Bullying and cyberbullying: a guide for parents

This guide is psychoeducational content. It does not replace a consultation. If your child talks about dying, says everything would be simpler if they were not here, is harming themselves or seems to you to be in unusual distress, do not leave them alone and get help the same day; in immediate danger, call the emergency services: in France 15 or 112, in Switzerland 144, elsewhere your country's emergency number. If they have been hit, threatened or had money extorted from them, or if intimate images of them are circulating, the situation is also a matter for the police. Section 15 explains how to ask about suicide. Allow fifty minutes to read.

1. Before you begin

Sunday, eight in the evening. Your twelve-year-old daughter has a stomach ache, like last Sunday, and the one before. She has left half her plate. Her phone is lying face down on the table, and when it vibrates you see her stiffen. She no longer talks about Chloé or Inès, and on Wednesdays she no longer goes to football. When you ask whether everything is all right at school, she answers "fine" in that voice that shuts the door.

Or it is your nine-year-old son who comes home with a torn jumper, a pencil case gone missing for the second time, and a story about falling over in the playground that does not quite add up.

You do not know yet what is going on. You can feel that something is.

Three things, straight away.

Bullying is not a quarrel between children. It is a situation in which one child faces, alone, one or more others who have more power than they do, and in which the attacks keep coming. By definition, the child cannot sort it out alone: it is the adults who have to make it stop.

Your first reaction counts for more than anything you do afterwards. A child who sees their parent play it down, fall apart or go on the warpath learns that they would have been better off keeping quiet. A child who feels believed, listened to and involved in the decisions will come back and talk to you.

The goal is not to win against the other child, it is for yours to be safe. Protecting, documenting, bringing in the school and following up: it is less spectacular than going to wait for the other child at the school gate, but it is what public authorities recommend, and it is what leaves the school the means to act.

Who this guide is for

For you if your child is being bullied, or if you suspect it without having proof.

For you if it is also happening, or mainly happening, on their phone: class group chats, social media, online games.

For you if you have just learned that your child is one of those doing the bullying.

For you if your child has seen what is happening to a classmate and is asking you what they should do.

2. What bullying is, and what it is not

Three elements

The definition that still serves as the reference comes from the work of Dan Olweus, a researcher at the University of Bergen, in Norway, and a pioneer in the field from the nineteen-seventies onwards. Most official texts have adopted it.

• Repetition. The attacks keep coming back, over weeks or months.
• Intent to harm. The aim is to hurt, humiliate, exclude or frighten, even if the perpetrator claims afterwards that "it was only a joke".
• An imbalance of power. The targeted child finds it hard to defend themselves: they are alone against a group, younger, less popular, new, or the other child has gained the upper hand.

This third element changes everything. Between two children of equal strength, a quarrel gets settled. Once the balance of power is set, asking the children to "talk it through" amounts to letting the stronger one run the discussion.

What is not bullying

A one-off fight, a falling-out between friends, a conflict in which both sides are partly to blame: these situations can be painful, but they do not work the same way. A conflict is something you help children through; bullying is something you stop.

Two qualifications. A humiliating photo posted once and seen by the whole class goes on hurting every morning. And online, bullying is often the work of a group in which each person acted only once. French law takes this into account: bullying can be committed by several people without each of them having acted repeatedly.

The forms it takes

It can be physical (shoving, hitting, belongings damaged or stolen, money demanded), verbal (insults, nicknames, mockery about appearance, accent, family), relational (organised exclusion, rumours, others being forbidden to speak to the child), sexual (remarks about the body, inappropriate gestures, pressure to send images). Relational bullying is the hardest to spot: it leaves no bruises, often takes place right under adults' noses without their seeing it, and attacks what matters most at that age, one's place in the group.

Cyberbullying

It does not replace bullying at school; often, it extends it. What changes is the setting. Home is no longer a refuge: the messages arrive in the bedroom, in the evening, during the holidays. The audience is huge, traces survive deletion, and fake accounts give perpetrators the feeling that they risk nothing. A class group chat the child has been left out of, doctored photos, accounts set up to mock them, someone impersonating them, blackmail with images: the forms are many. Our programme Screens and social media: a guide for parents covers the general framework for screens at home.

"It was only a joke" is the phrase parents hear most often. It changes nothing. A game in which only one of the players is not laughing is not a game.

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