Bullying goes on in schools throughout the Western world. It has been a feature of British schools since Tom Brown's Schooldays in the 1830s. It is usually accepted as ‘one of those things’, but sometimes gets noticed by the press; the ensuing discussions are dominated by sociologists, politicians and miscellaneous pundits, and rarely include a psychologist.

Bullying caught the public eye in Sweden in the 1970s, and was variously blamed on large schools, large classes, resentment of bright pupils by ‘under-achievers’, frustration and failure engendered by the educational system, or deviance (in the victims, not the bullies). The prevailing Swedish orthodoxy thought bullying was caused by inequality and deprivation. Anyone who bothered to consider the bully himself said he was ‘basically’ insecure and anxious, projecting his inadequacies on deviant co-pupils. (People tended back then to assume bullying was something only boys did, which turned out not to be the case.)

In the midst of this clamour of speculation, much of it clearly motivated by ideology or professional interest (smaller classes require more teachers), a lone psychologist, Dan Olweus, actually went out and collected some evidence. He found that 1 in 20 Swedish schoolboys are bullies, and 1 in 20 gets bullied. The problem does not ‘sort itself out’ if the school ignores it; three years on the same bullies were making life miserable for the same victims. Bullies were not victims of the school system, nor of social deprivation; their intelligence and achievement were average, as was their social background. The same was true of their victims. Bullying was unrelated to class or school size.