School Bullying and Battered Women’s Syndrome: Understanding Vulnerability and Impact
School Bullying: A Habitat of Vulnerability
School environments can be breeding grounds for harassment. Three types of vulnerability and associated risk factors are evident:
1. Individual Vulnerability
a) Vulnerability to Diversion: Based on personal and sociocultural characteristics that affect the harasser.
b) Vulnerability to Victimization: Relies on individual features of the student as a potential victim.
2. Relational Vulnerability
Intensifies acute situations of asymmetry of strength or power in the victim and offender interaction. Bullying is a negative, malicious, willful, and repeated behavior by one or more persons against another who has difficulty defending themselves.
3. Situational Vulnerability
a) Socio-biological Factors: School competitiveness geared towards obtaining social status can lead to bullying as a strategy for dominance.
b) Lifestyle Factors: The school context can generate risky lifestyles due to its multitude of contacts that the child cannot avoid.
c) Routine Activities Theory: School settings may lack monitoring, leading to convergence between:
- Victims: Individuals with risk characteristics.
- Motivated Aggressors: Proactive aggressors who initiate harassment, and reactive aggressors who victimize others to defend themselves or as an emotional compensation mechanism.
- Lack of Guardianship: Including formal monitoring and natural surveillance by peers.
The Battered Women’s Syndrome
This syndrome appears following exposure to repeated abusive relationships. It is not a limitation of the victim’s personality but a psychological reaction to chronic violence. Significant symptoms include:
– Feeling of Uncontrollable Threat
Repeated and intermittent violence, interspersed with periods of repentance and tenderness, raises extreme anxiety, alert responses, and permanent shock. The sense of threat may be related to the woman and her children and families, resulting in constant fear.
– Social Isolation
This leads to greater dependence on the aggressor, increasing their domain.
– Feelings of Guilt
Victims blame themselves for the mistreatment, believing their actions cause it. These feelings provide emotional dependence on the aggressor.
– Depression and Low Self-Esteem
Battered women present mental weakness and a deterioration of their personality:
- a) Decline in Personal Resources: Loss of assertiveness and becoming very compliant with the wishes of others.
- b) Increased Insecurity: Reduced capacity to make decisions.
- c) Reduction in Work Performance: Decreased concentration.
- d) Emotional Collapse: As a mechanism of self-protection.
- e) Negative Beliefs: About their self-image.
– Loss of Healthy Life
Chronic stress affects the health of battered women. High cortisol levels lead to negative health consequences, making women more vulnerable to infections, chronic fatigue, and increased risk of cardiovascular disease. This facilitates dependency on self-medication and tranquilizers to cope with the discomfort created by the abuse. They also often develop obsessive, compulsive eating.