First, think back to your school years – do you recall a particular classmate who often got laughed at? A person who went around threatening and physically harming others? Or a lonely girl whom no one ever talked to?

These are the victims and perpetrators of bullying, and they are found in many schools and even workplaces around the world. Bullying is unwanted, aggressive behavior among school aged children that involves a real or perceived power imbalance (StopBullying.gov). Bullying has detrimental effects on both the victim and the perpetrator and in various aspects of children’s lives. It negatively influences youths’ wellbeing and mental health, decreases academic achievement in school-age children, and even evokes suicidal intention in some adolescents.

It is therefore important to investigate bullying and effectively prevent bullying in schools. Most of the current common knowledge on bullying derives from psychology research conducted in Western countries, as many non-Western countries remain unexplored in the literature. In reality, however, culture affects the type of bullying, common attitudes towards bullying, as well as preventions plans. In order to gain a cross-cultural understanding of the bullying behavior and to conduct effective preventions, a cross-cultural understanding of bullying is necessary.

This website presents research findings on bullying in the country of South Korea, a country in East Asia. There is a significant amount of literature on the phenomenon of bullying in South Korea incorporated into this website. We hope to help the general public understand the differences and similarities between bullying in South Korea and Western countries. We would like to raise awareness on the fact that bullying is not a distinctively Western issues, and that culture exerts a significant influence on the characteristics of bullying in both Western and Eastern contexts.

The intended audience for this website is the general public. We hope that by exploring this website, as a reader you will understand bullying from a multi-cultural perspective. Although we used South Korea as the base culture, we also incorporated western perspectives to highlight the contrast between collectivistic and individualistic cultures.

Finally, we would like to introduce some suggestions in working cross-culturally with bullying in South Korea: what is unique in working to prevent bullying in South Korea, and is there a prevention method that is universal to both Western and South Korean culture?