A history of youth bullying in Western civilization

Bullying is a pernicious problem in the modern world, leading researchers to ask whether this is a new behavior or whether bullying has more ancient roots. An evolutionary perspective on bullying suggests that it is a behavior that extends well beyond modernity. Adopting that perspective, I chose to examine evidence for adolescent peer bullying in Western cultures during Antiquity (i.e., Ancient Greece and Rome), the Medieval Period, and the Renaissance. Given the scarcity of evidence for the daily lives of adolescents, I focused on two sources of information. First, I analyzed broad cultural factors that may have related to bullying. Second, I examined anecdotal evidence for adolescent bullying. The cultural data reveal that at one level, bullying was a structural feature of historical life in Western Europe and thus was very likely to be present among adolescents. At the anecdotal level, most of the evidence for historical bullying focuses on hazing rituals associated with education. Thus, direct evidence for historical bullying is scant. This may be because peer bullying was rare in history or it may be because peer bullying was not something worth recording. I lean towards the latter interpretation and argue that historically, bullying was at least as common in the past as it is today, with the severity of bullying often exceeding what is seen in modern cultures. These data fit with an evolutionary perspective of bullying and argue for the importance of considering historical research when creating and testing modernized theories of bullying and bullying interventions. • I review evidence for bullying in Western society from antiquity to the turn of the 20th Century. • Bullying is rarely described in historical sources, other than hazing in scholastic settings, most likely because bullying was normative and not worthy of notice until quite recently. • Western (and probably Eastern) society's historical youth bullying was likely as or more prevalent and severe than modern bullying. • There is good evidence that youth violence in general has declined over history and that, along with recent evidence of declines in bullying, suggests that we may be able to further reduce modern youth bullying if we can draw the appropriate lessons from history.