Lead
"My child isn't the one doing the bullying" — that statement is probably accurate in most cases. Perpetrators are a minority. So are direct victims. The question is how to think about the much larger layer in between.
What decades of bullying research have established is not a two-person relationship between aggressor and victim but a map of roles distributed across a classroom functioning as a social system. Perpetrators are necessary for bullying to occur, but what sustains it — laughter, attention, silence — is a broader collective dynamic. That finding has been reproduced across longitudinal studies and school-based surveys for years [1,2].
This article uses the participant role theory developed by Finnish developmental psychologist Christina Salmivalli as its organizing framework. Easy prescriptions are not on offer. But understanding the structure changes the questions worth asking.