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Jonathan Gathome-Hardy is writing about a particular aspect of the public school phenomenon. ‘There are horrific accounts’, he says, ‘from all centuries, but it is clear the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries marked a climax. Boys killed each other’ (p. 60)
In quoting Jonathan Gathome-Hardy I want to establish from the first that the phenomenon of bullying is the product of an extremely complex picture of external and internal events. Albeit in an historical, class, and gender specific context, the issues raised here are central to the ones explored in this paper. Axiomatically the bully must have an object, or person to bully. We are talking, in other words, of a dynamic relationship in which, aggravated or fuelled by external circumstances, aspects of the personality are played out — sometimes with tragic consequences.
Bullying among children cannot be separated from wider social, cultural, and political considerations. Indeed the subject could be said to encompass everything from a stressed mother yanking her child away from a shop toy, ‘if you touch that again I'll slap you!’; to a marital row, to relationships at work, to structures of class, racism and sexism, to religious, ethnic, and tribal warfare — indeed to any kind of oppression in which, by means of power, violence, cruelty, and perversity, one side