Adult Bullies: When Conversations About Bullying Get Complicated

ST. CHARLES, IL — Lark Cowart remembers shaking after finally working up the courage to tell a bully to back off. After several unsuccessful tries, she was finally able to tell him “when you stand that close and raise your voice like that, it makes me uncomfortable,” and was clear that he needed to stop.

“I was very upfront with how the behavior impacted me, which feels very risky to do,” Cowart said in a phone interview with Patch. “I got the shakes after that. He was a tall, fit male. He was bigger than me, and it was a very uncomfortable moment, but I can tell you that he never, ever treated me like that again.”

Surprisingly, the 41-year-old Cowart’s confrontation did not occur on the schoolyard or even when she was a child. It was while she was working as the Kane County assistant state’s attorney, and her bully was a colleague she was working with on a case.

It also was not the first time she had been bullied as an adult.

“I’ve had multiple unfortunate experiences with people who are bullies … I challenge you to find somebody who hasn’t,” Cowart said, “and I have reacted to it differently because I’ve learned each time. Some of my experiences, I did not handle successfully.”

She looks back at her less confident self, a 23-year-old law student.

“There was a professor there who took great pride in belittling,” Cowart said, “and not just like in the interest of building you up and making sure you knew what you were doing. He really enjoyed making people feel less than, and I wasn’t the only target.”

Instead of confronting the situation, Cowart ignored it.

“I thought to myself ‘OK, well the semester is almost over. We’ll be done soon and I won’t have to worry about it.’ I didn’t handle that very well,” Cowart said.

Later in her career, Cowart worked for a judge who she said would “make very inappropriate comments.” Once again, she was unprepared to deal with it.

“That’s [another] one I did not handle well,” Cowart said. “I didn’t have the skills.”

Those skills were something that came later after she spent time working for the State’s Attorney’s Office. She began educating herself on adult bullying and came to realize how prevalent it was.

“This is something that really isn’t dealt with often enough,” Cowart said. “It is startling how many people are dealing with these issues.”

Cowart is not alone, both in her experiences and her decision not to report the behavior of adult men in a position of power over her academically and professionally. A 2014 study by the Pew Research Center found that 40 percent of adult internet users have personally experienced some variety of online harassment.

According to a 2017 national survey from the Workplace Bullying Institute, 61 percent of Americans are aware of abusive conduct in the workplace, and 60.4 million Americans are affected by it. The survey also found that 29 percent of targets remain silent about their experiences.

“More of it goes unreported as adults because there’s not the same focus on [bullying] like there is in schools now,” Cowart said. “We tell kids what they’re supposed to do when they encounter this situation. When it happens with adults, where are you supposed to go? If it’s your neighbor, what is it you do about that?”

Different Kinds Of Bullies

In Cowart’s experience, most adult bullies tend to be people who behaved that way as children and never grew out of it. Surprisingly, she said, many of these people not only recognize they are a bully, but actually take pride in being one.

“There’s different types of bullies,” Cowart said. “There are people who are really proud of the fact that they are bullies, like that is part of their identity. There’s others that are really unaware of the effect of their behavior on people. They typically lack empathy.”

Such bullies don't necessarily mean to inflict harm, but are simply unaware of how their behavior is perceived, she said. But for others, bullying is learned or compensation for a slack of social skills.

“There’s kids that … it’s who they are and how they relate, and if they’re not taught to change that behavior in their relationships, that just develops as their interaction,” Cowart said.

Defining Adult Bullying

While schools typically set standards for what is acceptable behavior when children interact with each other, conversations about adult bullying are more complex. Terminology matters, Cowart said.

“Typically when we get out of school, we stop calling it bullying and we call it being rude or harassment,” Cowart said. “The language regarding the behavior changes, not the behavior itself.”

In fact, one major difference between harassment and bullying is that harassment has a legal definition behind it, whereas bullying can mean a number of different things.

In a September blog post, Psychology Today touched on the difficulty of defining bullying in the workplace due to the fact that the “same aggressive behavior can be (and has been) labeled differently,” using terms such as harassment, ostracism, abusive supervision and others.

“Bullying is a catch-all that encompasses all types of behavior. When you get out of the school setting, the overarching term that encompasses everything goes away,” Cowart said. “We’re actually having trouble … schools are categorizing everything as bullying, and it’s not. It needs to be a repeated instance, and it has to be about either real or perceived power imbalance.”

While at the State’s Attorney’s Office, Cowart worked with a program focused on informing the public of ways to appropriately deal with bullying among children.

“We were really focusing on the kids, and as part of our program we would present to the school’s kids, we would present to the teachers and we would have an evening presentation for the parents,” Cowart said. “We noticed time and time again parents were coming up to us after [the presentation] not to talk about the situation their kid was facing, but to tell us about a situation they were facing and needing advice on how to handle it.”

Adults also do not have the same support systems in place a child facing a bully has (teachers, parents, etc.), and many instances of adult bullying go unreported as a result.

“Unless it’s in a work setting where there is a clear path from Human Resources about what you’re supposed to do about it, adults often don’t know what to do,” Cowart said, “which is why there’s been a lot more interest in how you handle this behavior as an adult.”

What To Do

If you are faced with an adult bully, one thing Cowart recommends is calling the person on the behavior, and encouraging others to do it as well.

“Typically, people are seeing what’s happening and it’s making everyone uncomfortable, but nobody says anything,” Cowart said. “So you go to your friends, you build a support group … and then when [the behavior] is seen, you need to stand up, and you need your community to stand up with you, and say ‘we don’t act this way.’ If you can find a way to connect that person to the community and then hold them accountable by the community standards, that is one of the most effective ways to change that behavior.”

In an examination of dealing specifically with bullying in the workplace, The Balance Careers said many authorities on the subject suggest the first step might be a frank discussion with the bully about the effects of their behavior.

The career website also acknowledged this might not be possible if the bully is a boss or supervisor, in which case the best course of action might be enlisting the help of someone else reasonably high up in the hierarchy of the company. It is also important to document each event by noting times, dates and other important details, and perhaps even statements from witnesses if possible.

According to Cowart, there is no crime called “bullying”; however there can be criminal consequences depending on what the bullying behavior is.

“When someone sends repeated and harassing messages through an electronic device, that’s a crime, and there’s criminal consequences for that,” Cowart said. “If somebody is in your face in the community, that’s assault. If you get scared and think you’re going to get hit, that’s a crime. People think they have to be harmed, but if somebody grabs your arm, we call that ‘alarming and disturbing.’ Touching without your permission is a crime.”

While she emphasizes that she is “absolutely, 100 percent not about victim blaming,” Cowart does find some soul-searching is necessary to understand why someone might feel they can act a certain way toward a person. While the person doing the bullying obviously needs to change, it is worth looking at both sides of the equation to come to a resolution.

“People are ashamed of [being bullied as an adult], and it took some soul-searching with me because I had encountered this enough times in my life to recognize there is something about my personality that says ‘you can behave this way with me’,” Cowart said. “You have to do a little bit of soul-searching, and yeah it’s uncomfortable...but I think if you are noticing a repeated cycle and you don’t want that, you need to look at what you, yourself can do to change it...because you can’t control others.”

About This Series

Throughout 2018, Patch has been looking at society's roles and responsibilities in bullying and a child's unthinkable decision to end their own life in hopes we might offer solutions that save lives.

Do you have a story to tell? Are you concerned about how your local schools handle bullies and their victims?

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• America’s Shameful Truth About Bullying And School Shootings
• ‘They All Failed And Changed A Child’: Malden Bullying Detailed
• A 3-Week Nightmare: How Bullying Pushed My Son To Run Away
• The Hero Myth: Why Expecting Kids To Fight Bullies Is Harmful
• Teen Tells Bullies In Video: 'Every Day I Wear Your Words'
• Teen's 'I Wear Your Words' Video Inspires Nashville Songwriters
• Bullies And Their Targets The Same: Digital Self-Harm Rising
• Why These Kindergartners Start Each Day With A Respectful Handshake

Photo credit: Gabriella Figliozzi