Watching the people close to us—whether friends, colleagues or family members—get bullied is difficult. It can be equally difficult knowing how to help them, especially when we have felt the sting of bullying ourselves—those feelings of vulnerability, inadequacy, and hurt. Fortunately, there is something you can do.
How can you do help someone who is being bullied? You can start by giving them the support they need and stopping the bullying when you see it. If that doesn’t work, stand up to the bully and take their power away.
It may sound simple, but how exactly can you stop bullying in its tracks? It can be difficult to visualize how you would implement any of these actions. But it is much simpler than it seems. All it takes are a few easy steps that anyone can follow, some basic knowledge of the science behind bullying, and kindness. That’s right. Little acts of kindness combined with knowledge go a long way toward dismantling bullying and helping a friend.
How to Help Someone Who Is Being Bullied
There are five broad strategies you can use to help a victim of bullying. These range from strengthening the victim to confronting the bully or seeking help. Each of these strategies has its own easy steps you can follow.
Before we talk about the strategies, though, there are a few things you should know about bullies:
- Bullies feel inadequate or insecure: This explains why they might want to put their target down or make them feel bad about themselves. To them, the victim is a threat.
- Their bullying is a coping mechanism: The discomfort they feel, whether brought about by the victim or someone else, is best dealt with by making others feel bad. This makes them feel less inadequate because it means others have flaws just like they do.
- Some are victims themselves: For some bullies, the source of their inadequacy and pain is a wound, usually one that comes from being mistreated. This may have happened to them when they were young or more recently. For instance, a bully might have been bullied for their weight in school, and now, when they see someone comfortable with their weight, they become resentful.
- Their power lies in spectacle and an audience: They are not only interested in hurting the victim. They want to increase their popularity. They want an audience that can affirm their views and standing. They understand the social stage is where their bullying takes on the most power.
Understanding the psychology behind bullying can help you when you have to face it head-on to help a friend. The following are the best ways to help someone who is being bullied.
Strategy 1: Strengthen the Victim
No, I don’t mean it in the Karate Kid kind of way. You don’t have to be a sensei (or grow that sweet goatee) or know your way around the ring. All you need is good old-fashioned kindness.
When the victim is strong, the bully cannot hurt them. Here’s how to give them that strength.
Step 1: Let Them Know It Is Not Their Fault
Knowledge is power, and the affirmation that there is nothing inherently wrong with the victim is power as well. Bullies don’t bully the victim because the victim is flawed; they do so because the victim is strong and complete somehow.
This step is as easy as telling them, “Don’t take it to heart; he is only being mean to you because he envies people like you.” This will take the sting out of the attacks because they will view them as coming from a place of hurt and woundedness.
However, it has to be believable. Telling the victim they are bullied because of their popularity won’t do much if they are new to the workplace or school and hardly know anyone. Make it genuine.
Step 2: Teach Them to Be Invincible
After you have assured your friend that the bullying is not about them, teach them to employ the following tools to weaken the bully’s attacks further:
- Laugh with the bully. Instead of being embarrassed when the bully makes a joke at their expense, they should imagine that the joke is about someone else. The more impervious to their attacks your friend looks, the less motivated the bully will be.
- Ignore the bully. Instead of acting offended, they should pretend they are not aware of anything the bully is saying or doing. If the bully gets a little too aggressive, they can fall back on a comeback like, “I’m busy right now; can I ignore you another time?”
- Ignore the sarcasm. Tell them to go along with the bully when they are being sarcastic. So if the bully makes sarcastic comments about the victims’ clothes, they can reply with a smile and “Thank you! So kind of you to notice!”
- Refuse to be embarrassed about past mistakes. If the bully harasses your friend about something they did wrong in the past, your friend can respond with something like, “Unlike you, my life is moving forward, and I am not rehashing the same stories like a comedian out of jokes.” Alternatively, if they don’t want to fan the flames, they can ignore the comment.
- Refuse to be humiliated. If the bully tries to humiliate your friend, they can respond with, “I am an adult, and I have no time to be embarrassed. Mistakes are a part of life.”
- Cultivate healthy coping mechanisms. Have them try therapeutic activities that build strength. These can be self-affirmations, exercise, a hobby, or even therapy. Make sure it is an activity that shifts their mindset and gives them confidence. For me, it was joining a band.
To learn to be strong, they have to deflect, find confidence, and remove the power from the bully’s words. They will no longer be an enjoyable target, and the bully may just run out of ideas.
Step 3: Be on Their Team
Just befriending the person being bullied can provide a great source of strength. It makes them feel less alone and provides them with a reservoir of support.
Eat lunch with them, hang out with them, and make sure you accompany them, especially in the circumstances you know the bully likes to strike. For instance, if the bully likes attacking in the break room, accompany your friend when they go there.
Invite them into your life by introducing them to your friends and integrating them into your group. The bully cannot attack a group. The logistics are just too difficult. Plus, they might make more enemies than they would like.
You can also invite them to do activities that you enjoy or that you think they might enjoy. If they love Neo from The Matrix, how about a marathon night at your place?
Including them will give the victim a boost in confidence and self-esteem, which is great because most of the harm is done to the target when isolated. It may be that they need to have a shift in perception to stand up for themselves.
Strategy 2: Confronting the Bully
I know it can be hard to witness bullying and not do anything consequential to the bully, especially when it is within your power to. However, confronting a bully is not about hurting the bully or being vengeful. It would help if you were kind, as odd as that may sound.
Being kind is necessary for the following reasons:
- Bullies are in pain too. Studies looking at peer bullying have found that the risk of suicide is higher among those who bully and their victims than those who do not bully or are not victims.
- Many bullies have been the victims of bullying, which means they experience many of the same feelings the victim does.
Understanding that bullies are often in pain will change how you deal with the bully. So, how can you confront them without wounding them even more?
Step 1: Speak to Them About Their Bullying
You might think that talking to them about their bullying would not work, but it might be because they understand their victims’ pain. After all, some of them were also victims of bullying.
Be firm and tell them that what they are doing is not funny, cool, or acceptable and that people are getting hurt.
They might not want to acknowledge it in front of you, but they will understand, and they may re-examine their actions.
Step 2: Confront the Bully in Front of Your Peers
It is better to call out the bullying for what it is in front of others. If more people agree with you, the bully will have no choice but to retreat.
Remember, bullies, want others to think well of them, and seeing that others are not thrilled about what they are doing might change their minds.
Step 3: Take a Stance
Tell them that you and your peers are not going to stand for what they are doing, and then not acknowledge it.
In this way, you explicitly side with the victim. And when the bully sees himself losing support, he will begin to understand that it is not in his best interest to carry on the way he does.
Strategy 3: De-Escalate Bullying Situations
When you see bullying happening, de-escalate the situation.
Step 1: Call It Out
You cut short whatever is happening by explicitly calling it out. This could be saying something like, “Okay, I think we have heard enough. Let’s get back to work.” Or you could ask them to stop.
Step 2: Draw Attention to Something Else
This is a more subtle way of doing the same thing. When you draw attention to something else, you are taking away the hold that the bully has on bystanders, which is what they want.
If you are at school, you can say something like, “Was I the only one confused by yesterday’s homework? What answers did you give for question five?”
This can be something you prepare, or it can be something random that you have noticed, like, “Have you seen how Mrs. Brown sort of looks like Michelle from Derry Girls?”
If you are at work, you could try saying something like, “Did you guys see the game last night? What were they thinking?”
Step 3: Take the Person Who Is Bullied With You
If you don’t want to upstage or confront the bully for fear of retaliation, you can simply ask the victim to leave with you. This leaves the bully with nothing to play with.
Strategy 4: Stand up to the Bully
This is the most aggressive technique, and I only suggest this when you have exhausted your options because you run the risk of escalating things when you adopt these strategies.
There are two ways you can do this:
- You can interrupt the bully when they try to bully the victim and stand in their way, carrying out an attack. This makes things difficult for them and might discourage them.
- If they insult the victim, make a comeback on their behalf. If you don’t know any, you can practice. Don’t let this evolve into bullying.
When speaking this way, you should speak confidently and your actions should convey that you trust that others in the group have your back.
Remember that bullying is constant harassment of the person. Doing these things should be as needed. You shouldn’t weaponize them and harass the bully.
Strategy 5: Put the Matter in the Hands of Someone With More Power
If you feel you are not equipped to deal with the bully because of a power imbalance, risk of physical harm, or other serious reasons, you can bring the matter to someone who is in a better position to deal with it.
If you are at work, it might mean contacting your manager or HR. If you are at school, it might mean telling your teacher, guidance counselor, or parents. In situations where the behavior borders on criminal, you can contact the authorities.
Helping Someone Dealing With Workplace Bullying
Workplace bullying is one of the most pernicious forms of bullying. It can make the target feel like quitting and lead to low performance, stress, and a lack of work engagement, in addition to all the other harm bullying causes.
What Does Workplace Bullying Look Like?
In the previous section, we worked on the assumption that all bullying is overt and easy to spot. But the adult form of bullying, a majority of which takes place in the workplace, can show itself in ways that are harder to spot.
Often, it involves some power imbalance and can include abuse of power.
Perpetrators may use their power to:
- Excessively monitor an employee
- Give them impossible deadlines
- Keep crucial information from them
- Assign mountains of work to them
- Humiliate them by overly criticizing or broadcasting their mistakes to peers or superiors
- Commit more serious offenses like sexual harassment
Peer-to-peer workplace bullying often includes things like:
- Spreading false, harmful rumors about the target or gossiping
- Making fun of the target in front of other colleagues
- Cyberbullying or sharing memes, circulating emails, or other forms of media that ridicule or create a toxic environment for the target
- Undermining the target’s presentations, projects, or tasks, not in improving work but to be mean.
- Excluding the target from work social events or gatherings, such as not inviting them to after-work drinks
- Name-calling
- Sabotaging the target or blaming them for things they are not responsible for
How Does Workplace Bullying Start?
Studies show that workplace bullying rarely happens out of the blue, but this does not mean that the target is to blame for what happens.
It often starts with some conflict that then motivates the bully to target the person. It could be a disagreement in a meeting that makes the bully feel humiliated. Or it might be from what the bully perceives as upstaging when the target corrects them on an error.
It is this conflict that sends the bully on a mission to destroy.
If there is one place we need people to be kinder and work together for the good of everyone, it is work. When you look at the detrimental effects of bullying and the toxic work environment it creates, you realize how counterproductive and dangerous it is.
After all, people’s wellbeing and livelihoods are at stake.
Steps to Help Someone Being Bullied at Work
Step 1: Include Them in Your Work
This helps them feel included. And if they are the target of sabotage, it might discourage the bully from sabotaging them if their work is linked with yours. This is assuming you have a better standing in the eyes of the bully and others at work.
Step 2: Help Them With the Work
If they are getting work piled on them and can help with some of it, lend a hand. This remains an option if you can spare the time. You might find that it is all they need to get through it.
Step 3: Discourage the Spread of False or Harmful Rumors
Clearly state that you are unhappy about your colleagues’ rumors and label them as unhelpful. If people are sharing memes and being mean to co-workers, keep the evidence, and confront them.
Step 4: Provide Emotional Support
Being there for the target makes it easier for them to carry the burden. Just being a friend to someone can help them survive and overcome something as harmful as bullying.
Step 5: Support Their Ideas and Work
If bullies are constantly trying to undermine someone’s work, be the voice that breaks that tide. It is an encouraging act of kindness and might be the encouragement others need to intervene.
Step 6: Gather Evidence and Report
Gather evidence of what your colleagues are doing and report it to a superior once you have documented the mistreatment. When you present it to your supervisor, make it about an environment that adversely affects morale and makes it difficult for others to do their work.
Framed in these terms, managers and HR is much more likely to act quickly. This will not work in situations where the person bullying the target is someone in a position of power.
Step 7: Encourage Your Friend to Seek Outside Help
If they have gone through all the proper channels, and nothing is being done, or the people responsible are in power, encourage your friend to seek help outside the company. This is the best option if the offense involved is criminal, and nothing is being done.
When trying to deal with a bully in a position of power, there is greater risk involved, but this does not mean you have to sit by and watch. The reason people like this carry on doing what they are doing is that people like you are afraid to speak up.
As cliche as it sounds, it is true.
Things to Consider When Helping Someone Being Bullied at School
Young people are more likely to be aggressive in their bullying than adults. This means the bullying can get violent. In addition to the tips provided so far, here are some things to keep in mind when trying to help someone at school:
- Adults are always there to help if you feel overwhelmed, or the situation is looking more and more dangerous. For instance, if there are threats of violence.
- Cyberbullying is harmful, and if you see it, you need to report it to someone who can understand it and help.
- Think about your safety. Don’t confront a bully alone or in private where they can hurt you, especially if they are violent. If you fear that you cannot be involved, let someone older know.
- It is good to get witnesses and evidence of what you saw if you want to help another student. By seeing texts, audio, videos, or a written statement, adults can gauge the situation’s severity. Plus, if any action is to be taken, there is evidence to work with.
- Don’t bully or goad the bully. It is best to try to stay on good terms with them too. This can be telling them you like them, but not their bullying. Making enemies doesn’t go well in the long run.
- Don’t give the bully an audience unless it is to bear witness.
The methods above can work whether you are dealing with one bully or multiple. Somewhere in, there is a strategy that can crack your nut.
How Can I Stop Being a Bystander?
When bullying happens, it is easy to stand by and watch. But this is the opposite of what you should do.
First, you need to understand what you can and can’t control. Despite what I said earlier, it will do you no good to feel guilty about something that is not in your control.
Instead, look at what options you have. If the person bullying your friend is your boss, you might have a few options, especially if the work environment itself is toxic and scary.
You might have a legitimate fear of being fired or singled out for speaking up against mistreatment, and your career prospects may be negatively affected. But do you want to advance in a work or school environment where bullying is the law of the land?
In such situations, few people would blame you for being unable to act, but you wouldn’t be blameless either. You still have options. You can organize peers and bring attention to what is going on in the culture of work or school, for instance.
So, carefully weigh the risks and benefits and decide on an action you believe would be the least harmful to you while addressing the issue.
What If the Person Being Bullied Does Not Want Me to Intervene?
This is common among people who are being bullied. They often believe the consequences of speaking up or enlisting help would be worse than if they just sucked it up. They are scared.
But the truth is that bullies will not stop if they just suck it up.
This kind of thinking is defeatist. It plays into the bully’s power and tactic of making the target feel helpless and isolated because if the victim believes they are helpless, they can’t be a threat. The potential risks can be exaggerated, and it will take seeing to believe it.
So to break the spell, you need to do something regardless of what the person being bullied thinks, especially if you believe the act would not make their situation worse or would alleviate their suffering.
What Are the Long-Term Effects of Bullying?
As we have established, bullying affects the bully and the victim. The effects range from obvious to surprising.
How Bullying Affects Long-Term Health
Research shows that victims of bullying are at a higher risk of developing psychological disorders like depression and anxiety and having a psychotic experience. They are also more likely to be suicidal or attempt suicide.
Additionally, they are more likely to have poor physical health, such as chronic physical pain, headaches, and a weak immune system. Some victims may turn to self-medication to deal with their pain.
None of this is surprising since psychological stress can lead to all kinds of chemical imbalances and behavioral changes that can negatively impact one’s health.
But the health effects aren’t just limited to the victims.
Victims-turned-bullies also have a higher risk of suicide, anxiety disorders, agoraphobia, panic disorders, and psychotic experiences. They are also more likely to display antisocial behavior.
Interestingly, these victims-turned-bullies have slightly worse health outcomes than pure victims who never became bullies. They also have worse health outcomes than bullies who had never been victims or pure bullies.
While these pure bullies show antisocial behavior signs, they do not have an increased risk of any mental health disorder and are in much better shape health-wise.
How Bullying Affects Life Outcomes
Health isn’t the only thing impacted. So is the quality of life.
Victims achieve lower educational success, have poor financial management, earn less, and have trouble making and keeping new relationships. These may be explained by the health outcomes we talked about in the previous section.
For instance, if someone has mental health problems, they are more likely to have trouble keeping relationships or performing their best at work or school.
Those who were both victims and bullies are more likely than those who were just victims to have trouble in school, keeping a job, and handling money. This is what you would expect if the health problems we discussed collided with serious behavioral problems.
Antisocial behavior may explain why these victims-turned-bullies are worse off because it includes things like manipulation and disregard for others or criminal behavior. They are also more likely to become parents at an earlier age when perhaps they are not ready.
Pure bullies are likely to display antisocial and criminal behavior. They may break the law and use illegal drugs, in addition to other delinquent behavior.
Bullying Has a Dose Effect
The more frequent and long term the bullying is, the worse the impact becomes. This makes sense when you consider that those who escape bullying will have been impacted less than those who become long-term victims.
In this group, bullies who were victims have worse outcomes than the pure victims, while those who have never been bullied have better prospects in life than both groups.
What all of this shows is that bullying is a form of abuse. Just as we expect abuse to have long-term damage and be very serious so is bullying.
I hope it now makes sense why in the tips provided I talked about avoiding becoming a bully or turning the victim into a bully. It just doesn’t end well for them in most circumstances.
What Causes Bullying?
This is an important question because it can provide us with ways of minimizing bullying in the world. After all, if your goal in life were to end bullying altogether, it would be a great idea to figure out why it happens in the first place.
The specific reasons why a person bullies will vary with the individual, but they all follow similar themes.
- Bullying Works
Historically speaking, bullying works. If you think of a bully as someone trying to get something from another person and increase their chances of success, it makes sense.
For most of human history, people had to compete for scarce resources, and their lives often depended on it. Having power over others or abusing, it was one of the ways of retaining those resources.
Today, bullying works because it still has the same impact, especially if it goes unaddressed. Bullies get something they want at the expense of the victim.
But just because bullying works doesn’t make it a healthy strategy to get you what you want. Bullies need to invest in developing their other skills if they are looking for long-term success.
- Bullies Lack Other Social Skills
You probably take it for granted that you have a large set of skills that allow you to make friends, start relationships, and maintain them without the need to act aggressively.
These are things like emotion regulation, communication skills, and social thinking.
Bullies who don’t have the same skills as you still want the same things from society as you do: relationships, friends, status, and attention. So they use bullying to get them because that is what they are good at.
- Securing Their Place in a Group
We are all a part of some group or social circle. Different social circles have shared norms, values, and worldviews; it is a part of what bonds us.
If we feel our place in that group is tenuous, we might be motivated to signal our allegiance to the group by displaying hostility to members of other social circles who are different from us.
This shows you are loyal and may score you some points in the group. Bullying is especially allowed by members of a group if the target is posing a threat to the group somehow.
- Social Learning
Some bullies learn to be bullies. They may learn this by living in an abusive household, witnessing bullying, or being bullied themselves.
But it is not as simple as seeing something and imitating it. The imitation is coupled with the idea that the behavior is acceptable or can help them achieve something within a given context.
- Poor Coping Mechanisms
Bullies might have deep emotional or psychological wounds that they deal with by attacking external representations or reminders of those issues.
So if a bully is struggling with school and feels like they are getting left behind while everyone sails through the curriculum, they might lash out at those who remind them of their inadequacy, like academically excelling students.
You can see this applying to a range of other personal problems the bully might be struggling with privately, at home, or in other areas of life. If they had better coping mechanisms, they wouldn’t resort to bullying.
Related Questions
What Do I Do If My Friend Is the Bully?
Your friend probably cares a lot about what you think and wants you to think well of them. So an act as simple as sitting with them and explaining how their behavior makes you feel can go a long way. Just make sure your tone is not accusatory or judgmental. Make it about you instead of the victim.
This can be as simple as saying, “I don’t like it when you do x to y. It makes me feel uncomfortable. I think it would be better if you stopped. It isn’t cool.”
My Friend Won’t Tell Me Who Is Bullying Them. What Do I Do?
Let them know that it is safe to talk to you and not do anything without their consent. In other words, earn their trust.
If that fails, find a trusted individual you think they can open up to. It might look like a betrayal to your friend, but it might be what they need to finally open up.
If it means telling their family, a spouse, or their parents, do it. Once the matter is known among people close to them, they are more likely to open up.
I Have Bullied Someone and Feel Guilty. What Should I Do?
The first thing you should do is forgive yourself. Then, try to pinpoint where the anger is coming from and take steps to deal with it. Finally, go to the victim and ask for forgiveness.
This last step might be hard, but it is a huge step toward recovery.
When you apologize, make it detailed. Tell them what you did, how it made you feel, and why you did it. Then, ask for their forgiveness. It doesn’t matter if you do it now or after many years; however, the sooner, the better. You won’t regret it.
Final Thoughts
Bullying is serious, and when we see others being bullied, we have a moral obligation to stand up and protect them.
But that doesn’t make it easy. Confronting a bully or strengthening a victim can be hard. But the sooner we help a victim, the sooner they can begin their journey to recovery.
Remember that bullies are not monsters, nor are they people who deserve to be bullied in retaliation. We need to work with them to help them stop and equip them with the skills they need to find their place in society.
Demonizing bullies gets us nowhere, and the road to healing starts with understanding where the aggression comes from.