The hero of the «Endless Book» by German writer Michael Ende, a ten-year-old boy is hiding from his classmates chasing him in a bookstore. When asked by the owner of the shop why his classmates are bullying him, he replies: “I sometimes talk to myself … I come up with all sorts of stories, names and words that don’t exist, and all that.”
Indeed, there is always something in the victim that can alienate others, provoke attacks from them. They are not like the rest. The most common victims of bullying are children with obvious problems. The child is most likely to be attacked and ridiculed:
- with an unusual appearance (noticeable scars, lameness, strabismus, etc.);
- suffering from enuresis or encoporesis (urine and fecal incontinence);
- quiet and weak, unable to stand up for himself;
- untidy dressed;
- often skipping classes;
- unsuccessful in studies
- overprotective of parents;
- unable to communicate.
In my practice, I have seen many rejected children. According to the results of psychological testing, I can identify the following psychological characteristics of the victim.
— Rejected children can differ both in low self-esteem and a low level of claims, and inflated self-esteem and a high level of claims. Rate themselves inappropriately high on those parameters in which they are obviously less successful than their classmates (for example, in terms of the number of friends in the class, academic success, etc.). At the same time, they are assumed to be underestimated by others (parents or teachers consider them less successful in school or having fewer friends than they really are).
Claiming great success (wishing to be the best in all respects), such children often choose difficult tasks during the test to determine the level of pretension (solving problems of varying complexity using Raven matrices), and after failure they choose even more difficult tasks.
Studies by American psychologists have shown that peers usually accept children with adequate self-esteem more readily than those whose self-esteem is too high or low.
— According to the results of tests that reveal the child’s attitude to school (incomplete sentences on D.V. Lubovsky and «Diagnostics of school anxiety» by AM Parishioners), child victims often emphasize their rejection of school, note that they are teased, offended by classmates.
— In projective tests, where you have to choose a hero and tell what is happening to him, what mood he is in (fairy tales of Dr. what happens as quarrels with peers, resentment, rejection of the hero in the game. Often their hero becomes a separate child who is “sad, offended”, “he does not have a partner in physical education”, etc.
Even situations of peer interaction that most children rate as positive (“playing together, laughing”) are described by victim children as negative (“arguing, arguing”).
— According to the research of Crick and Ladd, conducted in 1993 (Craig G. Developmental Psychology. St. Petersburg: Peter, 2000. P. 542.), Rejected children report a stronger sense of loneliness and more often than children accepted by the group tend to explain their failures in relationships with peers by external causes. In my experience, unpopular children often deny their own responsibility, do not feel guilty about what is happening, show a high degree of defensive aggression directed outward, and do not try to find a way out of the situation (according to the results of the Personal Frustration Test). Not only do they not know how to adequately respond to troubles in life, but during testing they also attribute inadequate actions and aspirations to the hero who finds himself in a frustrating situation (for example, the desire to break something).
Bullying a child — the origins of hostility
The problem of any children’s team is not only the active rejection or harassment of one of the members of the group (class) — this phenomenon is noticeable to others, and, therefore, it is easier to track and try to stop it at the very beginning. But the fact is that it is very difficult for many children to enter the team, to feel comfortable and confident among their peers. See →