Other Roles in Bullying — Bullying Affects More Than the Bullies and the Bullied

8 min readDec 3, 2021

“You can be the person who puts the ‘kick me’ sign on the back, or be the person that watches it happen and does nothing, or you can be the person who takes the sign off… That’s it. Every day, every moment of your life, you’re making this choice. Life doesn’t stop for it, challenges don’t make way for it, the choice is there and you own it. Welcome to adulting.” Writer Kris Rafferty

In movie Promising Young Woman 🎥 (spoiler alert!), protagonist Cassie Thomas takes revenge on a list of people involved in her best friend’s rape during college, a trauma that ultimately led the victim to commit suicide. The list of offenders and abettors includes: the rapists, the rapist’ friends who witnessed the rape but did not interfere, another best friend of the victim who didn’t believe in the victim’s account of being raped, other students in the department who received a video recording of the rape in social media and did nothing, the department dean who decided not to investigate the alleged assault, the lawyer who dug “dirt” on the victim to help acquit the accused rapist, and other people in society who sexually assault drunk women when given the chance. The movie did a great job capturing all the roles involved in the bullying of a rape victim and how these roles form an unjust and inescapable network of rape culture.

Indeed, you don’t have to be directly involved in bullying to contribute to the act. As psychologist Marina Camodeca points out: “Bullying is a phenomenon which involves one or more bullies against one or more victims… and which usually takes place when several peers are present.” Below, we will explore bullying roles other than the bully and the bullied.

Assistants

Assistants are those who have not initiated or led the bullying behavior, but give assistance to the ringleader bully. Assistants either egg on the bullying behavior or occasionally join in. In Promising Young Woman 🎥, the rapists’ friend who made the video recording was an assistant.

Many bullying assistants abet the bullies because they want to feel the power but they do not possess the social skills or the strength to be the ringleader bully. Like a familiar to a vampire, assistants serve the bully in exchange for safety as well as a chance to be accepted into the rank of the bully one day.
Other assistants are brow-beaten to it — in the Milgram experiment mentioned in Self > Principle: Context Matters & Things Change, the majority of participants administered what they think were harmful electric shocks to other individuals at the researchers’ bidding. It demonstrated that in the right context or social influence ▶️, people can become cruel against their will.
A more graphic account of joining the bullies and thereby giving up our humanity is depicted in the Buckwhacked episode of TV show Firefly 🎥. A spaceship is drifting in space, sending out stress signals. Anyone boarding the ship to rescue the people inside would encounter the Reavers — creatures used to be humans but have turned so unspeakably violent that those who come across them either get brutally murdered by them or would turn into Reavers themselves to escape having horrific acts of rape, torture and cannibalism performed on them, sealing the fate of the spaceship that sooner or later, only Reavers remain onboard, and none of the initially sane people boarding that ship thereafter can reverse this fate. This brutal allegory illustrates the high price society has to pay for assisting bullying.
In terms of level of violence, Camodeca finds that while assistants do not act aggressively outside of the bullying behaviors initiated by ringleader bullies, they are just as aggressive during the acts.
Lastly, Camodeca speculates that assistants may “have been assigned the role of follower by their peers because of the way in which they behave when the bullying starts”. Would it be possible that they feel hard to walk away from the assistant role because they’ve been typecast? If yes, support and incentives should be given to them to stop assisting bullying.

Reinforcers

Reinforcers do not directly involve in the bullying behavior but give the bullying act an audience. By supporting the bullies or laughing at the bullied, they encourage bullying to continue. In Promising Young Woman 🎥, reinforcers were people who watched the rape as it happened and laughed . “We need to remind the peers of the bully that they benefit from bullying even if they are not themselves the transgressors,” writes civil rights activist DeRay Mckesson in On the Other Side of Freedom: The Case for Hope 📖, “Indeed, they benefit from it, but they are tarnished by it. To chip away at the humanity of select groups is to chip away at humanity itself.”

Bystanders

Bystanders are those who witness the bullying situation, but remain separate from it, neither reinforcing the bullying behavior nor defending the bullied. Some may watch the bullying behavior but do not comment on the situation or show their stance. In Promising Young Woman 🎥, people who received and watched the rape video but did not do anything were bystanders. As illustrated in World > Bullying Basics > Methods to Overcome Bullying, turning bystanders into defenders or upstanders is the key to end bullying. Below are a few perspectives that are important to know about being a bystander.

Bullies are encouraged by onlookers. Schoolyard studies found that bystanders “are involved in 85% of bullying incidences… this supports the idea that bystanders presence makes bullying ‘worthwhile’ from a social power perspective” (source). Bullying researchers Padgett and Notar explained that “[b]ystanders who flee the scene of a bullying event unknowingly play a role in encouraging bullying, and allow bullies to enjoy disproportionate freedom at the expense of others, as well as breeding further conflict. Watching without intervening actually reinforces bullying behavior”.
Author Kailin Gow further asserts that knowing “someone is being bullied and not doing anything about it is abetting that bully. It is like you are the bully. There is no such thing as being an ‘innocent’ bystander when a victim of bullying tells you to help them, and you don’t. In some states, you can be prosecuted along with the bully, for not helping stop the crime.”.
The truth is, most bystanders would like to intervene. Study found that at least 80% of peers find bullying and name-calling unpleasant to witness but admire those who intervene. However, a gap exists between their attitudes toward name-calling and their inaction (source). Witnessing bullying therefore also affect bystanders, who often want to help, but don’t know how or afraid to be picked on themselves.
Reasons bystanders do not stand up for the bullied include: “fear of getting hurt, fear of becoming a new target for the bully, fear of making the situation worse, simply not knowing what to do” (source) and diffusion of responsibility, where bystanders think it’s other people’s responsibility to intervene.
However, bystanders are “extremely important actors in deterring the demoralizing and damaging impacts of bullying,” Padgett and Notar conclude. “Bystanders who speak out and do not remain silent in the face of inappropriate behaviors are committed to resisting such injustice, and discourage bullying.”
Lastly, bystanders “seem to be good at regulating emotions and at using assertive strategies which do not include aggression”. It might be useful to study their talent for separating themselves from trouble and help bullying targets do the same, Camodeca proposes.

Defenders / Upstanders

Defenders or upstanders are those who actively comfort the bullied or come to the bullied’s defense. In Promising Young Woman 🎥, protagonist Cassie Thomas who take revenge for her rape victim best friend is a defender. However, because of the toxic rape culture, she has to pay the ultimate price to set the record straight. In a just society, we need to lower the cost of standing up to bullying and increase the cost of bullying so that bullies are discouraged and the bullied can get appropriate support. See more in World > Bullying Basics > Methods to Overcome Bullying.

“The current study shows that about two-thirds of tweens are willing to step in to defend, support, or otherwise assist those who are bullied online when they see it. The importance of helping behaviors need to be reiterated, reinforced, and rewarded as early in life as possible so that such actions become habitual instead of based solely on emotions in the moment,” according to Cyberbullying Research Center.
“Bystanders have the potential to make a positive difference in a bullying situation by becoming an upstander. An upstander is someone who sees what happens and intervenes, interrupts, or speaks up to stop the bullying,” StopBullying submits.
“Certain characteristics may be necessary for becoming a defender: they need to be competent at exercising assertive strategies, they must be highly prosocial and empathic. It is likely that they are good at regulating their emotions… Defenders are… likely to be well adjusted and popular in the peer group…” Camodeca suggests.
The whole idea of being a “defensive collaborator” proposed in Groups > Method: Defensive Collaboration is to be able to defend ourselves and one another while collaborating with others to achieve common goals.
Also, it turns out there is an emoji for anti-bullying — it’s an eye in speech bubble, 👁️‍🗨️, meaning when you witness bullying, speak up. Let’s use this emoji more often!

Gender differences

Regarding gender, “boys were more often labeled as bullies and followers, while girls were more often found to be defenders, outsiders and victims. Boys also scored higher on reactive and proactive aggression”. According to Camodeca, one reason might be that it is more socially acceptable for boys to be aggressive proactively or reactively while girls are expected to be well-behaving and polite. Girls also develop more empathy that allows them to be more sympathetic for the bullying targets. Another reason, though, may be that past researchers focused on “direct and physical bullying, more characteristic of boys, whereas girls can be aggressive in indirect and relational ways and use more subtle forms (damaging someone’s reputation, refusing friendship, isolating the victim)”.

Group Dynamics & Solution

When you take all the bullying roles into consideration, they form a self-reinforcing social network, where each role influences another. Bullies, assistants and reinforcers form an oppressive clique, while the bystanders witness the act but stay neutral, leaving the bullied feel helpless and isolated unless defenders comfort or stand up for them. “As a phenomenon fed by social power and underpinned by the social norm, an important part of tackling bullying will be changing the responses of bullying behaviors,” UK Department of Education advocates. As soon as we change the dynamic of a group where bullying occurs, bullying will stop. Specifically, changing the roles of bystanders and reinforcers into defenders will break the apathy of the crowd as well as the cycle of bullying. We will discuss how in World > Bullying Basics > Methods to Overcome Bullying.

Do you have any suggestions, doubts, hypothesis or experience for this topic? Please comment below 👇!