difference between harrasment and bullying
Harassment | Workplace bullying |
| Has a strong physical component, eg contact and touch in all its forms, intrusion into personal space and possessions, damage to possessions including a person's work, etc | Almost exclusively psychological (eg criticism), may become physical later, especially with male bullies, but almost never with female bullies |
| Tends to focus on the individual because of what they are (eg female, black, disabled, etc) | Anyone will do, especially if they are competent, popular and vulnerable |
| Harassment is usually linked to sex, race, prejudice, discrimination, etc | Although bullies are deeply prejudiced, sex, race and gender play little part; it's usually discrimination on the basis of competence |
| Harassment may consist of a single incident or a few incidents or many incidents | Bullying is rarely a single incident and tends to be an accumulation of many small incidents, each of which, when taken in isolation and out of context, seems trivial |
| The person who is being harassed knows almost straight away they are being harassed | The person being bullied may not realise they are being bullied for weeks or months - until there's a moment of enlightenment |
| Everyone can recognise harassment, especially if there's an assault, indecent assault or sexual assault | Few people recognise bullying |
| Harassment often reveals itself through use of recognised offensive vocabulary, eg ("bitch", "coon", etc) | Workplace bullying tends to fixate on trivial criticisms and false allegations of underperformance; offensive words rarely appear, although swear words may be used when there are no witnesses |
| There's often an element of possession, eg as in stalking | Phase 1 of bullying is control and subjugation; when this fails, phase 2 is elimination of the target |
| The harassment almost always has a strong clear focus (eg sex, race, disability) | The focus is on competence (envy) and popularity (jealousy) |
| Often the harassment is for peer approval, bravado, macho image etc | Tends to be secret behind closed doors with no witnesses |
| Harassment takes place both in and out of work | The bullying takes place mostly at work |
| The harasser often perceives their target as easy, albeit sometimes a challenge | The target is seen as a threat who must first be controlled and subjugated, and if that doesn't work, eliminated |
| Harassment is often domination for superiority | Bullying is for control of threat (of exposure of the bully's own inadequacy) |
| The harasser often lacks self-discipline | The bully is driven by envy (of abilities) and jealousy (of relationships) |
| The harasser often has specific inadequacies (eg sexual) | The bully is inadequate in all areas of interpersonal and behavioural skills |
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