Online Bullying

Bullying is the common denominator of harassment, discrimination, prejudice, abuse, persecution, conflict and violence. When the bullying has a focus (eg race or gender) it is expressed as racial prejudice or harassment, or sexual discrimination and harassment, and so on. Although bullying often lacks a focus, bullies are deeply prejudiced but at the same time sufficiently devious to not reveal their prejudices to the extent that they contravene laws on harassment and discrimination.

How do you know if you’re being bullied? Bullying differs from harassment and assault in that the latter can result from a single incident or small number of incidents – which everybody recognises as harassment or assault – whereas bullying tends to be an accumulation of many small incidents over a long period of time. Each incident tends to be trivial, and on its own and out of context does not constitute an offence or grounds for disciplinary or grievance action. So, …

How do I recognise a bully?
Most bullying is traceable to one person, male or female – bullying is not a gender issue. Bullies are often clever people (especially female bullies) but you can be clever too.

Why do people bully?The purpose of bullying is to hide inadequacy. Bullying has nothing to do with managing etc; good managers manage, bad managers bully. Management is managing; bullying is not managing. Therefore, anyone who chooses to bully is admitting their inadequacy, and the extent to which a person bullies is a measure of their inadequacy. Bullies project their inadequacy on to others:

Definition of workplace bullying by Tim Field
Those who can, do. Those who can’t, bully.
“Bullying is a compulsive need to displace aggression and is achieved by the expression of inadequacy (social, personal, interpersonal, behavioural, professional) by projection of that inadequacy onto others through control and subjugation (criticism, exclusion, isolation etc). Bullying is sustained by abdication of responsibility (denial, counter-accusation, pretence of victimhood) and perpetuated by a climate of fear, ignorance, indifference, silence, denial, disbelief, deception, evasion of accountability, tolerance and reward (eg promotion) for the bully.”

Bullies have high self-esteem
Bullies exhibit arrogance, narcissism, plausibility, certitude, self-assuredness, selfishness, untouchability, a sense of invulnerability and an unerring belief in their rightness and infallibility. Bullies also excel at deception and evasion of accountability. Some people mistake these for high self-esteem, which they are not. People with high self-esteem manifest their high self-esteem in having only positive interactions with others. Bullies have only negative interactions with others; negative interactions are a hallmark of low self-esteem. Bullies are motivated by jealousy, envy and prejudice which are indicators of low self-esteem. Bullying is the antithesis of high self-esteem. People with high self-esteem have no need to bully.

The need for attention

Human beings are social creatures and need social interaction, feedback, and validation of their worth. The emotionally mature person doesn’t need to go hunting for these; they gain it naturally from their daily life, especially from their work and from stable relationships. Daniel Goleman calls emotional maturity emotional intelligence, or EQ; he believes, and I agree, that EQ is a much better indicator of a person’s character and value than intelligence quotient, or IQ.

The emotionally immature person, however, has low levels of self-esteem and self-confidence and consequently feels insecure; to counter these feelings of insecurity they will spend a large proportion of their lives creating situations in which they become the centre of attention. It may be that the need for attention is inversely proportional to emotional maturity, therefore anyone indulging in attention-seeking behaviours is telling you how emotionally immature they are.

Attention-seeking behaviour is surprisingly common. Being the centre of attention alleviates feelings of insecurity and inadequacy but the relief is temporary as the underlying problem remains unaddressed: low self-confidence and low self-esteem, and consequent low levels of self-worth and self-love.

All quotes above have come from bully online I have picked out a few things but there is a vast amount of information about bullying on there click the link to read further..>BullyOnline<

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The word bully has cropped up on here in the form of signatures lately and is clearly a problem for some of you. So, heres somewhere to talk about what exactly it is that has been done to warrant the use of the word bully.

Okay discuss…..