Using disability models to rethink bullying in schools

Abstract

Much research on bullying in schools positions individual children within a deficit model of personal variables, categorising and cataloguing them with high levels of aggressiveness, low levels of empathy and so on. While less than optimal school characteristics are sometimes noted, the expectation for change is on the children. This article proposes a reconsideration of ‘the school’ as an unproblematically benign institution inimical to bullying and reframes it as a social system in which current arrangements are conducive to peer aggression. Using theoretical constructs drawn from outside the usual field of bullying, it critically examines some taken-for-granted features of schooling in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. The medical and social models of disability are deployed to illuminate the philosophical differences between psychological and sociological paradigms in bullying research, to call for more research on bullying that critiques political and systemic factors in education rather than ever more funding that frames children as psychological deviants.