The Effects of Bullying on Children - Essay Example

Other factors such as massive physical build in the case of an obese child can encourage this practice (Janssen et al 2004). It might seem to be a harmless phase that many children have to pass through during their school or college life. However, there are certain physical and psychological effects of bullying that can severely affect the personality and development of a child. Many researches have been conducted around the globe to understand and relate these physical and psychological symptoms with bullying over the past few years.

This paper aims to highlight and interpret the results of such researches and outline different effects of bullying on children. Physical and Psychological Symptoms: Bullying is a practice not confined to any country or region but is prevalent wherever it gets the right environment to survive. Therefore a more wider and comparative cross sectional study of 28 different countries was published in 2005 to validate any association of bullying and physical or psychological symptoms among school aged children (Due et al 2005).

The study included 123,227 samples of children from 28 different countries in the Europe and North America and evaluated for any associated effects of bullying. The physical symptoms accessed in these children include headache, stomach ache, back ache and dizziness. As for the psychological symptoms victims were scrutinized for bad temper, loneliness, helplessness, feeling nervous, feeling low, difficulties in getting to sleep, morning tiredness and feeling left out. The subjects were provided with a questionnaire and data was collected that include the intensity of bullying which was measured by how often they were bullied.

Other factors that are thought to be related such as family influence were also incorporated in the questionnaire. The data obtained showed some interesting results. The prevalence of bullying varied across the countries with more boys being victimized than the girls. The subjects showed significant association of physical and psychological symptoms with bullying. Moreover, the intensity or frequency of bullying had a directly proportional relationship with the severity of these symptoms. The curve was steeper for the psychological symptoms as compared to the physical symptoms.

(Due et al 2005). Discussion: These results raise various points for discussion. First of all, the obtained data clearly confirmed the link of bullying on physical and psychological symptoms. It also provides understanding that psychological symptoms are more closely associated with bullying in comparison to the physical symptoms. This is an important finding because psychological symptoms are more difficult to diagnose in children and may be misinterpreted as misbehavior or misconduct by the parents or teachers.

In that case the overall psychological effects are magnified. Therefore, it is important to educate society that closely interacts with the bullying victim so that a rehabilitation process is initiated rather than catalyzing the negative reactions. Adjustment Problems: The victims of bullying apart from their physical and psychological symptoms can have behavioral issues and school adjustment issues. But it is not clear whether it is the bullying alone responsible for these problems or there are preexisting scenarios that play a more prominent role.

To address this issue a cohort study was done where the preexisting adjustment problems were controlled. The two major groups were either the pure victims or bully/victims. The data was