Looking at many social issues, one gets to realise that many times, people are being bullied. This bullying goes further and causes many other unintended damages in homes, workplaces and personal lives. Society needs to understand this societal killer, and those who bully others need to understand the damage they are causing in communities.

What is bullying?

Bullying is regarded as unwanted, aggressive behaviour that involves a real or perceived power imbalance. This behaviour can be repeated or has the potential to be repeated over time. People who are bullied or who bully others may have serious, lasting problems. To consider such behaviour as bullying, it should be aggressive and include an imbalance of power, meaning using physical strength or access to embarrassing information to control or harm another’s reputation, and it may be happening more than once or have the potential to happen more than once. Many a time, this happens to us, and we try and justify it, or we wrongly identify it with many other acceptable behaviours, like he is my boss, a community leader, a church leader, an academic of note and many others.

Bullying may also include making threats, spreading rumours, attacking someone physically or verbally, and excluding someone from a group on purpose, to name a few examples. 

Bullying may come in many forms, verbally, socially and physically in nature. Bullying can occur everywhere: in schools, homes, workspaces and socially. Having a society with a gap between the haves and have-nots, bullying becomes an acceptable practice, but very damaging in the long run. Society has turned a blind eye to some of these bullying tactics being applied to ordinary men and women, either by their family members, colleagues or bosses, by so-called educated citizens and, at times, by the churches.

Impacts of bullying

Bullying impacts the entire community. It affects your health, well-being and entire personal development. It makes people feel lonely, unhappy and frightened. It’s not just those being bullied who feel these effects, but also those who are witnessing this bullying, and they don’t like it because it makes them feel worried and uncomfortable. Those who bully others are also likely to have problems and be unhappy with themselves. Being bullied may affect everything about yourself, your identity, your community and your future. People being bullied often experience depression and low self-esteem that may last a lifetime. Verbal and social bullying can be just as harmful as physical bullying.

Society or communities need to play their role in preventing bullying. We need to have the talks about what bullying is and how to stand up to bullying safely. 

People need to understand that bullying is unacceptable and be able to seek help when confronted by its ugly head. We need to check up on each other as friends, family and colleagues and be able to listen and understand one another. We need to understand that people should be able to live with one another in a kind and respectful manner. We need to come back to the African way of life, as guided by the African philosophy of “Ubuntu”, meaning humanity.

When society knows what bullying is and is able to identify bullying, it will be better equipped to stand up to those bullying them or, better yet, seek help. We need to encourage people to speak up when they are being bullied or see others being bullied. Talking about bullying directly is an important step in understanding how issues might be affecting you and broader society, in my personal opinion.

By treating each other with kindness and respect, we are modelling a society that has no place for bullying. 

Even if it seems like our communities are not paying attention, they are watching how people manage stress and conflicts and how we treat our friends, colleagues and family members. Stop this ugly face of society called bullying. 

*Jason Naule, communications expert and community activist.