Why Children Bully — and Who Is Really Responsible: A Psychologist's Perspective
- Sarah El Nabulsi, M.Sc., M.A., M.A.
- Jul 15
- 6 min read
MBC1 — SABAH AL KHAIR YA ARAB · October 1, 2020
Ms. Sarah El Nabulsi, M.Sc., M.A., M.A., DHA Licensed Clinical Psychologist, joined the hosts of MBC1's Sabah Al Khair Ya Arab following a devastating incident in Egypt: the death of a child named Mohammed, killed as a result of bullying by other children. The case had shaken the Arab public and prompted the question that follows every incident of this kind — who bears responsibility, and what could have been done differently?
Ms. El Nabulsi began, as always in discussions of this kind, with her condolences to the family of the victim.
We Cannot Blame the Children — But We Cannot Excuse the Environment
The instinctive response to a tragedy of this kind is to ask what is wrong with the children involved. The clinical answer to that question requires care.
Children are not fully-formed moral agents in the way adults are, and this is not simply a philosophical position — it is biological fact. The prefrontal cortex, the region of the brain responsible for impulse control, consequence-assessment, moral reasoning, and the regulation of aggressive behaviour, does not reach full maturity until the mid-twenties. Research by developmental neuroscientist Sarah-Jayne Blakemore and colleagues, as well as decades of work on adolescent brain development by Laurence Steinberg at Temple University, has consistently documented this extended developmental timeline — and its direct implications for how young people assess risk, consider the impact of their actions on others, and regulate powerful social impulses. Children engaging in bullying behaviour do not fully compute the consequences of what they are doing. This is not an excuse. It is a developmental reality that has to inform how we respond.
That said: this biology does not absolve the adults responsible for shaping the environment in which children develop.
The Parents Carry the Largest Responsibility
Violent behaviour in children does not appear from nowhere. When a child has developed a pattern of aggression serious enough to inflict lethal harm on another child, something in that child's developmental environment has been going wrong for a long time — not days or weeks, but years. Children are educated constantly by the adults around them, both consciously and unconsciously. They watch how conflicts are resolved at home. They observe what emotions are expressed and which are suppressed. They absorb what happens when someone smaller or weaker is in the room.
When violence is present in the home — whether directed at the child or witnessed between adults — it normalises aggression as a mode of relating to the world. When neglect is present, it signals that other people's suffering does not require a response. When abuse is present, it teaches the child that the world is fundamentally dangerous and that power is the only reliable form of protection. These are not abstract psychological claims. They are the documented developmental pathways that run from adverse childhood experiences to later aggression, and they are visible in clinical practice every day.
The parents play the largest role in shaping who their child becomes — not because they are always to blame, but because they are the primary architects of the environment that shapes development. Monitoring children's behaviour, addressing negative patterns early, teaching explicit respect for the dignity of other human beings regardless of social class, race, or background — these are not optional aspects of parenting. They are its core.
Even Genetic Predisposition Is Not Destiny
One of the most important — and most misunderstood — insights from decades of research on conduct disorder and antisocial personality disorder is the relationship between genetic predisposition and environment.
Yes, there are children who carry a higher genetic vulnerability toward callous, unemotional traits — the precursors to what clinicians recognise as psychopathic characteristics. But the research on gene-environment interaction is unambiguous: children with this genetic predisposition who are raised in warm, consistent, engaged, and appropriately structured environments show dramatically better outcomes than those raised in environments characterised by neglect, inconsistency, or normalised aggression. Genes load the gun. The environment determines whether it fires. A child who might otherwise develop severe antisocial patterns, raised well, can and does develop very differently — with significantly less aggression and a far lower likelihood of harming others.
This is one of the most important arguments for the primacy of the parental and community role in prevention.
The Social Pressure Dynamic — and the Role of the Instigator
In incidents of group bullying, the dynamic is rarely uniform across all the children involved. What frequently occurs — and what appears to have been present in cases of this kind — is that one child, with a more pronounced absence of empathy or remorse, instigates and escalates behaviour that others follow.
Why do the others follow? Because the pressure to belong — to remain within the group, to not be singled out as the one who objected — is, during adolescence, one of the most powerful forces operating on human behaviour. Research consistently shows that peer conformity pressures peak in early to mid-adolescence, precisely because this is the developmental period during which group identity matters most and the neural architecture for independent moral reasoning is least developed. Children who might, alone, never engage in aggressive behaviour can be drawn into it under group pressure, especially when the instigating child carries social dominance.
This does not remove their responsibility. But it does require us to understand that responding to bullying as a simple moral failure of individual children misses the group dynamics that make it possible — and the conditions that make those dynamics go unchecked.
Video Games: Mixed Evidence, Legitimate Question
The legal case raised the question of violent video games as a contributing factor. This is a legitimate question, and the honest clinical answer is that the evidence is genuinely mixed.
Some research — including work by Craig Anderson and colleagues — has found associations between violent video game exposure and increased aggressive thoughts and behaviours. Other researchers, including Christopher Ferguson, whose comprehensive meta-analyses have challenged earlier findings, argue that these effects are small, inconsistent, and confounded by other factors. What the research does support is that video games are unlikely to turn a child with normal development and a stable home environment into a violent offender. They may, however, be one among many factors in an environment already characterised by desensitisation to violence, poor supervision, and normalised aggression.
What Prevention Actually Looks Like
The percentage of children with genuine psychopathic traits — who would engage in serious harm to others instinctively, driven by an absence of empathy rather than by environment — is very small, well below 1% of the child population. The vast majority of children who engage in serious bullying behaviour are not born to it. They are shaped toward it by circumstances that, with earlier intervention, were changeable.
Prevention, at its most basic, requires adults to be genuinely present in children's lives: monitoring behaviour, addressing aggression early when it appears, teaching the foundational respect for human dignity that makes it harder to harm someone else, and recognising that the culture of the home — what is normalised, what is overlooked, what is modelled — is the most powerful educational force a child will ever encounter.
It also requires recognising the structural context. Some families are struggling severely — with poverty, with their own unresolved trauma, with a lack of access to support. When we talk about parental responsibility, we must also talk about the societal responsibility to provide the resources that make good parenting possible. Neither conversation replaces the other.
About Ms. Sarah El Nabulsi
Ms. Sarah El Nabulsi, M.Sc., M.A., M.A. is a DHA Licensed Clinical Psychologist (License No. DHA-75083705) based in Dubai, and UAE Director of the Transcendental Meditation Organization. She has been featured on MBC, MBC1, Sky News Arabia, Dubai TV, and BBC Arabic, and is the founder of the online courses Anxiety 101 (Level 1) and Master Yourself (Level 2).
References:
1. Prefrontal cortex / adolescent brain development
Blakemore, S-J., & Choudhury, S. (2006). Development of the adolescent brain: implications for executive function and social cognition. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 47(3–4), 296–312. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-7610.2006.01611.x
Steinberg, L. (2008). A social neuroscience perspective on adolescent risk-taking. Developmental Review, 28(1), 78–106. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dr.2007.08.002
2. Gene-environment interaction in conduct disorder / callous-unemotional traits
Viding, E., Blair, R. J. R., Moffitt, T. E., & Plomin, R. (2005). Evidence for substantial genetic risk for psychopathy in 7-year-olds. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 46(6), 592–597. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-7610.2004.00393.x
Waller, R., Gardner, F., & Hyde, L. W. (2013). What are the associations between parenting, callous-unemotional traits, and antisocial behavior in youth? Clinical Psychology Review, 33(4), 593–608. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2013.03.001
3. Peer conformity and adolescent group pressure
Steinberg, L., & Monahan, K. C. (2007). Age differences in resistance to peer influence. Developmental Psychology, 43(6), 1531–1543. https://doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.43.6.1531
4. Video games and aggression — competing meta-analyses
Anderson, C. A., et al. (2010). Violent video game effects on aggression, empathy, and prosocial behavior in Eastern and Western countries. Psychological Bulletin, 136(2), 151–173. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0018251
Ferguson, C. J. (2015). Do angry birds make for angry children? Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(5), 646–666. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691615592234
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