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TECHNICAL BUSSINESS & WRITINGS

NAME CH M USAMA SIPRA

GROUP MEMBERS:
GHAROON ALI ABBASI
ARSLAN KHAN
HARIS GHAFOOR
ABDULLAH RIAZ
MALIK HASEEB HAIDER
AWAIS ASGHAR

Bullying and its Long Term Effects on Psychology of

Students in Institutions of Pakistan

Abstract:
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Bullying at educational institutions and workplaces has been a cause of

personality deterioration for a long time now. And leaves a negative impact on the
mindset and the cognitive abilities of the victim. And most of the times it goes
unheard because the victim is scared to talk about it and parents do not take it
seriously and consider it a temporary phase and think it will pass. But usually it
indents a strong scar on the life of the person. So we conducted a research that
would help us to find the number of victims that fell a prey to bullying, to
highlight the ways a student gets bullied and to enlighten the drastic long lasting
effects of bullying on the mental and physical health of a person.

Introduction:
A brief introduction of bullying is given as follows:
Definition of Bullying:
Bullying is an important public health problem, affecting one in three US
children. The most commonly used definition of bullying was developed by
Daniel Olweus in the 1970’s and 80’s. Olweus describes bullying as “intentional,
repeated, negative (unpleasant or hurtful) behavior by one or more persons
directed against a person who has difficulty defending himself or herself. “This
definition applies to such aggressive behavior inflicted by a person or group with
seemingly more power on a person or group with less power. The power
differential may be due to physical size, psychological/social power, or other
factors.

Key elements of bullying:

1. a physical, verbal, or psychological attack or intimidation
2. an actual or perceived power imbalance between the victim and oppressor
3. intent to cause fear, and/or harm to the victim
4. it is repeated and produces the desired effect

Types of Bullying
Bullying includes direct and indirect forms of aggression. Physical and verbal
aggression are direct forms of bullying, consisting of an overt expression of
power. Physical bullying includes any type of physical assault, such as hitting,
pushing, kicking, choking, and forcefully taking something from the
victim. Verbal bullying includes verbal harassment or intimidation in the form of
name-calling, threatening, taunting, malicious teasing, and psychological
intimidation using words to harm victims. Stealing, vandalizing, and making faces
or obscene gestures also are ways in which children are bullied.
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Characteristics of Victims:
The majority of bullying victims are passive or submissive victims (vs.
provocative/aggressive). They may be physically smaller, less assertive, more
anxious, insecure, or sensitive than bullies. Victims of bullying also may have
difficulty making friends and may relate better with adults than peers. They also
may have lower self-esteem, which may result in their being less likely to report
victimization from bullying. Compared with bullies and bully-victims, victims
report the highest levels of loneliness and anxiety, whereas bullies report the
lowest. Victims have the lowest social status among peers and bullies have the
highest, however, bully-victims are most avoided by classmates.

Hypothesis:
Students and Individuals who undergo bullying in institutions undergo a
deterioration in their cognitive abilities and suffer from long term psychological
effects.

Research Questions:
 To what extent is bullying present in institutes of Pakistan?
 What are the mutually exclusive impacts of bullying on the personality
of a person?
 Is any psychological counsel required after bullying?
 What is the students take on bullying?

Aim:
To develop the relationship between cognitive ability disintegration of students as
a result of bullying. Moreover, to establish the long lasting of effects of bullying
on the mental and physical health of a student.

Objectives:
 To determine the approximate number of students that are suffering from
bullying in Pakistani institutions.
 To determine the impacts of bullying on a child’s social activities and
his/her performance in institution.
 To determine the psychological condition of bullying victims and to
establish the medical needs of a bullying victim.
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 To determine the attitude of the students especially victims on bullying

and to check whether they have a hostile attitude towards bullying or
something else.

Design and Methodology:

Study Instrument:
In this research our team has used the second step, exploratory method of research
and went to people and tried to uncover the different types of bullying in
institutions and to unravel the number of students that are actually suffering from
bullying in institutions of Pakistan.

Methodology Adoption:
This second step mixed method approach is used because of the following
reasons:
 It provides better techniques that put to use both the qualitative and
quantitative analysis and minimizing the limitations of either approach
 This technique gives us the chance to interact with the victims and to
personally know their views on bullying
 The students who are afraid to talk about in front of others can easily raise
their issue in this method
Population and Sampling:
We went to over 80 students and teachers of different institutes of Pakistan and
these institutes include:
 NUST College of EME
 APS EME
 LGS Johar Town
 LACAS Lahore
 LSE
 SIMS
 King Edward Lahore
 IST
 UET Lahore
The teachers in our research were from the following institutions:
 APSACS Lahore Cantt.
 Govt. College
 Punjab College, Muslim Town Lahore
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Data Collection :
Two data collection methods were used. Internet questionnaire was used for
collecting the required secondary data while self-administrated interview was
used for the research sample for the purpose of collecting the primary data.

Rationale:
In this research we wanted to develop a relation between the long term effects of
bullying on a student with the view of establishing the major forms of bullying in
school and to create a way of helping such students in the future.
This research will help us to enumerate the total forms of bullying that are
predominant in the institutions of Pakistan. And it will also unravel the
approximate number of children that are suffering from bullying. It will also
highlight the long term psychological effects on children.
And in the future it will help the students in better tackling of the problem and
they will find our research helpful to shake off the effects of bullying.
Child bullying was primarily a problem in the west. But now it has strike the
schools of Pakistan also. A lot of children in the schools of Pakistan face this
problem also, but they are scared to talk about it.
Bullying not only strikes fear in the heart of a victim. But it also leaves a lifelong
impact on the personality of the victim. Bullying not only disintegrates the
personality of the victim but it also makes them doubtful of their decisions and
decreases their cognitive abilities.
Bullying mostly goes unheard and its impact mostly remain undetected because
people are mostly not aware of the types of bullying and the keep suffering from
it because of negligence.
In the past researches that we studied, only the physical short term effects of
bullying were discussed but the domain of this research contains the long term
effects of bullying which will help enlighten the psychological effects of bullying
to parents and institution authorities.

Literary Review:
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Some of the works that have been done on this topic already are given in

summarized form as follows:

1. Cythia (2014) analyzed bullying impact on student’s performance either in

short or long term. She found that there are differences in relationship between

bullying level and academic performance depending on student´s academic

achievement. Nadine (2014) investigated bullying impact on student’s ability to

academically succeed. Nadine found that bullied students have feel of fear from

coming to school because they feel that they are unsafe; therefore, they are unable

to concentrate which reelect negatively on their academic success. Mundbjerg et

al. (2014) analyzed the relationship between bullying in elementary school in

Denmark. They found that bullied students have lower academic achievement in

9th grade and bullying impacts are larger if it is more severe.

Placidius (2013) found that physical bullying was perceived as a dominant

bullying element. Boys prefer to be bullies more than girls. Poor academic

performance was as impact of bullying.

2. Mehta et al. (2013) found that when students feel that bullying is a

phenomenon in their school, they feel that they are unsafe which reflected on less

engaged in school community. Therefore, they have less motivation to do

well at school and they do not participate in school activities. Bullying affects

student’s academic achievement in various ways. Ammermueller (2012) found

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that being bullied has a significantly negative impact on present and future

students’ performance in school.

3. Brank et al. (2012) indicated that bullying victims are weak, shy, and anxious.

They added that victims’ performance is poor in school and seek to avoid

attending school classes for the purpose of avoiding victimization. Victimization

experiencing can lead to poor academic performance and leading to absenteeism.

Skapinakis et al. (2011) found that victims were more likely to report suicidal

thoughts than were bullies.

4.Juvonen, et al. (2011) said that bullying experiences affect victims’ academic

achievement in both direct and indirect ways. So bullied student by his peers may

become worried and afraid of being teased, therefore he may stop participating in

class or may has e trouble in concentrating on class work because of fear. They

added that students who are often subject to be bullied by their peers during

school period have less engagement at school and poor grades. Konishi et al.

(2010) confirmed that interpersonal relationships within school environment

influence academic achievement.

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5.Roman and Murillo (2011) found that aggression in schools has a negative

effect on academic achievement in Latin America. They affirmed that students

who have been physically or verbally abused perform less. Marcela and Javier

(2011) found that bullying is a serious problem throughout Latin America they

indicated that; students who suffer from their peer’s aggression have lower

performance in reading and math than those who do not; and students who are in

classrooms with more physical or verbal violence perform are worse than those in

less violent classroom settings. Konishi et al. (2010) found that school bullying

affects negatively academic achievement.

6.Chaux et al. (2009) argued that ten to fifteen percent of adolescents worldwide

are bullied two or more times a month. Skrzypiec (2008) found that third of

students who had been seriously bullied reported having serious difficulties in

concentrating and paying attention in class because of bullying and the fear

associated with. Glew et al. (2005) reported that bullying prevents concentration

and subsequent academic achievement since bullying victims lose interest in

learning and experience a drop in academic grades because their attention is

distracted from learning. Mishna (2003) indicated that bullying is “a form of

aggression in which there is an imbalance of power between the bully and the

victim that occurs largely in the context of the peer group”.

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7. In conjunction with National Bullying Prevention Month this October, a

nonprofit called YouthTruth released data gathered from 80,000 students in 21

states between the fall of 2012 and the spring of 2015. Their schools, which pay

YouthTruth to conduct candid, anonymous surveys of students, are split among

urban, suburban and rural areas, are varied in wealth and size, and span the

country from the East to West coasts, the South and the Midwest.

Nationwide, YouthTruth found that 25 percent of students reported having been

bullied, echoing the results of other national studies. But far more important for

teachers and administrators is that the organization reports specific findings back

to each individual school, including students’ comments.

These reports have shown a tremendous disconnect between teachers’ perceptions

and what their students say is happening in their school hallways, cafeterias and

classrooms.

8. Approximately one in four Year 4 to Year 9 Australian students (27%) reported

being bullied every few weeks or more often (considered to be frequent) in a

national study in 2009.

Frequent school bullying was highest among Year 5 (32%) and Year 8 (29%)

students.

83% of students who bully others online also bully others in person.

84% of students who were bullied online were also bullied in person.

Peers are present as onlookers in 85% of bullying interactions, and play a central

role in the bullying process.

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Hurtful teasing was the most prevalent of all bullying behaviors experienced by

students, followed by having hurtful lies told about them.

Online bullying appears to be related to age (or access to technology), with

secondary students more likely to engage in bullying online than primary school

students

Young people over the age of 15 are less likely than students between 10 and 15

years of age to be involved in online bullying.

Approximately one in five young people under 18 (20%) reported experiencing

online bullying in any one year. The figure of 20% has been extrapolated from a

number of different studies which found rates varying from 6% to 44% of

students.

School staff report an average of 2.1% reports per student of online bullying, with

1.2 per 100 for primary schools and 9.1 per 100 students for high schools.

The majority (72%) of schools reported managing at least one incident of online

bullying in the previous year.

Results:
The sample size of our research was 100 students from different institutions of
Pakistan. But some of the students were afraid to answer and we had 81 responses
from the students. Then by using the research analyzation techniques we analyzed
all of our data and drew the following conclusions:
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The research yielded a high positive response of bullying among the students and
that 74% of students in our institutions have at least been through bullying once in
their academic life.
Our hypothesis lead us to anticipate that bullying leaves long lasting scars on the
mindset of a person. And the result of the research turned out to be correlating
with our hypothesis. And the result showed that 42% of the students suffered
through post psychotic stress and trauma after the incidents they encountered.
The results also seemed to be moving parallel to our hypothesis in the field of
educational performance of the students as 30% of the students suffered from
extreme decline in their school grades after getting effected by bullying.
In our hypothesis we predicted long term effects of bullying on the psychology of
students which was later backed by our research results as it showed that 31%
students became patients of anxiety disorders and they developed certain phobias.
The researched also exposed the horrific number of people that were even afraid
to connect with their loved ones. It shows that 40% of students got socially
disconnected and confided themselves to the solitude of their rooms.
It also shows that 26% of the students were afraid to go to school afterwards and
many of them had to see a counselor or psychiatrist for their mental rehabilitation.
Overall, our research shows that a high majority of students undergo bullying in
their academic life and almost all of them face a decline in their cognitive abilities
and get socially isolated and have to undergo some treatment for their proper
rehabilitation.

Data Analysis:

According to our survey, it is no surprise that about 74% of the students have been bullied or
have been watched students being bullied. So it is showing the major vice in our institutions.
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The charts show that most common type of bullying is calling people names with a percentage of
about 35. This type of bullying is affecting many students because every student has a bad name
from which he or she is known. And another major activity is by hostile behavior towards other
students with 33.3 % of numbers. It also shows that misuse of social media and text messages is
leading the bullying in our institutions.

According to results, the most

common place where the students are
being bullied is the Cafeterias where
students gather for their amusements
but from their, the main bully starts
and it spreads in buses, classrooms,
internet and gymnasium.
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According to charts shown, average of 27 percent students has dropped their grades which is
very alarming for our students. This shows how heavily bullying is affecting the studies of
students.

Here the data shows that 26% of the

students are not safe in schools
because of bullying very common in
institutions.

So the results show here average of 42 percent of students are being affected by post traumatic
stress and it is ruining their joys.
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The charts tell that average of 10 percent students have been stopped their education after the effects of bullying.
This is ruining their career.

Here it is clear with no surprise that about 40 percent people has chosen to stay away the company of their loved
ones because of the effects of bullying and get socially disconnected.

The horrific results here show that 31 % of students have become the patients of anxiety and
restlessness.

Conclusion:
The research concluded that bullying exists in almost every school either
governmental or private one but with different levels. The search found that
school bullying affect academic achievement either for the victims who suffer
from these phenomena and in the same time it affects the bullies themselves.
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The outcomes of the research clearly state that almost all the students who were
bullied faced a downfall in their grades afterwards in their education. And almost
all of them faced social cut off immediately afterwards their tragic experience.
And almost all of the students passed through a phase of post-traumatic stress
after their experience.
The findings of these results proved our hypothesis that the students who faced
bullying in institution faced a decrease in their grades, they got socially
disconnected and they suffered from mental problems afterwards and had to meet
up some counselor for rehabilitation.
To our amazement we find a conflict in our research with the previous work in the
field of feeling safe at school afterwards bullying of victims. The participants in
our research said that they felt safe at institution afterwards but the former work
suggests otherwise.

The research suggested that teachers and the school management have to take
different measures for the purpose of reducing the bullying volume. Moreover,
teachers should coordinate with bully’s students. Teachers and school
management have to set some programs for bullies to mitigate the school
bullying.

References:
1. https://study.com/teach/bullying-in-schools.html
2. https://www.psycom.net/effects-of-bullying
3. https://www.verywellfamily.com/bullying-impact-4157338
4. https://www.apa.org/topics/bullying/index
5. https://www.the74million.org/article/80000-kids-just-replied-to-a-survey-about-bullying-
heres-what-surprised-their-educators-most/
6. https://bullyingnoway.gov.au/WhatIsBullying/FactsAndFigures
7. Research paper by Bullying: An Epidemic among Youth
Courtney Eaken
Clark State Community College
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8. Bullying in schools: self-reported anxiety, depression, and self-esteem in secondary

school children. BMJ 1998; 317 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.317.7163.924(Published
03 October 1998)Cite this as: BMJ 1998;317:924

9. Bullying, depression, and suicidal ideation in Finnish adolescents: school survey.

BMJ 1999; 319 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.319.7206.348(Published 07 August
1999)Cite this as: BMJ 1999;319:348

10. Does bullying cause emotional problems? A prospective study of young

teenagers. BMJ 2001; 323 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.323.7311.480(Published 01
September 2001)Cite this as: BMJ 2001;323:480