Mitologías del bullying: falsos perfiles de víctimas y agresores

Abstract

Bullying is a complex social problem. Most of the studies use measuring instruments based on self-reports analyzed from the area of psychology. It is necessary to conduct research from other disciplinary and methodological perspectives. The sociology of education, in the tradition represented by Pierre Bourdieu, connects from the epistemological point of view with the Freirian perspective aimed at fostering a pedagogy of autonomy that traces Spontaneous Educational Practice. As an example, this paper analyzes the discourses that weaves public opinion at the level of spontaneous sociology about the nature of victims and bullies of bullying. Just as poverty should not be offered as a cause of violence, neither can a past of violent experiences, school failure, or belonging to certain especially vulnerable social groups -such as immigrants or gypsies- be used as explanations of abuse. But even if beliefs are manifestly erroneous from an empirical point of view, they can have real consequences: they reinforce the problem by preventing understanding and solving it. And it is the case that, almost half a century of bullying research, this does not seem to yield.