Let’s think for a moment that we travel 10 years into the future and find that a large number of young school bullies are now incarcerated for various crimes. It is difficult to imagine this situation, but it is a reality. Mr. Adán Herrera Hernández conducted an investigation based on interviews with a sample of 60 adolescent offenders incarcerated for various crimes at the School of Social Improvement for Minors in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. His interest is to study bullying from a criminological perspective. For the purposes of his research, he considers bullying to be a “serious antisocial behavior.” In his research, he identifies three factors inherent in any act of bullying or school harassment: the physical and emotional factor for the victim, the future criminal behavior for the aggressor or aggressors, and finally, the impunity to which accomplices are accustomed. To place us in the context of his research on bullying as a criminological factor, he presents two examples that could be repeated anywhere in the world: “In the first case, it showed the desperate form of expression by a blind child victim of school bullying identified only as Chemita, who went in November 2013 to the Early Attention Unit of the State Attorney General’s Office to seek help, as the aggressions he was receiving from his classmates had already surpassed the limits of bad behavior. These aggressions ranged from verbal, physical, and psychological abuse to material damage, as among the constant abuses, they caused damage to his Braille machine.”
In the second case of extreme bullying, students assaulted a classmate with metal pipes. In both cases, observed from a criminological point of view, it was found that the children (bullies) were acting methodically and systematically. Once detained, they responded that they carried out the aggressions for fun, enjoying the emotional harm to their victim, feeling pleasure and power.
To carry out the investigation, he took a sample of 30 adolescents from a population of 165 sentenced inmates at the School of Social Improvement for Minors. The second group also consists of 30 unsentenced adolescent offenders who are in the Department of Sentencing Execution for Adolescent Offenders in the northern zone.
He applied an initial questionnaire with two factors to both groups. The first factor of the questionnaire uses items related to aggressive behaviors, such as having painted school walls or having insulted classmates. The second factor is related to victimization, such as having been insulted or mocked in class. The second questionnaire is related to the adolescents’ personality and the environment in which they develop.
The statistical result shows “how the factors of school bullying violence, with negative and violent attitudes towards institutional authority and within their family environment, allow adolescents to generate three types of antisocial behaviors: aggressiveness, criminal behavior, and drug use, which are part of the profile of the bully who engages in school bullying.”
Schools should be places where there is healthy coexistence without students having to endure actions that violate their human dignity. It may be very bold to affirm that bullying is indeed the cause of subsequent criminal actions; however, school bullying and now cyberbullying do contribute to high crime levels worldwide, or as the researcher suggests, “bullying as the incubation stage of subsequent criminal behavior.”
Summary prepared for Protocol AB, LLC, July 1, 2024
Source: https://erevistas.uacj.mx/ojs/index.php/cicja/article/view/4969
