Bully

What is your first thought on hearing or seeing that word?

My bet is your brain turned immediately to schools and teenagers topping themselves from cyber-bullying. I mean, that's where the news value is, especially is we can link a pretty girl's suicide to cyber-bullying on a website run from the lawless east of Europe, and parlayed when you can tie in sexual assault and illicit photos.

News porn is the term that's been invented for it.

But bullying is a much deeper problem than just teenagers and Ask.fm.

I constantly see and talk to people who have been mentally shattered by being bullied at work. There are many bosses in New Zealand who recognise that the job they provide is the actual life and blood of the people they're paying. Almost half of us are in the position living "pay to pay". That means that you have exactly enough income to meet expenses, and even Dickens told us over a century ago: "Income two shillings, expenses one-and-six, equals happiness. Income two shillings, expenses three, equals misery."

The situation gets worse for people in that situation if they are older, relatively unskilled, or have some other imperfection that makes them less-employable. If you have children whose food is contained in your ability to work 50 hours a week, then you'd better keep that bloody job!

In that kind of employee, we have created the perfect slave. Not a slave in essence, because he is legally free to go, but a slave in practice, because he cannot afford to leave. This person can then be bullied mercilessly, because if they are silly enough to leave, they better not expect any kind of reference that is less than horrific.

An abusive employer can not just hold the Sword of Damocles over you, they also sit there with a pair of scissors long after you've left their employment by giving lousy references and ruining your job prospects.

I have to stop here and wonder if there's any irony in bullying behaviour being vigilantly pursued and punished on the football field, yet being such an ingrained part of our lives that we miss it right in front of us.

From an evolutionary perspective, bullying is second nature among social animals as they strive for control - the term for it is "pecking order", named after chickens, who do indeed peck each other to establish dominance. Take a look around you, and every type of animal that lives in a hierarchal or group structure will display pecking order behaviour.

Horses in the wild have a distinct order, with a leader who may be challenged by young males. They will fight until a victor is established. From lions and chimpanzees through to the most docile of animals - dairy cows - these animal groups will have a leader and a loser, and if the loser tries to improve it's place, it will soon be bullied back into its rightful one.

Those of you to whom milk comes from bottles, not cows, almost certainly would be surprised to see the antics of dairy cows, where the lead cow will protect her position through pushing and butting challengers. That is identical behaviour to humans.

The thing is, being bullied is not an essential part of the human experience, so if you are in the position of being bullied, you need to do something about it. As a recent case against the Auckland City Council showed, bullying at work is unacceptable and will be viewed very negatively by the Employment Relations Authority. In the case of the council, payments of over $300,000 were made to employees who had suffered bullying at work.

I suspect that tens of thousands of Kiwis are bullied at work every day, but because of the fear of losing their income, they stay in jobs that are slowly destroying their lives.

There is another, almost never mentioned piece to the bullying puzzle - families.

Children have the same pecking order as chooks and bullying between siblings is generally laughed off, but how serious an issue it is we have no idea, because there are no studies I can find on the effects of sibling bullying, but it would not surprise me at all if it is one reason some kids go into depression.

Then we look at parents, and there is a fine line between keeping discipline and bullying. On one hand, it is certain that not disciplining children is a terrible idea, but on the other, how do we know we're not bullying our kids?

The way for parents to ensure that line is never crossed is to write the boundaries of behaviour down and stick to them. Next up is to make sure punishments are not physical. Time out can be enforced and does not constitute bullying, nor does removal of toys, Playstations and Wiis.

The two important messages I would like people to take from this are:

Don't be a bully

If you are being bullied at work, ring 0800 UNFAIR - the employment problem solvers - and stop it happening.

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