The Social Culture of Bullying: Exploring the Institutions of Family and School

Abstract

In the social cultural setup of the world, the differentiation between a man and a boy is almost universally established, with the man representing the evolved, comprehensive, mature and wise end of the spectrum, whereas the boy being the imperfect, meek, ignorant and premature organism. This polarity structures an acutely gendered concurrence, in that, a boy is always defined in a grown man’s world with a lack that also characterizes the female species. The aggrandizing features and the cultural reinforcements of the masculine inadvertently lead to the genesis of a tendency to prioritize this trait as the most desirable and the negation of all that falls outside its predefined markers. With the onset of puberty and the appearances of physiological changes in the body, the young boys with a generous influence of these alterations, tend to assert their superiority over others through both open and covert forms of bullying, the latter often falling within the growing menace of the phenomenon of cyberbullying. This paper attempts to argue that the phenomenon of bullying is both infused and ingrained in the psyche of the young through the primary institutions in the society, that is, the family, the schools, the external world, even often without consciously aiming to do so. The paper charts out the concept of bullying in schools and makes an assessment of the various biological as well as socio-cultural influences which generate this tendency among school boys. Making use of psychosocial data and real-life examples, the paper also suggests how schools, teachers and parents, may tackle bullying by regarding it as a behavioural problem and adopting approaches that bring positive interpersonal connections.