The reality of Spanish educational centres is behind the phenomenon of bullying, a worrying and unknown situation. Santiago Ramírez Fernández, a researcher of the department of Evolutionary and Education Psychology of the Universidad de Granada, has carried out an extensive assessment of the phenomenon of bullying among students of Primary and Secondary Education from several approach levels through his thesis “Bullying among schoolchildren and other conducts-problems for cohabitation: a study from the group-class context”.
His study, carried out in the city of Ceuta, has produced a series of conclusions in line with other similar research works: according to Ramírez, the profile of the maltreater-intimidator and the victims of bullying still respond on most occasions to the typical profile, although his fieldwork has revealed the existence of certain subjects who differ with regard to the typical characteristics of the group they belong to. If most of the experts agreed up to now that most of the bullying attacks came from very popular children, accepted among their classmates, Ramírez’s thesis shows that in certain cases, their classmates despise harassers and reject and censure their attitude.
Something very similar happens among the victims of bullying: ‘battered students are not always ‘the marginalized’ of the classroom. The study of the UGR shows that a small percentage of the children who have been bullied are popular in the group, a circumstance that could help them to escape from the bullying at one stage.
A radiography of bullying
Santiago Ramírez´s analysis has been carried out among a population of 587 students of the public schools ‘Lope de Vega’ and ‘Reina Sofía’ and the high school ‘Luis de Camoes’ of Ceuta. His research work intends to go deeply into the knowledge of bullying and the characteristics of the involved persons from a broad perspective considering the rest of the cohabitation problems of the centres and the dynamics of the relations established in the en school groups.
The incidence of serious bullying cases in Ceuta is not higher than those showed by other national and foreign studies. The study concludes that in our classrooms there is a cohabitation of 3.1% of intimidators, 6.4% of victims, 1% of victimized-aggressors and 89.5% spectators, 33.3% of which has never been involved in bullying situations and 56.2% has.
Another new aspect of the research work backed by the UGR is that the number of girls involved in violent sanitations has increased although still the re are more boys who act both as aggressors and victims of bullying. Besides, the forms of bullying according to sex have overlapped too: if not long ago the rumours and social exclusion were typical of women and physical aggressions and threats of men, this difference is disappearing little by little.
The importance of preventing
In bullying there are different degrees of severity: 42.6 % of children from Ceuta have been occasionally bullied, 7.6% suffer it with certain frequency and 6.4% are victim of serious bullying. According to Santiago Ramírez, it is necessary to explore low-intensity bullying in order to lay the foundations for a preventive education.
The study distinguishes between the bullying suffered by Primary and Secondary Education students. The profile of a victim of bullying in Primary Education is a child who has depression feelings (sadness), receives physical and verbal aggressions and has to bear a more extensive bullying (as he is attacked in different ways at the same time) whereas Secondary Education students feel defencelessness (fury, impotence), concern for themselves (the image others have of them) or do not feel anything at all, at the same time that they are victims of psychological, indirect and selective bullying (as if it was not necessary to carry out an abundant and extensive amount of aggressions to raise subjection and the feeling of being victimized). As regards the batterer-intimidator, he “feels superior” in Primary Education and ‘he is worried about what the others may think about him’, and in Secondary Education the batterer child says that he ‘is having fun, he thinks that the victims ‘deserve it’ and, n some cases, ‘they feel pity.
The research work carried out by the UGR has concluded that, despite the relevance acquired by the subject in the media in recent times, 24% of the victims hide bullying from parents, professors and friends, and 22% of batterers do not receive any recrimination for their attitude, which makes them feel unpunished and victims, even more impotent.
Reference
Santiago Ramírez Fernández. Dpt of Evolutionary and Educational Psychology of the Universidad de Granada.
Phone numbers. 958 24 39 85 – 956 52 61 56.
E-mail. sramirez@ugr.es