Sevanna Connors

Eng.-101
Peter C. Remien
11/19/14

Bullying: Whos Really The Mean One?

According to the national youth violence prevention resource center, 30% of kids
on the U.S. are involved in some kind of bullying. Males and Females alike are
involved in bullying but is there a meaner sex? There are many statistics that prove
who is in the work place, at school, and on the internet. Females have been proven
to be crueler than men in all of these environments. Statistics say that 71% of
students report incidents of bullying as a problem at their school and over 67% of
students believe that schools respond poorly to bullying, with a high percentage of
students believing that adult help is infrequent and ineffective. Over 3.2 million
students are victims of bullying each year.
Although both males and females bully in schools females are twice as
likely to take the bullying beyond school and into the personal life such as over the
internet a recent study by Hinduja and Patchin (2010) found that 25.8% of girls
report having been cyberbullied, compared to only 16.8% of boys and an alarming
21.1% of girls report cyberbullying others, while only 18.3% of boys report the
same. Studentpluse.com says: The venues for female cyberbullying are
numerous. MySpace, Facebook, texting, IMing, and email are all common and

easily accessible methods for covert bullying for both genders. Girls seem to be
more drawn to these methods of bullying for several reasons: girls are not as
concerned with establishing their dominance physically(Athanasiades and
Deliyanni-Kouimtzis, 2010), girls prefer to utilize relational aggression (rumors,
ostracizing one member, exclusion, etc..) as it fits better with female societal
expectations, and girls prefer language use over other types of aggression, with is
conducive to electronic means that rely on language use as the primary vehicle for
the behavior.
According to a 2010 survey by the Work Place Bullying Institute Women
make much nastier office bullies than men says psychologist Dr. Gary Namie (cofounder of the institute). Bullying in the work place is four times more common
than sexual harassment and racial discrimination. Females are taught to be critical
about each other at a very young age and it fallows them into adulthood from
badmouthing their colleagues to picking favorites among them. Some of the most
common carriers that experience bullying are law and finance. Any job where the
female feels like they need to be hyper-aggressive to get ahead is prone to this kind
of behavior.
Many environments come into play for bullying but no matter where it takes
place females seem to always come out on top for being the cruelest and most
persistent of the two sexes.