Conflicting perceptions of bullying : an investigative study of parents, teachers and pupils' understanding of bullying behaviour.

Sammanfattning: Bullying is a common phenomenon among all social groups, whether that be within the school, at work or among other social spheres. It can have serious consequences for the target and can arise in many visible and not so visible forms. Within the school environment bullying often occurs out of sight and undetected. If schools are to effectively overcome the negative effects of this complex social behaviour teachers, pupils and their parents need to take steps to develop and unify their perception of this common form of abuse in schools. Thus the aim of this essay was to examine teachers, pupils and parents’ perceptions of bullying behaviours in correlation with researchers understanding of this complex social behaviour. A quantitative approach was used in this essay to investigate upper-secondary school teachers, pupils and parents’ perception of the term bullying? Having gathered the results of the empirical data, many of the extracts from the subjects open responses could be categorised, and have been for the purpose of analysis under the appropriate headings pertaining physical and psychological forms of bullying behaviour. The results of this research illustrated a diverse and on occasion inadequate understanding of bullying behaviours among the respondents, despite the implementation of an anti-bullying programme (Likabehandlingsplan), required by Swedish law. Furthermore, many respondents illustrated the tendency to define bullying behaviour solely from the actions of the perpetrator. Are then the schools included within the scope of this essay at fault and failing to inform respondents of the complexity of bullying behaviour? Schools need to listen carefully to what adolescents are reporting as well as help teachers, pupils and parents develop a more inclusive, objective and balanced definition of bullying behaviours. This will not only have a positive effect for the individual (target) but may also help in identifying, reporting and combating incidents of direct and indirect forms of abuse, regardless of how insignificant one first perceives the act of bullying to be.