droid said:
In a recent thread, a member of this forum has accused two other members of bullying.
He's also accused me of bullying on a different thread.
So what constitutes bullying? One reply to the accusation stated that bullying involved threats, and presumably intimidation. Is it possible to be intimidated on a forum like this? I'm certainly intimidated, or at least wary of some people's intellect, but that's about it.
What's other people's views?
Here's my views, based on a fair bit of experience of workplace bullying, both as victim, as a manager dealing with bullying, and supporting those involved in bullying. But they are just my views - I have no specific qualifications in this area.
It doesn't need explicit threats. It's basically repeated aggressive behavior designed to belittle the other person. Two people slagging each other off on-line is just two people having a fight. But if you find your carefully considered posts are being repeatedly dismissed as rubbish by someone, without any evidence that they've actually bothered to read them, and as a result you find yourself feeling nervous about posting, then you may be being bullied. The ultimate effect of "successful" bullying is that you start doubting yourself, and losing confidence in yourself.
It's certainly possible on a forum like this. And I've witnessed a nasty piece of mass bullying on a advice newsgroup. The victim was an obnoxious know-it-all who was giving information that was just downright wrong, and could cause problems for anyone following it. At first I did my share of correcting her "advice", but I started to notice the vindictiveness of several posters in criticising her every post for the sake of it and referring to her by an offensive nickname based on her posting name, and I realised that it had tipped over into bullying.
It's difficult if you're on the other end. What you intended as a robust rebuttal of an argument may be seen by someone else as an attempt to bully and belittle. At this point it isn't bullying, because you didn't mean it as such. The key thing is what happens next. If someone lets you know that your behaviour feels like bullying to them, and you nevertheless carry on doing it, knowing how they feel about it, then you have tipped over into bullying.
Unless of course the person is simply accusing you of bullying as a debating point ...
That's one reason why on-line stuff is so difficult, you just have people's words, not the rest of the body language. So you can't see whether you are upsetting them, or whether they are meaning to upset you.
