Many students with disabilities in an integrated class have been suffering, both mentally and physically from bullying during their adolescence, when the youth are affected significantly in their character and value system, just because they have a di...
Many students with disabilities in an integrated class have been suffering, both mentally and physically from bullying during their adolescence, when the youth are affected significantly in their character and value system, just because they have a disability. In spite of that, they have been laid aside in the actual education field of integrated classes as well as in their school life, unable to deal with bullying properly, or even avoid it, for they are awkward with expressing themselves and lack of sociality.
For this reason, the goal of this study is to offer the basic materials under the condition that there is little definite statistic on bullying from which students with disabilities are suffering in the integrated education field during school age, and to investigate its real condition, causes, or types. Considering the current situation, it is very important to us, indeed. Thus it is significant for the study to provide the basic information for the successful integrated education in elementary, middle and high schools, by analyzing the following: the actual state and cause of bullying of those students with disabilities, bullying types, assaulters' traits, reaction of other classmates, and effective ways to handle it.
To achieve this aim, this study conducted a survey of 155 students with disabilities and 355 ones without disabilities, all of whom were selected from elementary, middle, high schools of metropolitan areas, where special classes were established and the integrated education was being implemented, and then collected data on bullying behavior using a questionnaire survey distributed to each student. Then, the frequency was treated as a percentage(%) using SPSS for Windows 10.0, followed by checking the difference in the rate of response by means of χ² test.
As a result, harassment of students with disabilities in integrated classes happened most frequently in their classroom during rest time, and bullying--or mobbing as group bullying is sometimes called--had a bad influence on their peer relation, or was harmful in its psychological effect on them like school refusal. The main factors that affect bullying behavior committed by juvenile offenders were external reasons--such as those unhealthy students' outward appearance, uncleanliness, hindrance to class, Among bullying types, exclusion and verbal taunts were more frequent than physical violence or attacks. Most of the students who had committed a harmful act on another student with disability were characterized by strong and active, often scolded by their teacher. Moreover, they were doing this just for fun, and other classmates pretended not to know when bullying occurred even though they took pity on their schoolmates with disabilities, thinking that it is no use helping them. There are effective ways to reduce and prevent bullying as the following: proper reaction of students with disabilities, requesting for assistance actively; normal or healthy students' recognition of students with disabilities as their peers; and efforts made by those students with disabilities to acclimate themselves to the integrated class.
Here are some suggestions: first, it is necessary to study substantial and effective education and teaching methods in order to make all the people--all students, with and without disabilities, and teachers--in integrated classes recognize the important role of the integrated education; second, additional studies, possible to generalize by means of an investigation about more integrated classes in a wider range of regions, are needed