Some people categorize teenage bullying based on the reasons behind it, while others may pay more attention to the method used. There are some bullies who use embarrassment as a weapon against their targets, seeking to hurt them emotionally; others take it further by attacking people physically. Most bullies attack their targets because they see them as different or weak, but that can take many forms. For example, there can be racial bullying or bullying based on class. Cyber bullying is a method of teenage bullying that appeared when the Internet started becoming popular, and it involves using the Internet to damage a person emotionally, usually through embarrassment.
Teenage bullies generally look for someone they see as weak. A weak person could be anybody with a smaller peer group than the bully because a lack of friends can make a person seem relatively unprotected. This is considered one of the primary reasons that so much bullying is based on differences between people, from race to class or sexual preference. In a typical scenario, the bully will be part of a larger peer group in which all his friends are more like him, while the target may be from a minority group. For this reason, any group of outsiders can be targeted in a teenage bullying scenario.
Some experts focus more on the methods of teenage bullying, and pay comparatively less attention to the reasons. The classic bully is usually someone who physically assaults people, but that isn't the only definition. Some bullies use their words to hurt people instead of their fists, and there are other bullies who might use both to some extent or another. In many cases, the bullies who rely on taunting to hurt people may not be seen as brutes by the people around them. In fact, sometimes they can even be popular or very well liked by their teachers and most other students.
The Internet has made it possible to bully people emotionally on a scale never seen before. Teenage bullying using cyber techniques will often rely on social networking sites to attack the victim in front of everyone they know. Cyber bullying can sometimes be done without any threat of physical retaliation, and in some cases, there is even a level of anonymity. Some experts think the anonymous environment encourages cyber bullies to take things further than they would in a personal exchange.