Bully-victims: victims of bullying turned into aggressors

Harassment between equals or bullying is becoming a common topic in our society. At the European level, an epidemiological study with a sample of more than 16 thousand adolescents, determined that 20% of these have suffered bullying at some point.

These data reflect the idea that a considerable number of adolescents in secondary and high school education are under high levels of interpersonal stress, living complex situations that can lead to an emotional maladjustment and alter, in some way, their development psychological.

The main objective of this article is to make known to the bully-victims, that is, adolescents or children who have suffered or continue to suffer bullying and who, for various reasons, have ended up becoming bullies and victims at the same time.

• Related article: "The 5 types of bullying or bullying"

What are bully-sictims?

Before describing what bully-victims are, we are going to provide a definition of bullying.

According to Olweus (1978, cited in Olweus, 1998) bullying consists of a type of violence that occurs in

an imbalanced power relationship between the stalker and his victim, is repeated and prolonged over time and includes behaviors of a diverse nature (physical, verbal and psychological aggressions). In this sense, bullying is a sequence of repeated actions between some protagonists, aggressor / s and victim, whose relationship persists over time and develops a certain and known dynamic.

The bully-victims would be those young people who, after being direct victims of bullying, end up becoming aggressors themselves, while at the same time they can continue to be victims of bullying. In other words: minors who have been bullied by others and who bully themselves their peers are called bully-victims.

• You may be interested: "The 11 types of violence (and the different types of aggression)"

Types of bullies or aggressors

The scientific literature specialized in the subject suggests that bully-victims make up a different typology within the aggressors who carry out bullying. In general, there are 2 fundamental types of aggressors (in English “bullies”):

Bullies "pure"

They are the bullies who trust themselves. They intimidate others and harass them without hesitation. Better than the rest, they fit the stereotype of an aggressive child who wants to show his will to dominate others. Usually, these children or adolescents are not usually victimized by other aggressors.

Bully-victims

As we have explained previously, in this group they can play both roles, both victim and aggressor, although As a general rule, they do not attack their aggressors, but other minors they perceive as more vulnerable.

Characteristics of bully-victims

These victimized offenders suffer from a wide range of problems; compared to “pure” bullies, bully-victims are more anxious, lonely, usually in high states of tension (hypervigilance) and tend to present more depressive symptoms than the rest. They have very little trust in others, which leads them to remain vigilant in case an episode of bullying occurs again.

Andreou (2004) states that bully-victims show more "Machiavellian" attitudes: lack of faith in human nature, they tend to manipulate and deceive others more, they are more distrustful and they tend to hide the truth as a form of protection.

According to Stein et al. (2007) bully-victims have more physical injuries and they pose, at the same time, a greater danger to their colleagues. As an example, in a study carried out by Kochel et al. (2015) it was observed that bully-victims tend to be involved in more acts in which they play the role of aggressors than bullies cigars ”.

The bully-victims, being victimized for so long, respond to their peers in a hostile way. Some American studies point out that these young people are more likely to bring guns to school, since they consider that in this way they will be protected.

Psychological problems

Several studies have documented that victims of bullying often suffer anxiety, depression (including suicide), social isolation, eating disorders and post-traumatic stress disorder compared to other children who have not suffered bullying.

In addition, children who are aggressors within the dynamics of bullying experience social rejection, behavior problems, anxiety, academic difficulties and they are often defiant to adults.

When a minor is a victim and an aggressor at the same time, apart from being able to experience all the symptoms previously described, tends to have more difficulty than everyone else in "fitting in" within their social group (they have lower social skills and difficulty establishing and maintaining positive friendships), suffer with more intensity states of overexcitement that they do not know how to handle and more academic difficulties in the school.

How to become a bully-victim (the bullying cycle)

Emler (2009) refers to being a victim of bullying can have a negative impact on the victim's empathic capacity who, far from understanding the aggressor's behavior, will try to defend himself by showing equally hostile behavior. This would be the specific case of bully-victims.

Some authors (Carroll, Green, Houghton and Wood, 2003; Lereya et al., 2013) have elaborated an explanatory hypothesis in relation to the existence of the “bully-victims”: when the adolescent is being a victim of harassment and does not have the emotional support of an adequate social protection network (group of friends, parents, teachers) or does not accept such help, you can resort to the search for an informal alternative of protection against attack situations.

In this way, the adolescent will try to achieve a social reputation based on an image of a rebellious, strong and antisocial person; the implicit message addressed to the aggressors would be that she is a brave person, strong and that she has the resources to defend herself. It could be that the victims started to behave aggressively as a form of self-defense against future attacks.

It has also been claimed that bully-victims often come from violent or dysfunctional family backgrounds. They may have been abused by an older brother, or have seen a member of their family mistreat another relative. In fact, many of the negative behaviors related to violence are learned in childhood-adolescence within the family environment, and this is also the case in bullying.