I doubt very much if anyone has ever thought to write a book with the title: A Theology of Bullying. One reason for its non-existence may be that the word bullying is still associated in many people’s minds only with the abusive activities in a school playground.  A lot of cruelty and abuse would take place there but, because it was often out of the sound and sight of supervising adults, it was deemed not to exist.  Teachers and other adults are today, hopefully, far more attuned to the signs of child-on-child abuse in schools and better trained to deal with it. 

The word bullying, as we are all aware, can be applied to the abuse of power in any context and may occur in any human relationship.  Theology does have a great deal to say about power and its use/abuse so, by extension, theological reflection may be relevant in a discussion over bullying whenever it occurs. Relationships which involve power abuse are everywhere, whether in a workplace context or in a church. It is always important to understand why they happen, and we have the resources of a number of disciplines to help us do this. Attitudes in society mean that now we are far less tolerant of bullying behaviour.  For example, in the past it was expected that the novices in many work situations would have to endure power abuse as a kind of initiation into the adult world of work.  Even in the Church it seems to have been a common experience for training incumbents to have bullied their curates.  Whether Vicars were jealous of their younger colleagues, or for some other reason, the typical curate experience may well have included this experience of being bullied.   Power misuse in a church context was not only found in the experience of curates trying to find their feet as pastors and teachers.  We are now of course aware of the extensive catalogue of sexual abuse cases that continue to haunt the churches so grievously over recent years.  The authorities in the Church have made enormous efforts to protect the vulnerable from this particular manifestation of power abuse by the setting up of an extensive variety of safeguarding structures.  Unfortunately, these structures are so complex and convoluted that it takes a determined effort to find one’s way around them.  Even when we have negotiated our way round to understand all the Church’s structures to deal with power abuse and bullying, we find that there is one enormous failing in the whole enterprise.  To put the problem into one sentence, the Church does not really understand the nature and prevalence of power inside its structures and culture.  Without such an understanding the Church cannot root out the evil in the abuses that exist, whether in sexual exploitation or in the other forms of bullying that occur.  Without a detailed and intelligent understanding of power and the way it works in institutions and relationships, there can never be any end to this evil found in bullying and other forms of power abuse.

A good place to start our understanding of power and its abuse, are the writings of Albert Maslow.   He proposed that all human beings have a series or ‘hierarchy of needs’.  At the base of this hierarchy, we find the existence of fundamental survival needs.  These include the need for finding food, shelter and safety from predators.  When we have established our ability to survive and reproduce our species, our needs become more sophisticated.  We have social and esteem needs, and these can be attended to once the survival needs have been met.  At the top of the needs table is a state of existence which Maslow calls self-actualisation.   This is the peak of human striving, and it might embrace such things as spirituality and fulfilling one’s deepest strivings and vocation.  For many people the idea of self-actualisation remains an aspiration rather than a reality and they are content with the fulfilment of their survival and psychological needs.  My introducing of Maslow’s ideas is not the prelude to a full exposition of what he has to say about human striving.  Rather I want to suggest that there is a way of understanding bullying and human evil generally by presenting them as the shadows of the various stages of Maslow’s hierarchy.  To put in another way, each legitimate attempt to provide for one’s human needs can be easily corrupted to become an act of pure evil.

To return to the theme of bullying.  At one level we can see that bullying is a corruption of our natural and healthy need to preserve our life from threats to its existence.  The need to protect oneself and one’s family might begin as a legitimate desire for survival, but it can slide into acts of gratuitous unpleasantness towards another.  These acts may or may not involve physical violence, but the techniques practised by bullies are similar to the legitimate acts of self-preservation against threats of various kinds.  The thing that makes one violent act legitimate and another evil is found in what motivates them.  Bullies inflict evil and pain, not for survival purposes, but because it provides them with some gratification.  There is the pleasure of being in control, having power over another.  To summarise, power abuse/bullying finds its roots in actions that are connected with the instinctive behaviour around our self-preservation.  We know that if we are threatened, primitive instinct comes into operation, activating the fight/flight response.  Any use of this fight response, an expression of our raw power, will not be used very often we hope.  It is unsettling ever to be faced with our capacity for violent behaviour towards another.  Perhaps bullying is an addiction to this primitive capacity for violence.  Most of us avoid being attracted in any way to this form of gratification even though we recognise that we may have it deep down within the psyche.

Beyond mere survival for the individual and his/her progeny, other needs in Maslow’s construct come to the fore.  As we go up Maslow’s ladder of needs, we find legitimate needs existing alongside their negative/shadow counterparts. For example, love and belonging have positive manifestations but there are those who can only experience such things in a corrupted version such as dominance and control.  A higher level that Maslow calls self-esteem also may be honourable, but we also find a parasitical version which we describe as malignant narcissism.  The narcissist is the one who has learned through life how to feed off other people to meet his esteem needs.  Even the highest level of need, self-actualisation, may be at someone else’s expense by manipulating them in some way.

Maslow and his hierarchy of needs gives us, I believe, a different way of understanding evil and abuse.  To put it at the simplest, evil can be found whenever fundamental legitimate human needs are short-circuited and thus corrupted.  A human being has the right to expect to find at some point in his/her life a fulfilling partnership with another which may involve sexual expression.  This ‘need’ is not a justification for an act of violence or abuse to extract a fleeting moment of physical gratification.  In the same way it is reasonable to look for some form of human community.  This does not mean that we have to find a group of people to control and terrorise to fulfil our fantasies of importance.  Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is extremely helpful for pointing us to legitimate fulfilment and forms of gratification.  At the same time it shows us how easy it is for these to become corrupted and sources of active evil, both for ourselves and those whom we infect with that evil. 

What is evil?  The answer from our brief consideration of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is that evil appears when human legitimate needs and desires are corrupted by their shadow side.  Two factors in the corrupting of Maslow’s legitimate needs are laziness or impatience.  When the child, Violet Beauregarde, in Charlie and the Chocolate factory shouted, ‘I want it and I want it now’, she was thinking and acting out the way that many behave today.  The ‘right’ to have our heart’s desire instantly, whether it is food, sex, power or wealth is a powerful motivation for becoming enmeshed in evil.  Because the legitimate need to flourish as a human being is quite close what is thought of by many to be a right to be gratified in whatever way we desire, there is a tendency to get the two muddled up.  When a parent gives way to a demanding child who, because of their immaturity, thinks only in terms of a instant gratification, he/she does that child an extreme disservice.  Long-term harm may be stored up for the young person who does not understand the difference between these two concepts of need and want.  In the same way there is much evil caused by the individual who can only see and treat all others as objects, i.e. as a means for personal gratification.

Human needs and human gratifications have the habit of getting confused in our minds.  Many find it difficult to disentangle them.  The problem for many is that some forms of gratification have become made respectable because they are practised by people we look up to.  We may perhaps see nothing wrong when a bully is in full flow because we have been conditioned to think of hierarchical authority as being always legitimate.  The use of the cane in schools of yesteryear seemed normal at the time because those of us who were witnesses of it could not contemplate the dimension of base gratification being felt by those wielding the stick.  In the same way we still find it hard to challenge the motivation of those who act unjustly in disciplinary matters, even within our churches.  Are they meeting their own psychological needs by administering such power/punishment or is there some other process going on? Disentangling motives for action is quite a hard thing to do, but perhaps what is more serious is the refusal ever to scrutinise these motives for doing the things we do, whether or not from a position of responsibility.  We all need to be able to recognise that the person who is put in a position of authority and power, may be simultaneously abusing that authority for reasons of satisfying a base need for gratification, and this has nothing to do with goodness and justice.