Who's involved in bullying?
When people think about bullying, they often imagine a two-sided interaction between someone who is bullying and someone who is being bullied. While this idea captures part of bullying, it’s not the entire picture.
Bullying roles
School bullying is a complex social issue that involves multiple participants and observers. As well as students who bully others and students who are bullied, it also involves bystanders, teachers, school staff, parents and carers, and the wider community. All of these people influence and are impacted by bullying.1
Students who are bullied
Anyone can be the target of bullying, but there are some characteristics that can make people more vulnerable to being bullied at school.
- Any characteristic that sets a child apart from the group places them at greater risk of being bullied. In other words, students who are seen as ‘different’ by their peers are more likely to be bullied than students who aren’t seen as different.2
- Students who have bullied others and have been bullied themselves are at the highest risk of being bullied in the future, compared to other students.3
Students who bully others
Students who bully others share some common characteristics. Someone with these characteristics will not necessarily bully others, but they are more likely to do so. Studies have also found that:
- young people commonly say that enhancing social status is a key motivator for bullying
- bullying can come from a desire to belong – a need to be accepted or improve status.
Bystanders
Bystanders (witnesses of bullying) can act as:
- assistants, who join the bullying student.
- reinforcers, who provide support to the bullying student. They are not actively involved in the bullying, but they reinforce the bullying by, for example, providing an audience, laughing at the person being bullied or (in cases of cyberbullying) by sharing or reposting the incident online.
- outsiders/passive responders, who don’t intervene. They remain passive bystanders or leave the situation. This can sometimes be perceived by others as silent approval of the behaviours.
- defenders (also known as upstanders or active bystanders), who help the student being bullied. They might, for example, intervene, try to stop the bullying, tell a teacher about it or comfort the student being bullied.5
- aggressive defenders, who ‘defend’ the student being bullied by using aggressive behaviour such as threatening, or saying mean things or spreading rumours about the person doing the bullying. This is more commonly seen in online bullying.6
Changing roles
Because of the complex nature of bullying, students who are involved with bullying can play one role in one context and a different role in another. For example, in one context they may be an ‘assistant’ and in another they may experience being bullied.
School community involvement
Because it is a complex social issue, bullying involves the whole school community. Teachers, parents and carers all have a role to play in prevention, early intervention, response and recovery. They also play indirect roles in school bullying through their actions, attitudes and (lack of) interventions.
The behaviours and attitudes of adults help shape the social environment that students interact in with each other. These indirect influences can unintentionally contribute to bullying in schools or – by promoting respectful, inclusive and supportive relationships – can create an environment that is less likely to foster bullying.
Protective factors
There are characteristics that act as protective factors against bullying and practical steps to support children and young people being bullied or bullying others.
- UNESCO. (2024). School bullying, an inclusive definition. https://antibullyingcentre.ie/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/UNESCO_Fin_Def_August_24.pdf
- UNESCO. (2019). Behind the numbers: Ending school violence and bullying. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000366483
- Thomas, H.J., Connor, J.P., Lawrence, D.M., Hafekost, J.M., Zubrick, S.R., & Scott, J.G. (2017). Prevalence and correlates of bullying victimisation and perpetration in a nationally representative sample of Australian youth. Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 51(9), 909–920; Hemphill, S.A., & Heerde, J.A. (2014). Adolescent predictors of young adult cyberbullying perpetration and victimization among Australian youth. Journal of Adolescent Health, 55(4): 580–587. doi.org/10.1016/j.jadohealth.2014.04.014
- Green, D.M., Price, D.A., & Spears, B.A. (2023). Persistent bullying and the influence of turning points: Learnings from an instrumental case study. Pastoral Care in Education, 1–21.
- Forsberg, C., Thornberg, R., & Samuelsson, M. (2014). Bystanders to bullying: Fourth-to seventh-grade students’ perspectives on their reactions. Research Papers in Education, 29(5), 557–576; Salmivalli, C., Lagerspetz, K.M.J., Bjorkqvist, K., Osterman, K., & Kaukiuanen, A. (1996). Bullying as a group process: Participant roles and their relations to social status within the group. Aggressive Behaviour, 22(1), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1098-2337(1996)22:1<1::AID-AB1>3.0.CO;2-T
- Sae-Koew, J., Gonsalkorale, K., & Cross, D. (2024). Protecting children and adolescents from cyberbullying: An evidence review of risk and protective factors and effective interventions.