How To Prevent Bullying

There are ways that you might try and prevent bullying or avoid being bullied. It's important that you understand what bullying is and also why people bully. Bullying can either be verbal when people are calling you names or disrespecting you and putting you down or picking on something different about you.

It can be physical or actually aggressive to you. It could be when people hit you, take things from you, ignore you or ostracise you, not include you in things that a group of people are doing. There can be cyber bullying as well and bullying by text.

It can be a really serious problem to deal with. But why do you think people bully? People bully as a way of feeling powerful when they don't feel particularly powerful themselves. Bullying in itself is an abusive power, it's a way that somebody tries to humiliate and put somebody down so that they feel more powerful.

The type of people that want to feel more powerful by putting someone else down, tend to be quite insecure in themselves or have had a history of bullying themselves around in their family or around them in their groups. It may be their way of getting attention or respect from their peer group or boosting their own low self-esteem or keeping people away. Now, bullying is a part of life.

Unfortunately, it happens everywhere, in playgrounds, in schools, in colleges and work. Some of the ways of preventing bullying is to protect yourself as much as you can from being bullied. But there's never a 100% guarantee because we can't control what another person does.

We certainly can safeguard ourselves from being bullied, and one of the main ways is to try to be more confident, be more comfortable with who we are. Bullies tend to pick on something about a person that stands out or is a bit different about them. It may be that you have a different sexual orientation to them or you may have a different skin color or religious belief, different colored hair, you might be shorter, smaller, bigger or fatter.

Whatever it is, they will try and target on that and if you are more comfortable with the aspect of your self which is different to them, then they are less likely to have an impact on you. You can kind of laugh back at them or you can see that the bully sees that they're not hitting the target because it's not actually winding you up. Avoid bullies.

If in a school or college, avoid somebody knows or you've witnessed bullying others. Don't befriend them. Avoid places you know that bullies hang out.

Bullies tend to pick on people when they're on their own. So if you are with a group of friends, you are more likely to be kind of protected. Look confident, be confident, even if you don't feel it, sometimes just putting on the act of confidence could mean that bullies would realize you're not so easy to push over, you're not so easy to intimidate.

Be assertive. If it's not easy for you to kind of speak up for yourself or answer back, have a go, have a practice, think of what you might say that isn't aggressive or going to wind them up and provoke the situation but isn't passive either. Don't carry valuables with you if you know that people are having trainers taken off.

Be careful about what you are taking to school, don't stand out as someone who owns a lot or someone that might be desirable. And what's also important is that you know the school. If you're at a school or college, there definitely should be a school policy on anti-bullying so find out about that, know who it is that you would go to.

But certainly, don't feel like if you ever are in the position of being bullied, that you have to go through it alone and don't blame it on yourself. It's important that you get help.

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