~A child who is a bully by age nine or ten—and possibly long before—is likely to remain a bully into adulthood.

~They have a strong desire to dominate.

~They lack empathy, the ability to fully grasp the feelings of others, and therefore come to deny the suffering of others.

~They are untroubled by anxiety, which can be a source of restraint when experienced in the right quantity.

~Up to the sixth grade, they are of average popularity, which then sharply declines with each passing year.  They tend to have two or three friends, usually other aggressive kids.

~By high school they are marginalized and not well-liked, which they don’t usually realize.

~They’re expert for their age in getting short-term payoffs, but lousy at long-term thinking and planning.

~Their verbal intelligence is lower than their peers.

~As they age they become increasingly selective with their targets.

~They’re less interested in the speed of surrender than in the pomp of pain and suffering.

We currently call what bullies do “antisocial.”  This is true, but it’s highly euphemistic.  If adults experienced what school victims endure, they wouldn’t call it antisocial—they’d label it criminal.  Those who’ve been bullied in the workplace know how it drains their soul.  For some absurd reason we collectively don’t think such draining takes place with children, or if it does, that it’s not as damaging.

Today, thanks to the blessing and curse of highly personalized electronic media, there’s even less easy escape from bullying.  Where students used to worry about being bullied at school, now beginning in middle school, they also fear that everyone at school will see them bullied all over cyberspace—for example, on MySpace or Xanga, or through instant messaging, text messaging, e-mail, blogs, cell phones, or chat rooms.

Cyber-bullying (also called online bullying) is willful, recurrent harm inflicted through the medium of electronic text; it’s using the cyber world to harass through personal attacks or other means.  One of the more recognized instances occurred when Eric Harris, one of the killers in the 1999 Columbine massacre, put up a Web site that discussed murdering fellow students.  Another was “the Star Wars kid,” whose classmates uploaded video of him posing as Darth Maul onto Kazaa in 2003.  The footage was downloaded and modified extensively, causing him extensive embarrassment, resulting in psychiatric treatment and his dropping out of school.  In 2005, People magazine noted that a thirteen-year-old boy had committed suicide after his classmates taunted and teased him about his size for a month via instant messaging.

One national poll revealed that at least a third of teens have had mean, threatening, or embarrassing statements made about them online.  In Illinois alone, researchers estimate that a half million kids have been victimized by cyber-bullying.  Ten percent were threatened with physical harm (which is a crime).  There’s even software that allows people to text and instant message people as if they are someone else.  There is no conventional way of tracking down the impostor.  The anonymity allows bullies to be even more malicious.

Australia’s Department of Education and Skills reported that one in five students have been victims of cyber-bullying.  Yet one in three students never reported the incident.  Canada has taken a lead in this arena with tougher laws; under its Criminal Code, it is a crime to communicate repeatedly with someone if your communication causes them to fear for their own safety or the safety of others.  IT is also a crime to publish a “defamatory libel,” writing something designed to insult a person or likely to hurt a person’s reputation by exposing her to hatred, contempt, or ridicule.

Next time:  The uncomfortable truth about victims.

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Paul Coughlin is the author of numerous books, including No More Christian Nice Guy and No More Jellyfish, Chickens or Wimps. He also co-authored a book for married couples with his wife Sandy, titled Married But Not Engaged. His articles appear in Focus on the Family magazine, and he as been interviewed by Dr. James Dobson, FamilyLife Radio, HomeWord, Newsweek, C-SPAN, The New York Times, and the 700 Club among others. Paul is founder of The Protectors, the faith-based answer to adolescent bullying, which provides curriculum for Sunday Schools, private schools, retreats, and individuals that trains people of faith to be sources of light in the theater of bullying. 

Visit Paul's websites at: http://www.theprotectors.org, and http://www.paulcoughlin.net

Visit Sandy's website for reluctant entertainers at: http://www.reluctantentertainer.com