Blurred boundaries and the hierarchization of incidents: Swedish schoolteachers’ struggles with distinguishing degrading treatment, harassment, and school bullying

ABSTRACT While the efforts of teachers are crucial for preventing and stopping degrading treatment, harassment, and bullying in schools, research has found that teachers’ understandings of such terms may vary significantly. In this qualitative study, we take a social-ecological perspective to investigate Swedish schoolteachers’ understandings of the terms degrading treatment, harassment, and bullying. The study is based on ethnographic research, which included participant observations and interviews conducted at three schools. The findings demonstrate not only the ways in which teachers blurred the conceptual boundaries between degrading treatment, harassment, and bullying, but also how such blurring was influenced by factors within the microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macrosystem, and chronosystem, and how the juridification of degrading treatment and harassment encouraged teachers to construct hierarchies of what they perceived to be more or less serious incidents.

While some studies have found that teachers and older students tend to be more nuanced in their understandings of bullying than younger children and to distinguish between different forms of bullying (Monks & Smith, 2006;Siann et al., 1993), research has also highlighted that teachers are still less likely to perceive verbal and relational interactions, such as name calling and social exclusion, as bullying (Hazler et al., 2001;Mazzone et al., 2021;Oldenburg et al., 2016).Highlighting the importance of context, some researchers have noted that teachers' understandings of bullying may be influenced by their perceptions of the seriousness of the situation (Lee, 2006;Mishna et al., 2005), the behaviour of the person being bullied (Lee, 2006;Mishna et al., 2005), the extent to which the situation fits the teacher's beliefs about bullying (Bauman & Del Rio, 2005;Mazzone et al., 2021;Mishna et al., 2005), whether or not the teacher feels empathy for that particular child (Mazzone et al., 2021;Mishna et al., 2005), and whether or not the teacher witnessed what occurred (Craig et al., 2000;Mazzone et al., 2021).
In the Swedish school context, teachers and other school staff are obliged by law to deal with incidents of degrading treatment (kränkande behandling) and harassment (trakasserier), with different laws applying depending on whether it is degrading treatment (i.e., the Education Act) or harassment (i.e., the Discrimination Act) (Carlbaum, 2020;Hammarén et al., 2015;Horton & Forsberg, 2019;Lindgren, 2020;Thornberg, 2019).The Swedish Education Act (2010:800) defines degrading treatment as "Conduct that, without being discriminatory according to the Discrimination Act (2008:567), degrades the dignity of a child or student" (Chap.6., 3 §, our translation).In direct connection to this definition, the Swedish Discrimination Act (2008:567) defines harassment as "Conduct that degrades someone's dignity and that is related to one of the discriminatory grounds of gender, transgender identity or expression, ethnicity, religion or other belief, disability, sexual orientation, or age" (Chap.1., 4 §, our translation).While there are plenty of efforts to counteract bullying in Swedish schools, the term bullying is no longer explicitly used in legal documents (Carlbaum, 2020;Horton & Forsberg, 2019;Thornberg, 2019).However, highlighting the links between the terms, the Swedish National Agency for Education states that "It is usually called bullying if a child or student is subjected to degrading treatment, harassment or sexual harassment on repeated occasions" (Skolverket, 2019, our translation).
In this study, we investigate Swedish schoolteachers' understandings of the terms degrading treatment, harassment, and bullying, and consider the extent to which the conceptual boundaries between such behaviours, and between these behaviours and other negative behaviours, may be blurred.In doing so, we use the official definitions of the terms outlined in the paragraph above, as these are the definitions that teachers must relate to in their day-to-day work.Understanding how teachers distinguish the boundaries between degrading treatment, harassment, and bullying is important because teachers are legally required to intervene in and report all incidents of degrading treatment and harassment, and not only those that are repeated and take the form of bullying.Indeed, the term bullying was removed from the Swedish Education Act precisely because of a concern that one-off incidents would be overshadowed by a focus on bullying behaviour (Carlbaum, 2020;Horton & Forsberg, 2019;Thornberg, 2019).Understanding how teachers distinguish the boundaries between degrading treatment, harassment, and bullying is also important because the distinctions made by teachers influence whether, and in which ways, they intervene (Lee, 2006;Mazzone et al., 2021;Mishna et al., 2005).
Theoretical framework Bronfenbrenner's (1977Bronfenbrenner's ( , 1979Bronfenbrenner's ( , 1994) ) ecological systems model was used as a theoretical framework for the current study.According to the ecological systems model, individuals are embedded within a number of systems, including the microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macrosystem, and chronosystem.In thinking about teachers' understandings of degrading treatment, harassment, and school bullying, it is not enough to simply focus on the attitudes and behaviour of individual teachers, but rather to consider, for example, how their understandings relate to their relations with students and the different systems within which those students are located.This includes: (1) perceptions of those students as individuals; (2) students' relations with students or teachers (i.e., the microsystem); (3) relations between the students' different microsystems, such as their home-school relations (i.e., the mesosystem); (4) contexts where students may not be directly involved but which may impact them indirectly, such as the relations between their classmates and their friends or siblings, and the decisions taken at the school level in terms of action plans and the discussions of teachers and other school staff (i.e., the exosystem); (5) societal norms and their impact on social norms and student-student interactions (i.e., the macrosystem); and (6) the shifting temporal context within which such relations are understood and played out (i.e., the chronosystem).

Method
The study is based on ethnographic research conducted at three comprehensive schools in Sweden and is part of a larger project investigating the relations between school bullying and the institutional context of schools from the perspectives of both teachers and students.Prior to beginning the research, we received ethical approval from the regional ethical review board, introduced the project to the school principals, teachers and students, and received informed consent from all participants.In this study, we provide all the teachers with pseudonyms and fictively refer to the three schools as Woodland School, Hillside School, and Clifton School.
The research involved participant observations and semi-structured interviews with 21 teachers from preschool class to grade six (i.e., ages 5-13), as well as seven members of the schools' safety teams (trygghetsteam) or student health teams (elevhälsoteam).The interviews with the school safety and student health teams were undertaken at the beginning of the research at each school and were used to inform the participant observations.These, in turn, informed the teacher interviews that were conducted at the end of each school visit.The participant observations were written down in the form of fieldnotes and later typed up, while the interviews were audio-recorded and then transcribed.The data were analysed with the help of constructivist grounded theory, whereby we approached our findings as co-constructed and theory laden but sought to remain as openminded as possible (Charmaz, 2014;Charmaz et al., 2017;Thornberg, 2012).
Our analysis focused on how teachers distinguished degrading treatment, harassment, and bullying, and how they made sense of the meanings and processes articulated.We utilised initial, focused, and theoretical coding (Charmaz, 2014).During initial coding, the data were coded line-by-line and codes were compared with each other, while during focused coding we used the most telling and recurring codes to compare against the data and develop into concepts.The issue of blurred boundaries and the hierarchization of incidents was conceptualised at this stage.The relationship between the concepts was elaborated during the theoretical coding and we utilised Bronfenbrenner's (1977Bronfenbrenner's ( , 1979Bronfenbrenner's ( , 1994) ) ecological systems model as a lens through which to understand our findings.

Findings
While there is considerable overlap in the ways in which teachers in the study discussed the terms degrading treatment, harassment and bullying, in presenting our findings we take discussions of the three concepts in turn.In doing so, we illustrate the ways in which the boundaries between the concepts were often blurred and how teachers constructed hierarchies of what they perceived to be more or less serious incidents.

Degrading treatment
At Woodland, Hillside, and Clifton schools, degrading treatment was defined in the schools' plans against discrimination and degrading treatment in line with the definition in the Education Act.Different examples of what constitutes degrading treatment were provided in the different plans, including teasing, pushing, hitting, threatening, pulling hair, socially excluding, and sending mean emails or text messages to someone.As Marie, a member of the school safety team at Woodland School, explained, "It can be fights, it can be verbal, it can be … well, it's most of what goes on.
And … it can happen quite often sometimes in a week, so to speak".It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that teachers sought to make distinctions between what they deemed degrading treatment and what they did not.
In explaining how she decided whether something was degrading or not, Anja, a member of the school safety team at Hillside School, did not point to individual actions but rather to how individual students react to the treatment to which they are subjected: Some children use the word "degraded", and some don't, but you can almost tell when you talk to the child that they feel degraded.That they think about it a lot at home, have maybe talked about it at home, have difficulty sleeping, so that they … not just, "Oh, that's what people say", some say, and say a lot of bad words and sort of, "and there's no problem".But someone who gets upset and takes it very badly, then you can tell that they are degraded.
Anja pointed to the importance of the degrading experience and suggested that despite some children not explicitly saying they have been degraded, she can tell when a child feels degraded because the child "gets upset" and "takes it very badly".She also illustrated the extent to which someone may not only take it badly and get upset, but also carry the degradation around with them and feel degraded to the extent that it affects their daily thoughts and their ability to sleep.In doing so, Anja also raised the importance of the mesosystem and how what happens in one microsystem context (e.g., school) can impact what occurs in another (e.g., home).
In a similar vein to Anja, Joakim, a teacher at Woodland School, said that he tended to take those instances where someone is visibly sad more seriously, as it suggests that they have been degraded: Joakim: I usually look at it this way.If someone shouts that it's degrading treatment, then I don't usually take it that way, but if I see that someone gets sad and walks away, then I can feel that it is degrading.But I usually don't even listen to those who stand and yell that it is degrading.Author 1: No, okay.And why not?Joakim: No, because there's no reason, is there?You can't just pull out a degraded-card, because they might also have said something stupid.That's not very uncommon, I've heard that too.
Like Anja, Joakim pointed to individual level factors such as seeing that "someone gets sad and walks away".He suggested that it is not uncommon that students try to use a "degraded-card" to their advantage, despite also having said something degrading beforehand.Joakim made a distinction between degrading treatment that is provoked and that which is unprovoked, suggesting that teachers do not address all forms of degrading treatment but rather attempt to interpret them according to the relations between students within that student's microsystem.In doing so, Joakim highlighted the ways in which the boundaries between degrading treatment and bullying may be blurred, with teachers taking instances where there is a perceived power imbalance (in terms of a one-sided interaction) more seriously than those where there is no perceived imbalance.In a similar way, Sofia stated that because of the sheer number of incidents and the juridical demands of reporting, the safety team at Woodland School had decided to make distinctions between a "common degradation" and a "safety team case" where only one student is being degraded.In doing so, Sofia alluded to the interpretational importance of the microsystem and what else has been occurring in that situational context.Indeed, like Joakim, Sofia pointed to the perceived importance of a power imbalance and illustrated that teachers and school safety teams may not take cases where both parties are involved in degrading treatment as seriously as those where only one student is being degraded.In this sense, the boundaries between degrading treatment and bullying are blurred, suggesting that students who retaliate are not taken as seriously as those who do not.
Illustrating the interpretational importance of the microsystem, Sofia also talked about the difficulties of deciding what counts as degrading treatment: Many verbal insults are coded today, so that we don't understand them.So, many cases can start with them having to explain how they have degraded someone, because we understand that it is degrading, but we don't understand how, because it is so coded for us.It's not the usual, "Your mother".You have learned those.Or then it becomes "Mother" … Last time it was just, "That is so easy" and then we have to interpret it because the other person feels degraded because they have said so, and then it can start with them having to explain the degrading treatment, because it's so coded.
Sofia illustrated not only the difficulties of identifying what is degrading treatment, but also the subtle ways in which students can engage in degrading treatment, and how seemingly innocuous comments can be experienced as degrading.Sofia's comments about the coded nature of degrading treatment illuminate the importance of the microsystem context, wherein similar comments have been used prior to the perceived insult, "That is so easy", which teachers also need to be aware of in order to decode the degrading treatment as such.In this sense, Sofia's comments demonstrate how the boundaries between degrading treatment and bullying may be blurred.For example, it is questionable whether saying "That is so easy" would be experienced as degrading as a one-off comment.
Sofia's comments also allude to the importance of understanding the students' "peer culture" (Corsaro & Eder, 1990) and how this is intertwined with the various systems of the social-ecology.In this sense, the use of coded verbal insults can be understood as part of the students' peer culture, which is manifested during interactions with peers in the microsystem, with friends and siblings outside of school (i.e., the mesosystem), and during interactions between classmates and their friends and siblings outside of school (i.e., the exosystem).These systems influence one another and do not operate in a social vacuum.Rather, they are embedded within and influenced by a larger societal context (i.e., the macrosystem) wherein prevalent norms about sexuality, gender, and the use of mother insults, for example, circulate, shift and/or morph over time (i.e., the chronosystem).

Harassment
In Woodland, Hillside and Clifton schools' plans against discrimination and degrading treatment, harassment was defined according to the definition provided in the Discrimination Act.Yet, at all three schools, teachers appeared to have difficulty distinguishing harassment from other negative forms of conduct.At Hillside School, for example, Anja and Lena, who were members of the school safety team, discussed harassment in terms of its relation to the concepts degrading treatment and bullying: Anja: Harassment is … a bit under bullying, and degrading treatment is probably the one that is difficult, and there you need to listen to the person who feels … feels that they have been exposed to something.
[…] I think harassment is more that it doesn't continue so long and isn't as bad.Or what do you think?Lena: Yeah, I also think a bit like that, that harassment isn't … Anja: Tease each other.Lena: Yeah, that you tease and you, then it can lead to bullying, I think … Anja: Yeah, exactly.Lena: … if it continues, if you don't do anything about it.For me, degrading treatment can happen once.
While the others, both harassment and bullying, are more repeated to different degrees, sort of … Anja: Mm, yeah exactly.Lena: … in some way.But you have to be very vigilant there with harassment so it doesn't become bullying, I think.
As can be seen above, Anja and Lena suggested that degrading treatment is something that can occur once and is individual in the sense that the person "feels" degraded, while harassment is an under-category of bullying but "doesn't continue so long" and "isn't as bad" (like teasing).Lena stated that while degrading treatment can happen once, harassment involves a degree of repetition and can "become bullying".Neither Anja nor Lena made connections to societal norms at the macrosystem level or the discriminatory grounds of gender, transgender identity or expression, ethnicity, religion or other belief, disability, sexual orientation, or age.In contrast, Sofia, a member of the school safety team at Woodland School, made direct connections to societal norms at the macrosystem level when mentioning discriminatory grounds, and indicated that harassment usually occurs in oneoff situations: Skin colour has sometimes come up.Not repeatedly, but it is in one-off situations, in a conflict when you are angry.So, we have not had a dark-skinned student who has been repeatedly harassed because he has been gay, but harassment, one-time harassment, with skin colour involved, that happens.And it has, unfortunately, become more common at our school.I didn't experience any my first three terms here, but now we notice that such things, you blurt out things that are degrading; degrading harassment, if you can say so, in anger.
Sofia suggested that racial harassment occurs now and then, and is becoming more common, but rather than being something that is repeated or connected to other forms of harassment is instead something that occurs in the heat of the moment, when upset students "blurt out" degrading comments "in anger".Sofia combined the two juridical concepts of harassment and degrading treatment, highlighting not only that harassment is degrading, but also that the boundaries between harassment and degrading treatment may be perceived as somewhat blurred by teachers.There is a sense in Sofia's comments that the harassment is not intended to be hurtful, but rather that students use those degrading terms that are most readily accessible at the time when dealing with conflicts within their microsystem.
Indeed, in the same interview, Ingrid stated that it can be difficult to distinguish between what is harassment and what is simply the "most obvious" means for degrading someone at the time: It is also difficult to distinguish, when a child gets angry, they jump directly on what is most obvious.If you have glasses, it's "four eyes", and if you're a bit round, it's "fatty", and if you're dark-skinned, it's that, so the question is whether … and there it is also hard to say whether it's harassment or whether it's, you know, the first obvious thing to jump on, like that.But it … we still take it more seriously if it's about skin colour and ethnic background and stuff like that.
In a similar way to Sofia, Ingrid suggested that students "jump on" individual markers of difference when they are "angry" during conflicts within their microsystem, and that they may thus not be intentionally harassing someone.The examples that Ingrid provided highlight the fine line between what is degrading treatment and what is harassment.While calling someone "four eyes" or "fatty" is degrading treatment and thus falls under the Education Act, calling someone names based on their skin colour is harassment and falls under the Discrimination Act.In contrast to Anja and Lena, Ingrid suggested that they take harassment more seriously, and thus place it higher in the hierarchy of incidents than degrading treatment, despite both being legislated against.
When discussing the boundaries between bullying, harassment, and degrading treatment, Henrik and Irene, teachers at Clifton School, also pointed to the importance of conflicts within the microsystem context for determining whether something is harassment: Henrik: Where is the boundary, where is … Yeah.That's actually a very good question.It feels a bit like it's from conflict to conflict.Are there two girls or boys on the basketball court who've played football, collide, they've disagreed, one screams "whore" and the other screams "fag" to the other.Then we take it with them then and there, explain that it's not okay to say so, blah, blah, blah.Then it doesn't feel like, then I don't write an incident report about it.But if it's recurring, someone who says a bad word, degrading to someone, recurring, or that it's not … what's it called?Yeah, but it's more unprovoked.Irene: Yeah, when it's more unprovoked too, I think.Henrik: Yeah, more unprovoked and more … Irene: That you just go and say a bad word to someone, but as in the situation you said when they are two, like, we collide and we both get angry, both say something stupid.It's more like it's just happening in the moment, you probably report more those where it is explicitly, "Now I'm going to say this to you to make you sad".
Despite providing clear legal examples of harassment based on the discriminatory grounds of gender and sexual orientation with the discriminatory terms, "whore" and "fag", Henrik suggested, much like Sofia and Ingrid above, that the terms are used in the heat of the moment during conflicts within the microsystem and thus do not constitute harassment.According to both Henrik and Irene, they would be more inclined to define an incident as harassment, and to report the incident, if it is repeated, unprovoked and somewhat premeditated.

Bullying
Each school's plan against discrimination and degrading treatment was unsurprisingly focused on discrimination, harassment and degrading treatment, with the term bullying given little mention.In one of the action plans, bullying was listed as an example of degrading treatment, while in another bullying was provided as the term that is commonly used "if degrading treatment happens repeatedly".Highlighting the perceived importance of repetition in distinguishing bullying from degrading treatment and harassment, Clare, a teacher at Woodland School, explained that she usually looks for a pattern involving the same person being targeted in order to determine whether or not a situation is bullying: I usually look for a pattern.Is it the same person who is in the same position several times, during a month or something?That's when you start to see, okay but then maybe it is … or is it a one-off situation?Then maybe it's just a quarrel, so to speak, which breaks out and then it's finished, so it's often that you look for a pattern in the behaviour.
While Clare alluded to difficulties in judging how often something needs to occur for it to be considered repeated (i.e., "several times, during a month or something?"),she nonetheless distinguished bullying in terms of there being "a pattern in the behaviour" and pointed to the interpretational importance of the microsystem.Likewise, Pia, a teacher at Clifton School, stated that for something to be classified as bullying, it has to be "somewhat systematic": So really, if we look at our policy documents or rules, then I would say that it has to be somewhat systematic for it to be classified as bullying.If you go and generally poke everyone, then a specific person is not targeted.However, if I have a deviant behaviour and behave badly, then we need to correct that.And it's extremely difficult for such children who have difficulty regulating these things, but it's still my job to try.So, I would say when it is somewhat systematic, that it is premeditated, that I always target that person or those two … then it falls under bullying.
While Pia pointed to the importance of repetition, she also made distinctions between those students who do not target "a specific person" and those who more systematically "target that person or those two" in a "premeditated" way.In this sense, Pia's notion of bullying as systematic suggests that the bullying is intended (or "premeditated"), and also involves the same person (i.e., "I") repeatedly doing it to the same person(s).In a similar way, Hanna, a teacher at Woodland School, stated, "But you probably have to look at whether it happens repeatedly and that it is the same person who does it to that person all the time".By concentrating on the actions of those doing the bullying, these explanations focus on the individual level and the often-used definitional criterion of intention.
Similarly, two teachers at Clifton School, Anita and Helen, pointed not only to the repetitive nature of the actions within the microsystem but also to the intention of the individual(s) doing the bullying: Anita: Well, I think bullying is when it continues and goes on and it never ends.So, a quarrel can be one situation and then you solve it, yeah then it's over.But I think bullying is when you, well partly personal, that is, that you tease someone for being "four eyes" all the time or something, or you do it physically, that you continually push, that it never ends then.Even though, even adults maybe know about it and tell them to stop, but it continues anyway until they maybe catch up with each other on the way home from school or something like that.That I think is pure bullying.That it continues and goes on all the time.Helen: Yeah, I completely agree.Or I also think whether they are aware that they shouldn't do it, and they do it anyway, then it can be understood as bullying too, right?
When discussing repetition, Anita and Helen emphasised the repetitiveness of the actions of the individual(s) doing the bullying (i.e., "you" or "they"), in terms of "continually" teasing or pushing, for example.Both Anita and Helen also pointed to a conscious intention to engage in the bullying, as the individual(s) doing it continues to do it despite being "aware that they shouldn't do it".Despite bullying not being used in legal documents or the action plan of their school, Anja and Lena, at Hillside School, pointed to "the definition", in terms of bullying involving "repeated actions and the same children involved": Author 2: Tell me what you think bullying is.Anja: Mm. Well … Yeah, we think, in line with the definition, that it should be repeated actions and the same children involved.Lena: One victimized by one or more others.Anja: More, yeah, over a longer time.Lena: Yeah.And that that person maybe isn't someone who retaliates or is doing things too, but is rather more victimized, or what should I say?Anja: Yeah, yeah, exactly.Lena: But more alone in the whole thing.Anja: Victimized.
Anja and Lena pointed to the repetitive aspect of bullying in terms of it being "the same children involved", but also to it occurring within a relationship characterised by an imbalance of power, in which the person being bullied "isn't someone who retaliates" but is "rather more victimized" and "more alone in the whole thing".Lena's comment about the person perhaps not being "someone who retaliates or is doing things too" suggests that different situations are perceived quite differently depending on the reaction of the individual being bullied.In this sense then, teachers appeared to distinguish bullying from other interactions within the microsystem based on their perceptions of those individuals as either "bullies" or "victims".
While most of the teachers pointed to particular actions that are repeated when explaining bullying, Susanne, a member of the student health team at Clifton School, distinguished between what she perceived as disagreements and conflicts and those situations where some students are not particularly targeted but who are nevertheless not included and spend their time on their own for various reasons: No, but I mean I think like some children that I can see, and who often come to me even when I am outside, they are the ones who are on their own.I mean those who are alone, that is bullying … or there's no one who really directly targets them and says mean things and so, it's not like that.But I have a couple, three people, who usually look for me because they know that I have said it's okay and we can try to get involved in a game and I can be there a bit.But they have difficulty getting into the group and the group has a hard time letting them in.And I do not really know how to work with it, it's difficult.They are a bit shy, and some lack boundaries, and children are different in that way.So those kids try to engage me quite a bit, those somewhat invisible kids, who aren't directly targeted.I mean there is no one who says anything mean to them and that, but they are not really visible.
Susanne illustrated the difficulty of accounting for those students who are not "directly targeted" by their peers (e.g., in terms of being called "mean things").Rather than pointing to the direct actions of individuals, Susanne suggested that those students "have difficulty getting into the group and the group has a hard time letting them in".In doing so, she illuminated a grey zone between indirect relational forms of bullying and the establishment of friendship groups through microsystem processes of inclusion and exclusion.She highlighted that navigating such boundaries can be difficult not only for the person seeking inclusion but also for group members seeking to maintain the cohesion of the group, and that it may also be difficult for teachers to decide when children who are on their own are actually being bullied.

Discussion
In this study, we have investigated how Swedish schoolteachers distinguish between the terms degrading treatment, harassment, and bullying.While the Education and Discrimination Acts define degrading treatment and harassment as conduct that degrades the dignity of a student, our findings demonstrate that teachers may experience difficulties in determining whether or not something counts as degrading treatment, harassment, or bullying.In discussing these findings, we return to Bronfenbrenner's (1977Bronfenbrenner's ( , 1979Bronfenbrenner's ( , 1994) ) theoretical framework and use it as a means for unpacking the ways in which teachers blurred the boundaries between the terms.
In determining the boundaries of what is and is not considered degrading treatment, teachers looked to the individual for evidence that they had been degraded.In other words, rather than merely considering the conduct, they considered the effects of the conduct, in terms of whether the person targeted became sad and walked away, for example.Likewise, when deciding whether comments were harassment, teachers considered the intentions of the individual making the comments.Those comments that were seen to be emotionally provoked and "blurted out" in the heat of the moment were thus not perceived to be intended as harassment.Teachers also looked to the individual when interpreting potential bullying situations to see if the degrading conduct was systematic.While some teachers sought to determine whether it was the same individual (i.e., a "bully") repeatedly engaging in the degrading conduct, others sought to determine whether it was the same individual (i.e., a "victim") being repeatedly subjected to the degrading conduct.In doing so, they considered not only the degrading conduct but also the conduct of those subjected to it, in order to identify those interactions where there was no retaliation and that were thus not simply part of the give-and-take of everyday microsystem relations.
When deciding whether conduct was degrading or not, teachers considered the conduct in relation to the microsystem in order to determine whether the student claiming to have been degraded had also been engaged in degrading conduct, and was thus simply pulling out a "degraded-card".In this way, teachers blurred the boundaries between degrading treatment and bullying by drawing on the definitional criterion of a power imbalance that often characterises bullying definitions (Hellström et al., 2021;Horton, 2021;Mazzone et al., 2021), but which is not included in the official legal definition of degrading treatment (Swedish Education Act, 2010:800).
When considering harassment, teachers also sought to understand the discriminatory comments in relation to the microsystem context and dismissed some harassing conduct as simply being in the heat of the moment and the "most obvious" means available for degrading someone.Just as some teachers blurred the boundaries between degrading treatment and bullying, then, these teachers blurred the boundaries not only between degrading treatment and harassment, in terms of "degrading harassment", but also between harassment and bullying by drawing on the criterion of intent to inflict harm that often characterises definitions of bullying (Hellström et al., 2021;Horton, 2021;Mazzone et al., 2021).
In understanding bullying situations, teachers also sought to contextualise the conduct in the microsystem by considering whether the conduct involved a power imbalance and whether the individual being targeted retaliated or was "more alone in the whole thing".Understanding power imbalance as non-retaliation is problematic as it may lead to cases of bullying involving so-called "aggressive victims" (i.e., targeted students who persistently react with anger, display aggression and try to fight back rather than acting in a passive and submissive way) being interpreted as less serious cases of peer conflict.This is troublesome because these students tend to be highly disliked and rejected children who are emotionally distressed and at risk of serious mental health problems, as well as behavioural, social, and academic adjustment problems (Schwartz et al., 2001;Toblin et al., 2005).
Teachers suggested that determining whether or not conduct is degrading is not always easy.Coded comments such as "That is so easy" cannot easily be understood as degrading in and of themselves, but rather need to be understood in relation to the students' peer culture and the ways in which it is manifested within the microsystem, but also within the mesosystem and exosystem.Students' interactions with their peers in the microsystem settings of schools influence and are influenced by interactions between peers in mesosystem settings, and by interactions between those peers and others in the exosystem.All of these systems are also contextually embedded within the macrosystem and influenced by prevalent societal norms about gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and so on, which may shift and became more or less prominent over time (chronosystem).It is these norms which underpin not only the discriminatory grounds for harassment but also degrading treatment and bullying more generally (Horton & Forsberg, 2019;Rawlings, 2016;Ringrose & Renold, 2010;Thornberg, 2018;Walton & Niblett, 2013).
The interventional work of teachers is also embedded in the various systems of the social ecology and is influenced by the focus of school rules and policies (i.e., the students' exosystem), national policies, laws and definitions (i.e., the macrosystem), and shifting understandings, definitions, and juridification of the problem (i.e., the chronosystem).Legally differentiating between degrading conduct that is based on discriminatory grounds (i.e., harassment) and degrading conduct that is not based on discriminatory grounds (i.e., degrading treatment) serves to construct boundaries between forms of conduct that in practice may be difficult to distinguish.For example, while calling a girl "fat" because of her bodily shape is legally defined as degrading treatment, such name-calling is not disconnected from the discriminatory grounds of gender and sexuality upon which gendered and sexual harassment are based.Indeed, recent discussions about school bullying have focused attention on the ways in which bullying is connected to wider societal norms, such as gender and sexuality, and the regulation of social difference (e.g., Horton & Forsberg, 2019;Rawlings, 2016;Ringrose & Renold, 2010;Thornberg, 2018;Walton & Niblett, 2013).
Legal demands on teachers and other school staff to report all instances of degrading treatment and harassment entail that they need to either report "most of what goes on" or make decisions about which forms of conduct to report.Our findings suggest that teachers feel they have to blur the boundaries between different kinds of incidents in order to prioritise their time and focus their attention on helping those students who are most at risk.While the term bullying was removed from the Education Act to ensure that one-off incidents would not be overshadowed (Carlbaum, 2020;Horton & Forsberg, 2019;Thornberg, 2019), the tragic irony is that teachers appear to construct a hierarchy of incidents, whereby incidents of degrading treatment are deemed less serious than incidents of harassment, which in turn are deemed less serious than bullying.While it is troubling that instances of degrading treatment are not considered as serious as instances of harassment, it is perhaps understandable that teachers consider instances of degrading treatment and harassment that are repeated to be more serious than those that are not (Lee, 2006;Thornberg, 2019).After all, research suggests that there is a greater risk of negative long-term effects when bullying is repeated over time (Klomek et al., 2015).
However, the legal focus on conduct that degrades the dignity of individuals is problematic because it may serve to hide the experiences of those who are not directly targeted but whose dignity is nonetheless repeatedly degraded through their more indirect exclusion from the peer group.Research has shown that indirect forms of bullying may be particularly difficult for teachers to both recognise and deal with (Craig et al., 2000;Hazler et al., 2001;Mishna et al., 2005;Oldenburg et al., 2016).The focus on conduct is also problematic because it downplays the ways in which the conduct is contextualised and interpreted in practice.As we have shown, Bronfenbrenner's (1977Bronfenbrenner's ( , 1979Bronfenbrenner's ( , 1994) ) theoretical framework provides a useful means of unpacking the ways in which teachers blur the boundaries between degrading treatment, harassment and bullying.This is because it expands understanding beyond the degrading conduct of individuals and opens up for consideration of the importance of the context to that conduct.