Bullying Leads to Aggressive Behavior

            The first scholarly article we have about the backlash of bullying is called Teasing, Rejection, and Violence: Case Studies of the School Shootings. It is an article from Wiley Online Library by Mark R. Leary, Robin M. Kowalski, Laura Smith, and Stephen Phillips. The concern of students, teachers, parents, and the public with school violence is increasing rapidly. In the past fifteen years, since 1996, about forty students have died as a result of school shootings along with several others being severely injured during these tragedies also. Many different factors are discussed when people ask why school violence occurs. The main focus of this article about Aggressive Behavior is that the role of interpersonal rejection leads to school violence. Interpersonal rejection means bullying between two people.

            Those who are bullied get the unspoken message from the bully that they are not liked, not respect, or even that they are not accepted. There is no reason for this bullying, but bullies pick out the smallest things just to single out one kid. Bullying is also done publicly to cause public humiliation to get more people on the “same side” as the bully. Public attacks may even cause more trouble for the victim because the bully not only shows that they don’t like the victim, but they do it in front of other kids to make it hurt even more.  

            Rejection mainly occurs in three different forms. The three different forms are teasing someone, singling someone out, and romantic rejection. In the Columbine incident in Columbine, Colorado the shooters were kids who fell victim to bullying. They were taunted and humiliated by other kids at the school. Eventually they snapped and reversed roles. The once victims were now the bullies, and shot the one time bullies and turned them in to victims. This is an example of social rejection, keeping someone from being able to fit in. According to this article studies show that peer rejection and aggressive behavior have a strong linear relationship. This shows why kids who are bullied tend to act out aggressively against either the bullies, or an innocent bystander. That is one of the many examples that link bullying to school violence. Although it is what’s most seen in the media and stressed to all, most kids who are socially rejected do not always turn to a sort of physical violence, or lethal violence. The most extreme cases are the ones who turn in to violence.

            On December 1, 1997, a fourteen-year-old came into school armed with a semiautomatic pistol and killed three people. The young man being called a “faggot” because of his sexual orientation caused all this. They published in the school newspaper an article calling him “gay”. This article has 34 similar articles of kids who were bullied that were also the perpetrators of the school shootings. This certainly is not all of them. This article shows the correlation between kids who were bullied, and how leads to backlashes that cause school violence.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ab.10061/pdf