 'bullying', it must be a hostile behavior and include the following:

Power imbalance: Children who bully make use of their physical strengths, their access to information that could be considered embarrassing, or their popularity to harm or control the activities of other children. These imbalances in power can alter with time and circumstances, even when they involve the same set of people.

Repetition: These bullying behaviors do not occur just once, or can occur recurrently.

Bullying behaviors involve certain actions like threatening others, physical and verbal attacks, spreading rumors about someone, or leaving someone out of a group activity purposefully (Stopbullying.gov, n.d). It is hostile behavior, inflicting intentional and repeated harm in the form of injury or discomfort. Bullying can come as a physical contact, mere use of words or in subtle actions. Most times, the individual being bullied cannot protect himself or herself and often does nothing that could have triggered bullying (APA, 2016).

Bullying is a typical way of harming and humiliating others deliberately. It is a long-lasting behavioral style, mostly because the bullies often have their way-at least initially. Bullies are not born, they are made, and bullying begins at a very early age, once parents fail to handle the early hostility of a 2-year-old effectively. Without victims, there would be no bullies, and they do not bully just anybody they see; the victims are mostly people who appear scared even before they are bullied. Everyone hates the bully, but no one loves the natural-born victim either. Bullies cause problems in their place of work and relationships when they get older. Most experts are of the belief that bullying is becoming more rampant because more children grow up without having some unique experiences that help them develop some necessary social skills. lots of reports assert a decline in the rate of playing freely with peers; but it is a well-known fact that playing with their peers help children develop necessary skills that endear them to their age mates and help them learn how best to tackle social challenges (Understanding Bullying, 2016). School bullying has both short-term and long-term effects on the physical and mental health of children. There a number of new programs around the world channeled towards containing bullying. There is very limited previous work on the efforts made on preventing bullying, past narrative reviews, and past meta-analyses of the anti-bullying programs. The right definition for school bullying involves several major elements: verbal, physical, or intimidation or psychological attack aimed at causing fear, harm, or distress to the victim; a power imbalance (physical or psychological), with a stronger child or sometimes children, intimidating children who are less powerful; and recurrent events between the same set of children over a long time.

School bullying can take place in the school premises or while students are going to school or returning from school. When two people with the same strength (verbal, physical, or psychological) intimidate each other, it is no longer bullying (Farrington & Ttofi, 2010). This paper looks at the prolonged effect of bullying, results, and impacts.

Long-term impacts of bullying

The experience one gets from being bullied can cause lots of long-term damage to the victims. This is self-sustaining, and can also be supported with different researches by different bodies. Suffering physical harm with the aim of avoiding prolonged harm is not necessary. Using mere words and common gestures are enough. As a matter of fact, the age-long saying that sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never be able to harm me, can be said to be more or less precisely backwards. For most parts, any physical damage inflicted on a victim during a fistfight heals quickly, especially if the damage is inflicted on the victim during the growing years. The primary wounds suffered by bullying victims is the most difficult to mend because it inflicts damage on their self-concepts and, their personalities and identities. Bullying is simply an effort to instill self-hatred and fear. Being the victim of repeated bullying destroys one's ability to see oneself as a capable, desirable and efficient...

There are two main undesirable outcomes that emanate from learning to see yourself as undesirable and incapable person. The first undesirable outcome is that it becomes less likely that you will be more susceptible to depression, angry or bitter. Becoming a victim of bullying makes you feel undesirable (to yourself), and that the world can't keep you safe.
Being a victim of bullying lowers self-confidence and conviction in abilities, makes one feel unsafe in the world,,(when you are bullied by people who are physically stronger than you) that you lack the required power for self-defense when you are repeatedly forced to think about your obvious inability to reduce or stop the bullying, Learned Helplessness is setting you up (e.g., where you are made to believe that there is little or nothing you can do to help yourself no matter how hard you try even when this is so untrue), and this sets you up for depression and helplessness. Simultaneously, you start accepting how helpless and hopeless you are, you equally get to learn how bullies see you, which means you get to learn that others see you as pathetic, weak, and a loser. By the way identity works, you are set up with the belief that whatever the bullies say about you has got to be true. It would have been great if everyone possessed a great deal of self-confidence, but identity just does not work this way. Identity is just a social phenomenon. Others make meaningful contributions to it. Especially when people are still very young and are yet to survive a handful of life's challenges, it is not easy for people to understand their capabilities and strengths and what they can achieve. Much of what the society sees as identity among young people, and even among the older generation is really a sort of other-confidence, which means that the confidence of most people is strengthened continuously by the people surrounding them and what they make them believe about how good and worthy they are in both subtle and overt ways. This is the main reason why most people love being members of certain groups-it gives them positive feelings about themselves. Bullying makes people feel they do not belong to groups; and makes them believe that they are inferior to others in many different ways.

Doubting the stark reality of not being better than an outsider or outcast on being beaten or humiliated publicly becomes a bit harder. Only the exceptionally confident or well-supported individual can hold back from internalizing what bullies say to him/her and start bullying himself/herself the same way bullies do to him/her and start thinking like a real failure. Conversely, it is quite easy for victims to start thinking of themselves as worthless, pathetic, weak, and incompetent. These are the types of thoughts that can make you depressed, or, when combined with fantasies of revenge, to rage and retribution (Dombeck, 2014).

Where the first undesirable result of bullying opens up almost immediately as a wounded self-concept, the second undesirable outcome manifests much slowly with time. It is hard for you to believe in yourself with a wounded self-concept, and once you find it hard to believe in yourself, you will have a more difficult time triumphing during hard times and difficult situations. Low academic performances can occur easily when victims of bullying give in to depression or get demoralized. They also occur when the victims start avoiding school to avoid being bullied. These low academic performances are not the major problems. The main problem is that once these low academic performances become too pronounced or happen for a very long time, the victims can lose advancement opportunities to further their studies, and eventually, employment. I have gone through retrospective works where there were reports of people leaving school to avoid being bullied continuously, and this must have limited the employment prospects open to them as qualified adults. Dropping out from school may be one dramatic example of how bullying can affect an adolescent's early life, but there are definitely other ways depression and anger as a result of bullying can harm and cause developmental delays in people's progress.

Unavoidably, the sensitive kids are always singled out for mockery; the kids who easily cry; are always the easiest targets. They are targets due to the way they are, most sensitive kids start thinking about their sensitivity as a very negative thing and make efforts to avoid being sensitive, or channel their sensitivity towards anger or revenge. When you are a kid, this does not work out. Reinventing yourself without first moving to a new place is always difficult, and it…