Bullying in a girl’s world. A case study of a group of girls in a Norwegian school.

Abstract

Symbolic forms of bullying (“soft” bullying) may be an underrated problem in discus-sions on bullying. A reason for this may be that the signals emitted from such events are often weak and incoherent, hence much of the information disappears before it reaches external parties. A second reason is that much information disappears due to problems of communication. Even more can get lost in attempts at communicating such experiences scientifically, due to rigid rules of verification and validity. <br>In this study, I describe various forms of symbolic (or “soft”) bullying. I show that contextual information is necessary in order to see the pattern, without which we cannot decide whether an incident/episode is “bullying” or not. Empirical examples are listed and summarized to rules, indicating that bullying is a pattern of action. <br>If only persons who are close to the victim see the details – hence the pattern - their experience may can get lost in communication. In social science, scientific claims (inter-subjective agreement, external validity and neutrality) may filtrate even more information, so that patterns that are visible at close range, may be lost in the filtering process. I suggest that this problem can be overcome by collecting personal bullying stories, and by identifying homologous elements in the stories - a first step to a theory of “soft bullying” - that can span a broad variety of social contexts.