What is Bullying?

Bullying is not just cruelty that happens between two students. It is a performance seeking an audience — and recognition is the goal.

Bullying occurs when a student repeatedly tries to hurt, humiliate, or exclude another student in order to gain attention, status, or influence within a peer group. It often happens in front of others and can occur both at school and online.
UNESCO estimates that roughly one in three teenagers worldwide are bullied every year – making it one of the most widespread forms of violence affecting young people today. Bullying can seriously harm a student’s sense of safety, belonging, and confidence to be themselves.

Students who bully use humiliation, exclusion, and intimidation to gain status and influence within their social world. Understanding this dynamic is the key to understanding why bullying is so hard to stop — and why addressing the whole peer group, not just the students involved, is essential.

When bullying targets a student because of who they are — their race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, or religion — it can cross into harassment, which carries different legal and institutional obligations for schools.

What is Cyberbullying?

Cyberbullying is bullying that happens online — social media, messaging apps, gaming platforms, or any online space where students interact and compete for attention, likes and status.

What makes cyberbullying particularly damaging is its scale and permanence. Unlike bullying that happens face-to-face, a single online incident can reach a vast audience almost instantly. Harmful posts, images, or messages can be seen, shared, and commented on by hundreds of people — amplifying the humiliation and making it nearly impossible for the targeted student to escape or move on.

For this reason, even a single act of online bullying can have the devastating impact of repeated bullying when it publicly humiliates a student in front of their peers.

In most cases, cyberbullying is an extension of the bullying that happens at school. The same students who bully in classrooms and hallways continue the behavior online, carrying the social dynamics of the school day into spaces where there are no teachers, no rules, and a much larger audience.

Why bullying happens

Bullying students target differences — using whatever makes someone stand out as a justification for bullying them. Any child who is visibly different from the dominant group in their class or school can become a target.

Students who are different because of their race, disability, appearance, sexual orientation, or gender identity are two to three times more likely to be bullied. Sometimes the difference that makes a child a target is invisible to adults but immediately apparent to other children.

As students move into adolescence, bullying increasingly overlaps with harassment — particularly sexual harassment and identity-based harassment. Young women face disproportionately high levels of online harassment, where harmful comments and images can spread rapidly and be very difficult to remove.

Frequently Asked Questions

Researchers commonly define bullying as repeated harmful behaviour between students that involves a power imbalance. This definition is widely used in schools and education systems around the world.

In practice, however, the power imbalance is not always present from the beginning. Bullying behaviors themselves — humiliation, exclusion, or intimidation — can create the imbalance over time, especially when other students support or tolerate what is happening.
This is why bullying so often spreads through peer groups, and why the most effective responses address the whole social environment — not just the students directly involved.

Cyberbullying is bullying that happens through digital tools — social media, messaging apps, gaming platforms, or any online space where students interact and compete for attention, likes and status.

What makes cyberbullying particularly damaging is its scale and permanence. Unlike bullying that happens face-to-face, a single online incident can reach a vast audience almost instantly. Harmful posts, images, or messages can be seen, shared, and commented on by hundreds of people — amplifying the humiliation and making it nearly impossible for the targeted student to escape or move on.
For this reason, even a single act of online harassment can have the devastating impact of repeated bullying when it publicly humiliates a student in front of their peers.

In most cases, cyberbullying is not separate from school bullying — it is an extension of it. Often the same students who bully in classrooms and hallways continue the behavior online, carrying the social dynamics of the school day into spaces where there are no teachers, no rules, and a much larger audience.

Conflict is a normal part of growing up. Students disagree, fall out, and argue — and these experiences, though uncomfortable, are part of how young people learn to navigate relationships.

Bullying is fundamentally different. In conflict, both students feel they have some power to influence the situation. In bullying, one student repeatedly uses humiliation, exclusion, or intimidation to dominate another — and the targeted student feels unable to stop what is happening. Often the behavior happens in front of others, which is precisely what makes it bullying rather than conflict.

The distinction matters because the response needs to be different. Conflict can often be resolved by bringing students together to talk it through and repair the relationship. Bullying requires addressing the wider social environment — including the peers who witness, support, or tolerate the behavior.

Yes. When bullying targets a student because of who they are — their race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, or religion — it can cross into harassment, which carries different legal and institutional obligations for schools.

The line between bullying and harassment is not always clear, but the distinction matters. Harassment is typically defined as conduct that creates a hostile environment for a student based on a protected characteristic. Schools have a legal duty to address harassment, and in many cases are required to report it.

As students move into adolescence, bullying increasingly takes the form of identity-based harassment — targeting students for their gender identity, sexual orientation, or race. Sexual harassment also becomes more common, particularly online, where harmful images and comments can spread rapidly.

If you believe a student is experiencing harassment rather than — or in addition to — bullying, it is important to involve school leadership and, where appropriate, seek legal guidance.

Sources: UNESCO Global Status Report on School Violence and Bullying (2019).

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