School bullying is a subject that is talked about a lot and has also been tackled for decades by investing a lot of resources in research and various means of prevention and intervention. Despite all the effort, research, debate and media attention, peer challenges and conflicts among children and young people persist as a social and societal issue and continue to be part of everyday life in schools. 

Peer pressure between schoolchildren was first identified as school bullying in Sweden in the late 1960s, when Peter-Paul Heinemann (1969) wrote a newspaper article about the bullying of his own black adopted son. This triggered a broad social debate that considered the phenomenon of bullying in the context of other social phenomena such as racism, urbanisation and the democratisation of schools. Since then, social perspectives were marginalised, as psychological research took over the field until, in the mid-2000s, social perspectives began to re-emerge in school bullying research (Agevall 2008; Schott & Søndergaard 2021). Consequently research on bullying internationally is divided into two distinct research perspectives. Individualised research focuses on the risk factors and behaviours of the individual. It seeks to manage and address bullying through large-scale surveys, building on them to construct context-independent intervention models and targeting remedial interventions at individual children and young people. Critical bullying research, on the other hand, looks at bullying situations as a complex phenomenon linked to broad social and societal structures, involving ordinary children and young people.  Critical bullying research seeks to identify and remedy structural factors that produce offence or emotional or physical violence against others, such as racism or heteronormativity (Schott & Søndergaard 2021).

In the middle of this research dichotomy, in my research, I discursively analyse Finnish expert texts on school bullying. I focus on the discourses that practitioners use to form their knowledge base on bullying, and on which anti-bullying interventions in schools are built. In this study, I ask: What are the expert discourses on school bullying in Finland and what do they bring to school practices?  Although I study discourses specifically in the Finnish context, the research is also relevant elsewhere. Research on bullying is international and Finnish research has been very influential in it (e.g. Salmivalli et al. 2021). So it can be argued that Finnish discourses of bullying are to some extent in line with international discourses.

A discursive perspective braids together power, knowledge, institutions, expertise and society into broad systems and allows for a critical examination of what is taken for granted as expert knowledge (Foucault, 2003; Gannon & Davies, 2014). Through my research, I thus aim to respond to the challenge of critical bullying research (e.g. Horton, 2021; Walton, 2015) and question the theoretical assumptions that seem to be taken for granted in bullying research. I have analysed the expert discourse on school bullying through professional literature on bullying (n=40), and Finnish administrative documents on anti-bullying work (n=36). In the first part of the study, I examined the professional literature on bullying and how children and young people are talked about in this literature and what kind of subject positions (Youdell, 2006; Davies & Harré, 1990; Ryan & Morgan, 2011) are formed for them in this literature. With thematic analysis I answered the question: How does the professional literature on school bullying describe the bully and the victim? In the second part of the study, I used the concept of decontextualisation with concept as method analysis (e.g. Jackson & Mazzei, 2012;Taguchi & St.Pierre, 2017. The concept of decontextualisation has not been used before in bullying research and with this concept I aimed to open up new perspectives and not to reproduce previous knowledge (Kuby et al, 2016). In this phase I asked how the contexts are recognized in professional literature. In the third part of the study I used What's the problem represented to be -method (Bacchi & Goodwin, 2016). This method is based on the poststructuralist view that problems are discursively produced in temporal and spatial contexts, under specific conceptualisations, practices and conditions, and if the conditions are different, the problem statements could also be different (e.g. Foucault & Lotringer,1996). Following the WPR method of analysis, I asked what is presented as a problem in administrative documents on bullying?

Finnish expert discourse on bullying relies heavily on individualistic research and marginalises the relevance of contexts in the bullying discourses. School bullying as a phenomenon becomes decontextualized. The impact of social phenomena such as racism, poverty or heteronormativity on bullying situations is hardly recognised or is thought to be part of other discourses. As a result of decontextualisation, the causes of bullying are seen to lie in the characteristics of individuals, thus cementing the positions of children and young people in bullying situations in permanent, opposing positions of bully and victim, while placing school and home on opposite sides. By cementing the position of bully and victim into permanent positions, the possibility for change, growth and education is reduced. In these discourses, discipline is validated and education is invalidated, stricter control and management are justified, and the pedagogical expertise, understanding, warmth and empathy that are central to education, seem excessively lacking.

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