by Steven Newit

Created on: March 05, 2011

Bullies are universal. They exist in all areas of life from the military to business to the classroom. Their nature is so evil that no policy document will ever prevent them from flourishing. They are knowing, cynical exploiters of whims, manipulators of social niceties, and experts at humiliation. They feed on pain and form communal sub-cultural belief systems of antipathy directed at their victims. They are without shame, incapable of redemption and completely bereft of compassion.

They may employ violence or the threat of it. But what is far worse is that they make a long and sadistic project of creating a negative group definition of an individual. Any physical imperfection like a stammer, a habitual movement of the body or even a look, may be caricatured and pointed out by jeering sycophants until it becomes accepted and legitimized in the minds of the group and, sadly, even by the victim.

It is the behavior of pack animals that instinctively seek out the runt of the litter or the weak link in the group and then seek to finish it off. When faced with a group there may be no specific individual for the victim to fight back against. The social engineering power of a number of people acting together can be most formidable.

Most children will want to be popular, thought clever, seen as attractive and interesting; this is true of adults, too. The ploy used by bullies will be to destroy any such positive notions of self-belief, knocking them down one after another like the supports of a bridge.

The consequences of such a concerted campaign of ruthless sadism may be the complete destruction of the victim. It may be that their spirit is broken and their confidence brought to a low point that could last a lifetime. Or it may even be that the collective wickedness of the pack, pecking away at the victim, chipping away at all that underpins them, brings them to such misery that suicide is the only escape imaginable.

In the news from time to time there are stories about children who have been placed in exactly this position and for whom this is the option they have taken. Each time this happens a representative of a school or college trots out a statement to the effect that their institution is fully cognizant of such issues and has a robust anti-bullying policy in place.

This, one feels, is more to do with concerns about liability than it is of any use or relevance to the doomed child.

Even if these policies which, frankly, were not good enough if a death has occurred

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