Victims of Educator-Targeted Bullying: A Qualitative Study on Teacher Harmful Experience

ABSTRACT

Bullying in school has become an international concern in recent years, and the issue became urgent after school closure during COVID Pandemic. International studies have identified teacher-targeted bullying by students as a real and harmful issue for teacher wellbeing. Our paper sets out discursive issues surrounding bullying against teachers as targets of intentional bullying. It reports on the findings of a small-scale, extant, qualitative research study on commenters' understanding of the antecedents of teacher-targeted bullying. The aim was to gain insights into the teachers´ targeted bullying from the perspective of teacher victims. We conducted a qualitative descriptive research design stemming from semi-structured interviews with victims of teacher-targeted bullying. A thematic content analysis of the data was generated from interviews with seventeen victimized teachers as a snowball sampling. The sample consisted of male (n = 7) and female (n = 10) participants from urban school locations in the capital of Czech Republic. The focus of our study was to determine how the teachers who had been experiencing bullying by their students described and perceived the nature and consequences attributed to such bullying. The findings indicate that the victims of teacher-targeted bullying were exposed repeatedly over long time verbal and nonverbal bullying, ignoring the teaching activities and other threats directed against teachers. Our results suggest bullying had a negative influence on the victims' private lives (family, colleagues), physical and mental health and self-esteem. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.