Evaluation of peer bullying among high school students from the teacher's perspective

This study was conducted to determine teachers' views and approaches towards peer bullying among high school students. Within the scope of the research, it was aimed to have in-depth information and to describe peer bullying, which is one of the common problems of today, as much as possible from the teachers' perspective. Therefore, the phenomenological approach, one of the qualitative research methods, was thought to be appropriate for the purpose of our current research and the research was conducted with a phenomenological approach. The study group consisted of a total of 25 branch teachers, 19 female and 6 male, who live and work in different provinces and continue to work in different high school types. Data were collected from the participants through interviews, the audio recordings obtained with the consent of the participants were transcribed and the written documents were subjected to content analysis. As a result of the analysis, it was seen that the participants mostly emphasized verbal and physical bullying, the least mentioned types of bullying were cyberbullying and sexual bullying, and peer conflict and peer bullying were considered as different concepts. The most frequently mentioned factor as the cause of bullying by the participants was family-related situations, followed by the structure of the characteristics of students and their developmental periods, factors related to the educational environment, and factors related to social structure and experiences. The participants stated that the victimized students were generally silent students with weak self-defense skills and that the victimized students experienced social isolation, decreased academic achievement and many other negativities during the bullying process. Bully students, on the other hand, were generally perceived as popular and powerful students with low level of awareness; in terms of how they were affected by the process, some of the participants stated that they had not thought about it before and that it was difficult to put forward concrete data on how bully students were affected, some of them stated that they enjoyed and gained strength, but that they could also be exposed to similar negative effects as the victim in the short and long term. Participants stated that they often resorted to strategies such as verbal warnings to the bully, cooperation with the guidance service, increasing interactive activities while intervening in bullying, and that their attitudes and reactions towards the bully and the victimized student may differ, but many participants stated that they were able to gain objectivity in the long run. Participants generally preferred strategies such as informing the family and creating a common strategy with the family to ensure cooperation with families. On the other hand, many participants also mentioned the difficulties of collaborating with families and therefore stated that they did not/ could not collaborate with families. According to the participants, bystander students generally tend to take sides, remain silent and provoke the bully, thus perpetuating bullying, but bullying is easier to prevent when these students take the side of the victim. The participants made suggestions such as raising awareness in families and teachers, increasing the necessary cooperation, increasing the importance of counseling services and conducting awareness-based group studies to combat bullying; they evaluated the dysfunctional approaches of teachers, the difficulty of providing cooperation with families, negative situations related to the educational environment, including curriculum, educational policies, guidance and administration, the difficulty of controlling the social environment outside the school and the inadequacy of the control mechanism in social media as factors that make it difficult to combat bullying. Keywords: Peer bullying, adolescent, high school, teacher