Bullying's long legacy

TVScopeBullying: Britain's Secret Shame, BBC1, April 19h to April 23rd.Marcus's problems started when he complained about a racist remark his boss made in the workplace. The complaint wasn't taken serious and Marcus ended up on the receiving end of six months' systematic bullying.

Dear reader, I know, you're thinking: "Bullying? What's a piece about bullying doing in the HealthSupplement?"

Marcus's case should help you to think otherwise. As the bullying worsened, he grew depressed. He turned to binge-eating and became ill with stress, leading to a lengthy spell of rest and recuperation ordered by his doctor.

Bullying, in fact, is a health matter - at least as much as it is an employment or education one - as this series, Bullying: Britain's Secret Shame, showed.

We found victims of bullying becoming dependant on anti-depressants. Others struggling against panic attacks, nightmares and hallucinations. Some had turned to self-harming behaviour, and even suicide. A recurring theme was a feeling of isolation - a sense that, as one victim said, "no matter which way you turn the help is not there".

As for the perpetrators of bullying, they may not have induced as much sympathy from the viewer but the scars on their mental health were obvious too.

Take Timothy, for example, a testosterone-fuelled teenager with serious anger-management problems who took the viewer on a tour of the damage he had done to his parents' home. "This one? Can't remember - 'cos it was ages ago - why I did it," he says, as he examines a large hole smashed through his bedroom door. "But generally, it's 'cos of money not being given to me, or people turning off the television when I want to watch something; things like that."

Then, there were the neighbours from hell, a family who terrorised a single mother and her two daughters, setting fire to their car on three occasions - all over a £10 debt that wasn't repaid.

"Bullies do not feel restrained in their behaviour," Tim Field, a workplace bullying expert, remarks. "They act outside the bounds of society whereas the people they target are normally law-abiding, peace-loving and will only act within the bounds of society."

Reaching such people is difficult but reach them we must if we are to get to the root of the problem. Or so says Cary Cooper, a professor and an expert on workplace stress. "The problem is not in the victim," he remarks.

"The problem is in the bully and the sooner we understand that the better."

While the interviewees were all UK-based, their testimony was all too familiar to an Irish audience.

Just last week, we saw a series of news stories about the impact of bullying on Irish children and adults, from the phenomenon of "first-year beatings" in secondary schools, to the case of a mentally disturbed homeless man who traced his decline to his being bullied at school 18 years ago.

The programme showed how victims of bullying tended to internalise the problem, blaming themselves, and holding back from divulging information. The consequences were depressingly predictable.

"In the majority of cases I have dealt with," says Field, "the target of bullying will lose their health, their job, their income, their livelihood, their profession, very often their marriage, their house and home. They will find themselves without a job, without finances, without support, and often without a reference, which prevents them from getting back into the workplace. It is a very destructive experience indeed."

The early afternoon broadcast time for this series suggests the target audience was primarily schools or stay-at-home parents. But it is a series that warrants viewing by health care professionals, employers and even politicians. For too long, the problem of bullying has fallen between the cracks of state agencies in the areas of health, education and employment.