Introduction
Non-physical forms of
bullying among school
pupils: a cause for
concern
Michael J. Boulton and
David S. Hawker
The authors
Michael J. Boulton is a Lecturer and Active Researcher in
Developmental and Social Psychology and David S.
Hawker is completing a PhD in the Department of
Psychology, Keele University, Keele, Staffordshire.
Abstract
Considers which behaviours pupils and teachers regard as
bullying. Finds that a substantial proportion of people fail
to include non-physical acts such as deliberately leaving
somebody out of activities, laughing at someones misfor-
tunes, and name-calling in their definition of bullying.
Reports on the frequency with which various behaviours
were experienced by young people, and how they might
affect standardized measures of psychological wellbeing.
Finds that many children were bullied in non-physical
ways, and that these experiences were associated with
psychological disturbances. Suggests that health educa-
tors should do more to widen teachers and pupils concep-
tions of bullying to include non-physical acts of violence,
and to encourage schools and other institutions to do
more to combat them.
Health Education
Number 2 March 1997 pp. 6164
MCB University Press ISSN 0965-4283
61
In recent years, it has become clear that chil-
drens relationships with their peers can have
important consequences for their psychologi-
cal health. On the positive side, good quality
friendships may directly contribute to chil-
drens sense of wellbeing, and they may also
ameliorate the harmful effects of other stres-
sors. On the negative side, relationships that
are characterized by abuses of dominance and
power, and which involve violence of one sort
or another, appear to be associated with a
range of psychological disturbances. The term
bullying is often used to refer to some (but
as we shall see not all) of the behaviours that
are common features of relationships of this
latter type.
In this paper, we shall look in some detail at
what specific behaviours teachers and pupils
regard as bullying, report on the frequency of
what we regard to be physical and non-physi-
cal bullying, examine the possible effects of
the different manifestations of bullying on
childrens mental health, and consider the
implications of this material for health
educators.
The problem of bullying
We start by considering the term bullying.
In the past decade, researchers, practitioners
and the media have all contributed to raising
awareness of this negative aspect of childhood
peer relationships. The former have shown
that many young people are involved.
Although figures vary from study to study, a
value of one child in five being involved as
perpetrator or victim was not atypical from
early studies which set out to quantify the
extent of the problem[1,2]. These early stud-
ies tended to adopt what could be considered
global or inclusive definitions of bullying, in
that a wide range of behaviours were explicitly
included.
Practitioners have also been very active.
Numerous anti-bullying projects have been
carried out. Some have met with an apprecia-
ble level of success, and important lessons
have been learned about how to combat
bullying[3]. The media, too, have played their
its part. Graphic accounts of how bullying has
driven some children to the depths of despair
and, in some cases, to take their own lives,
have pricked our collective conscience.
 Non-physical forms of bullying among school pupils
Michael J. Boulton and David S. Hawker
As a consequence of these efforts, it is
probably true to say that the vast majority of
schools now recognize that bullying is not
something that should be swept under the
carpet, but rather that it is a pernicious prob-
lem that demands attention. It would be
difficult to find a school that has not taken at
least the first tentative steps on the road to
developing an anti-bullying stance. However,
in our view, anti-bullying work could be made
more effective if it was based on a body of
convincing evidence about the phenomenon
as opposed to beliefs, stereotypes or myths,
which unfortunately appears to have been so
in some cases. For example, rather than start-
ing with the assumption that we know what
behaviours are most detrimental to childrens
wellbeing, and hence which ones should be
deemed bullying and unacceptable, we argue
that it would be better to collect data on these
issues and use these to inform professional
practice.
What is bullying? Does non-physical
violence count?
What is bullying? Studies by ourselves and
others have shown that while everyone is likely
to agree that it is a bad thing, and to regard
physical assaults as bullying, there is disagree-
ment about what other acts count as bullying.
For instance, what about calling people nasty
names, laughing at them when they make a
mistake, excluding them from activities, or
even looking at them in a certain way? Should
we see these things as bullying and, as such,
regard them as patterns of behaviour that
should not be tolerated?
While it is difficult to provide a definitive
answer to this question after all, each
episode is likely to be unique there are rea-
sons why we think it is necessary at least to
Table I Percentage of teachers, junior school pupils and secondary school pupils who considered specific behaviours to be
bullying
Behaviour
Physical assaults hitting, kicking, etc.
Deliberate social exclusion
Laughing at someones misfortunes
Name calling
Malicious gossiping
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Health Education
Number 2 March 1997 6164
consider the possibility that these sorts of
activities may be bullying. A recent study in
the USA found that 9-12 year old children
often viewed these behaviours as associated
with anger and as involving harm to others,
two characteristics that psychologists take as
defining features of aggression[4]. For these
sorts of reasons, researchers working in the
anti-bullying field have moved away from the
stereotypical view of bullying as just physi-
cal assaults. There is now a consensus that
children can and do rely on many non-physi-
cal acts in the service of their hostile interper-
sonal aims[5].
But do adults who work directly with
young people, and indeed young people
themselves, regard some non-physical acts as
bullying? In order to answer this question we
recently asked a sample of pre-, infant, junior,
and secondary school teachers and, separately,
samples of junior and secondary school pupils
to state what types of behaviours they did and
did not believe were bullying. The results are
summarized in Table I. They clearly indicate
that there was much more agreement for the
physical item than for all of the non-physical
items. This was most pronounced for deliber-
ate social exclusion fewer than half of the
teachers and the junior school pupils, and
only about one in five of the secondary school
pupils, regarded this as bullying.
We were also interested in how often young
people experience these types of negative peer
interactions. To generate data, we asked
junior pupils in interviews, and secondary
school pupils in questionnaires, to indicate
the frequency with which they were harassed
by their peers in particular ways. Our findings,
shown in Table II, clearly indicate that a large
number of pupils in our samples reported that
they were regularly victimized in a range of
physical and non-physical ways.
Junior Secondary
Teachers pupils pupils
(n = 138) (n = 96) (n = 170)
96 87 82
48 45 21
58 50 42
75 70 66
77 Not asked 54
 Non-physical forms of bullying among school pupils
Michael J. Boulton and David S. Hawker
Table II Percentage of junior school pupils (n = 96) and secondary pupils
(n = 170), who reported that they had been bullied in particular ways by their
peers
Junior Secondary
Behaviour pupils pupils
Others exclude you from their games 52 30
You get laughed at 46 43
You get called names 45 56
You get kicked 40 30
Everyone has a secret and they
wont tell you 43 40
No one will talk to you 27 12
You get punched 22 18
Does non-physical bullying matter?
A key question for professionals concerned
with childrens mental health is whether these
results matter. One way to address it is to
consider the possible effects of non-physical
harassment. In one study, we presented junior
and secondary school pupils with a list of
physical and psychological forms of harass-
ment, and asked them to indicate how upset
they would be if they were a victim of these
things. From their responses we were able to
produce a rank order of behaviours from
those that were most, through to those that
were least, upsetting.
Our findings suggest that children regard
physical assaults as being more upsetting than
non-physical forms of harassment. These
results match those of another recent study in
which teachers were asked to rate 50 student
behaviours in terms of their serious or dis-
turbing nature. The problem of children who
were characteristically unsocial and with-
drawn was ranked only 33rd when the average
ratings were placed in order.
If these perceptions were accurate, then it
might not matter so much that so many teach-
ers and pupils do not regard non-physical
forms of abuse as bullying. Conversely, if they
were inaccurate, and non-physical bullying
could be shown to be associated with negative
outcomes, then there would be cause for
concern. We therefore set out to investigate
what effects, if any, various types of peer
abuse have on children.
In order to obtain an objective assessment
of how often each child experienced physical
and, separately, non-physical bullying, as
opposed to measures based on their subjective
self-reports which could be inaccurate, we
asked each participant to nominate those
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Health Education
Number 2 March 1997 6164
classmates who were bullied in each of the two
different ways. For each type of bullying, the
more nominations a child received, the more
we could be confident that she/he was bullied
in this way.
In order to assess the possible impact of
these experiences on the mental health of our
participants, we also gave them a battery of
standardized psychological tests. This gave us
a quantitative measure of their levels of
depression, self-worth, loneliness, and anxiety.
Our intention was to examine the relationship
between the two types of bullying on the one
hand, and the measures of psychological
wellbeing on the other. However, it was diffi-
cult to untangle the effects of the two types of
bullying because children who were bullied in
one way were also likely to be bullied in the
other. Nevertheless, by statistically control-
ling for the effects of each type of bullying, our
results indicated that whereas experiences of
non-physical forms of bullying were indepen-
dently associated with higher depression and
loneliness scores, this was not the case for
physical forms of bullying.
In another study we are carrying out with a
colleague, Amber Arazi, we are investigating
what adults can remember about the hurtful
effects of physical and non-physical forms of
bullying, and what emotions they feel now
about these childhood experiences. Of the
137 adults we have contacted so far, 94 (68.6
per cent) indicated that they had been teased
in a malicious way at school. Of these, 72 per
cent said they remembered feeling sad at the
time the teasing took place, and 33 per cent
said they felt sad now about these experi-
ences. Similarly, 58 per cent indicated that
they remembered feeling depressed as chil-
dren because they were teased, and 11 per
cent indicated that they currently felt
depressed when they thought about this
childhood teasing.
These findings, then, provide strong evi-
dence that non-physical bullying is associated
with some mental health problems. But is it
the bullying that causes the adjustment prob-
lems or, rather, do these problems usually
precede bullying? To help resolve this issue, in
another series of interviews we asked children
who admitted to being victims of bullying to
state whether they felt better, worse or the
same about themselves prior to the onset of
the bullying[1]. The vast majority (82 per
cent) indicated that they had felt better before
the bullying had started. This, albeit limited,
 Non-physical forms of bullying among school pupils
Michael J. Boulton and David S. Hawker
evidence suggests that it would be appropriate
to regard bullying as a factor in the aetiology
of mental health problems.
Implications for health educators
Taken together, we believe that the results
from our various studies have enormous
implications for health care professionals,
health educators and others concerned with
childrens psychological wellbeing. We have
shown that some damaging forms of peer
interaction that do not involve physical
assaults are less likely to be regarded as bully-
ing than are physical acts such as hitting and
kicking. We have also shown that many chil-
dren report that they regularly experience
these non-physical peer assaults.
It would therefore seem to be the case that
what could be regarded as emotional and
psychological bullying is a widespread prob-
lem in our schools (and probably elsewhere)
but one which is not being taken as seriously
as physical bullying. We think it is appropriate
that health care professionals and health
educators attempt to widen adults and
pupils definitions of bullying to include such
things as malicious teasing, deliberate social
exclusion and mental subordination.
It would not be unreasonable to suggest
that this change could lead to fewer children
being exposed to these negative patterns of
peer interaction. For example, a teacher who
does view a particular type of behaviour as
bullying may be more likely to intervene if
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Health Education
Number 2 March 1997 6164
she/he saw it happening, or respond more
vigorously if it was reported to her/him, than
another who does not view it as bullying.
Similarly, children may be less likely to behave
in these ways if they were made aware of the
possible negative effects of their actions.
While changing peoples attitudes and beliefs
about non-physical bullying is likely to be a
difficult endeavour a sticks and stones
philosophy appears to be an integral aspect of
many adults behaviour management strate-
gies if we do not try, then we can expect that
many young people will continue to suffer
psychological disturbances as a consequence
of patterns of peer interaction that are at
present going largely unchallenged.
References
1 Boulton, M.J. and Underwood, K., Bully/victim
problems among middle school children, British
Journal of Educational Psychology, Vol. 62, 1992,
pp. 73-87.
2 Whitney, I. and Smith, P.K., A survey of the nature
and extent of bully/victim problems in junior/middle
and secondary schools, Educational Research,
Vol. 35, 1993, pp. 3-25.
3 Smith, P.K. and Sharp, S. (Eds), School Bullying:
Insights and Perspectives, Routledge, London, 1994.
4 Crick, N., Bigbee, M. and Howe, C., Gender differ-
ences in childrens normative beliefs about aggres-
sion, Child Development, Vol. 67, 1996, pp. 1003-14.
5 Bjorkqvist, K., Lagerspetz, K.M.J. and Kaukainen, A.,
Do girls manipulate and boys fight? Developmental
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Aggressive Behavior, Vol. 18, 1992, pp. 117-27.