Bullying can be described as a form of aggression, and these aggressive actions tend to culminate in a variety of negative consequences for the victimized party in question. It can develop as an individual or a group act, and involves repetitive antagonistic behaviour carried out with the intent to commit harm in one way or another.
Heinemann coined the term Mobbning (Heinemann, 1972), indicative of the mob and representative of a sub-type of aggression that entailed violence by the group against another individual. Over time, this perception of group bullying was complemented by the Olweissian notion that it does not necessarily have to involve group harm, but rather it could be inflicted by one individual towards another. Power differentials are at play and the target of bullying is oftentimes perceived by the antagonist as being in some fashion socially or physically vulnerable in respect to the norm. It was Smith (1994) who framed bullying as a “systematic abuse of power”, and in the following year, Farringdon (1995) described it as the “repeated oppression, psychological or physical of a less powerful person by a more powerful person”. All this being said, to intertwine the threads in the name of coherency brings us to a coherent conceptualization of bullying as the deliberate and repeated acts of aggression and intimidation against someone less powerful.