Roles within Bullying Behavior with Dr. Alli Cipra

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

bully, kids, victims, cyber bullying, uninvolved, social faux pas, bystander, pee pants, joy, roles, brainiacs, picked, content, terrible, school, standout,

SPEAKERS

Amy Vujaklija, Alli Cipra, Joi Patterson

Alli Cipra: 00:03

What we found is very few people are completely uninvolved.

Amy Vujaklija: 00:08

Welcome to clipped content from Governor State University's teaching and leading with Dr. Amy and Dr. Joi. In this pocket size PD, Dr. Alli Cipra identifies the roles within bullying behavior. So let's get into it.

Joi Patterson: 00:26

Talk to us more about the roles involved in bullying.

Alli Cipra: 00:30

A lot of times we talk about the victim of bullying and bully and how to help them those who have been victims. But tell us about who is the bully because we're talking about middle school and kids this is a kid to who have the bully. First, we typically study three main roles in bullying, you have the bully, you have the victim, you have the bully victims, but there are actually five roles that are talked about in research. So you have the bully, you have the victim, you have both the bully victim, you have the bystander, and you have someone who's uninvolved. What we found is very few people are completely uninvolved. So this means they're not seeing it, they're not part of it. They're not experiencing it. I don't know about you. But I would have thought prior to starting this research, I would have thought that that was the majority of kids, but it's not. And then the bystanders, this whole other thing we can talk about, sometimes it's called the observer in research, but the victims and the bullies so the victims and the perpetrators and the bully victims, so they participate in both roles are pretty common. We used to think that the bully was the kid who had a really bad home life who was maybe bullied at home by their parents. And while that can be true, that's not the majority of what we see, we actually see a very large number of kids participating in both being a bully and being bullied. So they're the bully victims. So if they're being bullied by kids in their gym class, they might then bully kids in another class. We do know that sometimes these kids have difficult home lives. Sometimes they have lower self esteem. Sometimes they're being bullied by others. But there's not a clear like, this is the bully. This is why they're just so many other factors. And I think a lot of that goes back into cyber bullying because even the nicest sweetest kid feels a little bit of power when they can be anonymous, or when they don't have to face the person that they're bullying, when they can do it from behind a screen

Amy Vujaklija: 02:34

is that change who is most likely to be bullied? You That was my next question. In our middle school years, there might have been that standout child is most likely to be bullied. You were talking about clothing as well as joy. What you said about the cyber bullying could really change who is most likely?

Alli Cipra: 02:57

Yes, absolutely. So I think when the three of us were in school, they were the kids that you knew were gonna get picked on. You just knew it. And then there were the kids who were kind of picked on because of some sort of social faux pas or, you know, wearing the wrong clothes. I still remember when I was in seventh grade, somebody laughed so hard. They peed their pants, they were known as Pee Pants until they graduated. Terrible, right? When it's, it's either Yeah, we know that kid's gonna get bullied. And in the past, it's often been the kids who are lower socioeconomic status because they don't have the right clothes or shoes or whatever. Or oftentimes the heavier kids were bullied. But then again, the kids who do something, right, they do something, whether it's innocuous or not. And that is the trigger to the other kids that oh, we can make fun of them. Or we can do something. Now it's very, very different. Groups are very different now. Well, you to probably go in the school systems quite frequently. But when I was in school, we had all of these really kind of standard clicks, right? You have the jocks, you had the brainiacs or the nerds, you had the music geeks, you had the theater, kids, you had all of these different groups, the preppy kids. And now a lot of kids actually kind of move between groups a little more, which can be a good thing, but I'm not really sure if now we're able to pinpoint why someone might be a victim of bullying because there is more social movement. Yeah, there's still the whole Queen Bee and their entourage at the top and that gets into the whole socio metric status about are you pro social popular, are you anti social, popular, all of that stuff. So we still have some of that. But now with things being online, you can be bullied for other things. So one of my children is 11 and she is not allowed to be on Facebook or Tik Tok or anything like that. But she can do kids messenger because I can monitor everything and one of her friends sixth grade was sad because she was getting picked on online because her parents posted a Christmas picture of them. And apparently she looked terrible in the picture and people started making fun of her. This is the hard part. We don't have an answer because there isn't one answer. This

Amy Vujaklija: 05:18

was clipped content featuring Dr. Alli Cipra. From our podcast teaching and leading with Dr. Amy and Dr. Joi. Find the full length interview@www.go vst.edu/teaching and leading podcast. Stay tuned for more pocket sized PDs from Dr. Amy and Dr. Joi