Can you unintentionally bully someone? Here’s the science
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Geoff Beattie, Edge Hill University
I was nine. Some girl, maybe around 15 or 16, old enough to tower over me, asked whether Bill Beattie was my brother. I nodded. Without saying another word she grabbed me by my hair and started to drag me across the street – pulling out clumps of it. The whole time she was swearing about my brother – how he thought he was too good for her. I was bent double, trotting to keep up with her in her rage. In shock, I prayed that nobody had witnessed the attack.
I never mentioned this to anyone – it was too humiliating. I always saw it as a particularly nasty act of bullying, but now I’m not so sure. Bullying, it seems, can be a slippery concept. Fast forward half a century and Priti Patel, the UK’s home secretary, has managed to keep her job, despite reports of bullying – claiming she didn’t mean to upset anyone. So what actually counts as bullying?
According to the psychologist Dan Olweus from the University of Bergen in Norway, a pioneer of bullyin...
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