Bullying victims may find themselves becoming perpetrators themselves, which is fairly uncommon. The likelihood of eventually engaging in bullying might rise for those who have been bullied as victims (Averdijk et al., 2016). According to Choi and Park (2018), in reaction to bullying victimization, students with greater self-esteem were more inclined to participate in future bullying perpetration, whereas students with lower self-esteem were less likely to do so. They are referred to as bully victims, and these individuals have the most mentally unbalanced issues. However, not all bullied individuals go on to bully others after being bullied themselves. It is important to note that, despite the fact that some bullied victims proceed to mistreat others, this is not always the case. Hence, adolescents who have already been victimized by perpetrators may react defensively by bullying others to shield their impressionable selves from underlying self-doubt and painful experiences.
When bullying crises occur at school, some teenagers take on the role of the bully, while others take on the role of the victim’s advocate. Adolescent bullies frequently discriminate in various forms of bullying, both physical and verbal (Hemphill et al., 2019). Bullying adolescents actively start harmful episodes and continually damages those who are weaker or less influential. This section aims to examine the effects adolescent bullies face, such as mental health disorders, externalizing behavior, popularity, and social dominance.
Bullying not only hurts the victims, but it may also have a harmful impact on kids and teenagers who bully peers, causing externalizing behavior. The long-term effects of a child’s persistent bullying activities are anticipated to incorporate ongoing externalizing behavior issues and unhealthy relationships (Ttofi et al., 2012). Drug abuse, hostility and violence, theft, and vandalism are examples of externalizing behaviors (Vaughn et al., 2013). According to Lee et al. (2015), adolescents who were involved in bullying experiences often indicate greater levels of delinquency and violence. The externalizing continuum is a crucial concept in understanding teenage violence. Common behavioral apathy and what are known as acting-out tendencies are characteristics of externalizing liability. Therefore, evidence suggests that children who practice bullying generally display higher levels of externalizing difficulties throughout time.
Moreover, bullying offenders seem to bear even more implications for mental health illnesses. Aggressive behavior against others that is constant and recurrent can most certainly lead to changes in the perpetrator’s mental well-being. Naveed et al. (2019) concluded that “Bully-perpetrators exhibited the greater severity of depressive symptoms due to distress in psychosocial functioning” (p. 1). According to an empirical investigation, both victims and offenders had higher rates of young adult mental illnesses as well as higher rates of teenage psychiatric disorders and difficulties in their families (Copeland et al., 2013). Researchers discovered that bullies had an elevated risk of early adult depression, anxiety attacks, agoraphobia, and suicidal tendencies, as well as being subject to antisocial personality disorder (Copeland et al., 2013). Thus, mental health issues are indeed common among young bullies and present a major threat to the general health of the educational environment.
Order this paper