A video recently circulated on social media showing a group of schoolgirls physically attacking another girl inside a classroom. Some students stood and watched. Others recorded it on their phones. Within hours, the footage had spread widely, and public reaction was swift and fierce.
People were angry. Rightly so. A child was hurt, in a place that was supposed to be safe, while others watched and did nothing. The outrage was directed at the students who attacked her, at the school for failing to prevent it, and at bystanders who chose to film rather than help.
But as the heat of the anger is almost settled, a harder and more honest question remains.
What does this incident reveal about the relationships in that classroom or learning environment?
What does it tell us about the kind of emotional environment those students were living in every day?
And what does it say about us, as a society, in how we respond when a child is harmed?
This incident, as specific and painful as it is, is not just about girls or this classroom. It is a fragment. And like all fragments, it carries the shape of the whole it came from. To look closely at what happened in that classroom is to see something about the larger world those children live in every day.
To interpret this incident, I draw upon Scheff’s Social Bond Theory that focus on quality of human connections and what happens when they break down.
Understanding Through the Lens of Social Bond Theory
Thomas Scheff, a micro-sociologist, argue that human beings are, at their core, relational. We do not simply live alongside one another. We need to feel recognised, respected, valued, and included. These are not luxuries. They are social and emotional needs. When those needs are met, people feel that they belong. When they are not met, something begins to go wrong in the way people treat each other.
Scheff describe these connections between people as social bonds. Healthy social bonds are the invisible threads that hold a group together. They allow people to disagree, to compete, even to frustrate each other, while still treating one another with basic dignity. When those threads weaken or break, the conditions for exclusion, humiliation, and violence grow.
I examine four of his core concepts: attunement, alienation, engulfment, and shame. For each one, I follow a specific method called Part | Whole analysis (elaborated in the next section).
Attunement
At the centre of healthy social bonds is what Scheff calls attunement. It simply means the ability to recognise and understand another person’s feelings and experiences. It is not about always agreeing. It is about remaining sensitive to the fact that the person in front of us is a human being with an inner life that matters.
In a classroom with genuine attunement, students may argue and compete, but they still listen to one another. They still notice when someone is in pain or is hurting. That recognition, however small, is what keeps the social fabric of a group intact.
The bullying incident reveals a serious breakdown of attunement. The students who attacked the girl showed no visible recognition of her fear, her pain, or her dignity. The students who watched and filmed showed no visible impulse to intervene or help. From Scheff’s perspective, this is more than poor behaviour. It is a sign that the emotional connections within that group had already been seriously damaged, long before the camera started recording.
And this breakdown did not grow in that classroom alone. It is the part that reflects a larger whole. The same emotional coldness visible between those students mirrors a broader pattern in the society around them, one where busyness, individualism, and the pace of modern life have quietly eroded the habit of genuinely noticing one another. When a society stops practising attunement in its homes, its communities, and its public life, its classrooms will eventually show the same absence.
Alienation
When social bonds break down, people experience alienation. This is not simply loneliness. It is the experience of being cut off, of feeling invisible or unwanted within a group one is physically part of.
The girl who was attacked was positioned inside the classroom. She was surrounded by her schoolmates. And yet she was completely outside the circle of recognition, care, and belonging that the group extended to itself. The attack made that exclusion visible and public. In that moment, she was not treated as a member of the classroom or school community. She was treated as someone who did not belong to it at all. That is alienation in its most painful form.
But she is the part, not the whole. Ask honestly: how many people in our society today sit within communities, within families, within institutions, and still feel they do not truly belong? The girl in that classroom is a small and visible version of a quieter and more widespread experience. Physical presence without genuine inclusion is not a problem that begins or ends at the school gate.
Engulfment
Scheff also describe a very different but equally dangerous problem, which he calls engulfment. This happens when a person becomes so absorbed into a group that their own independent judgement begins to disappear. They act with the group, think with the group, and stop asking whether what the group is doing is right.
Looking at the behaviour of those who participated in or encouraged the attack, engulfment is worth considering seriously. Not all of them may have acted out of personal cruelty. Some may have joined in because the group was doing it. Some may have stayed silent because speaking up felt impossible in that moment. Group pressure, particularly among young people, is a powerful and often invisible force. It can pull individuals into behaviour they would never choose on their own.
This creates a striking and painful contrast within the same incident. The victim experiences alienation, being pushed outside the group. Some of the perpetrators may be experiencing engulfment, being swallowed so deeply inside the group that their own conscience is temporarily suppressed. Scheff calls this pattern bimodal alienation, and it helps explain why bullying so often happens collectively rather than alone.
Again, this classroom dynamic is the part. The whole is a society where collective pressure routinely overrides individual conscience, where people stay silent in the face of wrongdoing because the cost of speaking up feels too high. The children in that room were not inventing a new behaviour. They were rehearsing one they had already absorbed from the world around them.
Shame
Scheff understands shame not simply as embarrassment but as a signal that a social bond had been threatened or broken. Shame arises when a person is humiliated, excluded, or publicly degraded. It is the emotional experience of being cast out.
The girl in the video was publicly attacked, in front of her mates, in a space where she had every right to feel safe. The shame she is likely carrying is profound. It is not just the physical pain. It is the knowledge that others watched, that others filmed, and that no one stepped in. That kind of experience leaves a mark that punishment alone cannot address.
When shame is not acknowledged or addressed, it does not simply disappear. It can transform into something else, including anger, bitterness, and in some cases, the impulse to hurt others. This does not shift blame or excuse what happened. But it reminds us that emotional experiences, left unattended, tend to resurface in ways we do not expect.
And here, if we are honest, the part mirrors the whole most uncomfortably of all. Our society, like many others, has a pattern of responding to painful public incidents with a flood of visible outrage followed by quiet forgetting. That is itself a form of collective unaddressed shame. We see something wrong. We feel the discomfort. And then we move on before anything is genuinely repaired. The individual victim's experience of being seen and then abandoned is not so different from how society treats its own difficult truths. What we do not sit with, we cannot heal. And what we cannot heal, we will keep repeating.
And so, if each of these moments points beyond itself, if the broken attunement in one classroom reflects a society that has grown less tender, if one girl's alienation echoes the quiet exclusion felt by many, if the engulfment of a peer group mirrors the silencing of individual conscience at every level of public life, and if unaddressed shame recurs in both the individual and the collective, then we are no longer simply looking at an incident. We are looking at ourselves. What happened in that classroom is the part. We are the whole. And the distance between what we witnessed and the values we claim to hold is the measure of the work still ahead.
Each of these concepts, taken together, points beyond the classroom. And that is precisely where Scheff's idea of part | whole analysis comes in.
Part | Whole Analysis
Part | whole analysis looks at a smaller piece of social life, event, or situation as a window to understand broader patterns, culture, values, and problems within a commouivtny or society.
For example, the recent classroom bullying incident is the part. Our society is the whole. And the incident, as painful as it is, gives us a rare and honest window into what is actually happening at every level between them.
The victim invites us to ask who in our schools and communities feels excluded, unseen, or unsafe. She is not the only one. She is simply the one whose experience became visible.
The perpetrators invite us to ask what kind of peer culture is shaping young people. What are the social pressures they are living under? What does belonging mean to them, and what do they feel entitled to do to protect it?
The bystanders invite us to ask what we teach children about responsibility and courage. Silence in the face of cruelty is not neutral. It has a weight. Those who watched and filmed are part of this story too, and understanding their position requires honesty rather than simple condemnation.
The classroom invites us to ask what the daily quality of relationships between students actually looks like. Not what the school policy says it should look like, but what it genuinely feels like for the students who sit in those rooms every day.
The school invites us to ask whether institutions are truly built around the wellbeing of students, or whether they are primarily built around rules, rankings, and reputation. A school that responds to bullying only after a video goes viral has already failed in a quieter and more ordinary way.
Our society invites us to ask what values we are passing on to the next generation. Not the values written in policy documents or stated in public speeches, but the values visible in how we treat people who are harmed, how long our concern lasts, and whether we follow through.
The incident belongs to all of us. We may not have been in that classroom, but the conditions that made the incident possible did not grow there alone. They grew in the broader environment that all of us, together, are responsible for shaping.
Looking Beyond Discipline
Scheff argues that social life revolves around four ongoing processes: forming bonds, maintaining bonds, disrupting bonds, and repairing bonds. Schools are generally well practised at the first two. They are far less equipped for the last one.
When something like this happens, the instinct is to reach for punishment. Punishment is not without value. There must be accountability. The students who attacked another child need to understand the gravity of what they did and face real consequences for it. That is not in question.
But punishment, on its own, does not repair what was broken. It does not restore the victim’s sense of safety and belonging. It does not help the perpetrators genuinely understand the harm they caused. It does not address the bystanders’ experience of having watched something wrong without intervening. And it does not change the emotional environment that allowed this to happen in the first place.
Support for the victim must be genuine, sustained, and led by her own needs. For now, the victim requires not just formal support but human connection. Someone who listens. Someone who stays. Her sense of dignity and belonging needs to be actively rebuilt, not just acknowledged in a meeting and then left alone.
Accountability for the perpetrators should go beyond suspension or disciplinary action. It should involve a process where they are required to reflect honestly on what they did, to understand its impact, and to engage in some form of meaningful repair. Restorative approaches, where harm is acknowledged and responsibility is taken in a structured and supported way, are far more likely to produce genuine change than punishment alone. Restorative approaches to conflict and harm should be adopted seriously and resourced properly, not treated as an optional add-on.
More than everything, I would like to see institutional responsibility, the part that is most easily avoided and forgotten in our context. Schools must look honestly at the relational environment they have created or allowed to develop. They must ask whether students feel genuinely safe and included, whether teachers or school counsellors are well-equipped to recognise and respond to social and emotional distress, and whether the systems in place are built around the wellbeing of students rather than the management of problems after they escalate.
Each of these failures at the institutional level is not merely a school problem. It is the part that reflects a whole-of-system failure. A school that only responds after a video goes viral is doing what the wider society does: reacting to visibility rather than attending to reality. The institutional reluctance to look inward mirrors the social reluctance to hold uncomfortable truths long enough to act on them.
And yes, public concern also carries a responsibility. The outrage that floods social media in the days after such an incident is real, but it fades so quickly from our memory until it occurs in a same or other ways. From a sociological point of view, I ask:
Did the concern translate into anything lasting?
Was the victim still supported after the incident?
Were required changes actually made?
If not, then society expressed just an emotion. An emotion that has expired before it was meant to bring an impact.
Interestingly, Scheff’s emphasis on social bonds is not foreign to Bhutan. Many of the values embedded in Bhutanese society, including compassion (སྙིང་རྗེ་), harmony, interdependence (རྟེན་འབྲེལ་), reciprocity, mutual responsibility, and care for others, reflect the same understanding that human wellbeing depends on the quality of our relationships. In many ways, the concerns raised by Social Bonds Theory echo principles that Bhutan has long regarded as central to a healthy society.
What Next?
Bhutan has built its national identity around values that are unique to the rest of the world. Gross National Happiness (GNH) that we proclaim in every public speech is not a slogan. It is a commitment to placing human wellbeing, including emotional, psychological, and social wellbeing, at the heart of national life.
Our Buddhist values of Ley Judrey, Tha-damtsig, Driglam Choesum, compassion, interconnectedness, and care for others are not just religious teachings in books. They are part of what it means to be Bhutanese.
And so, it is worth asking, where are those values in that classroom or school?
This is not a question meant to shame or to point fingers. It is a question that only a society serious about its own values can afford to sit with. If compassion is real, it must show up in the way students treat each other. If GNH is genuine, it must be felt by every child in every classroom, including the children who are most vulnerable and most easily forgotten.
The gap between the values our society holds and what happened in that video is itself a Part | Whole story. The classroom is the part. The nation’s stated commitment to happiness and human dignity is the whole. And the distance between the two is not a reason for despair. It is a precise measure of where the work needs to happen.
The incident does not merely show the behaviour of a few young people. It also reflects broader social changes such as increasing individualism, weakening community relationships, reduced emphathy, growing influence of social media, normalisation of humiliation as entertainment, and declining attention to emotional wellbeing.
So, what can we do collectively?
Schools as learning institution must create genuine (I repeat, a genuine) space for students to talk about their relationships, their difficulties, and their emotional experiences, not just in a formal counselling session, but as a normal part of school life. Compassion should not only be a subject on a timetable or during the auspicious prayer time. It should be the atmosphere of the room.
Professional learning should equip teachers and school leaders with practical skills to identify exclusion, bullying, and emotional distress before they escalate. A teacher who can recognise when a student is being excluded, before it reaches a breaking point, is one of the most valuable things a school can have. I have practically done this over-a-decade teaching service with multiple students and always learnt nuances of student experiences. And honestly speaking, this is how I was intrigued to pursue my doctoral study focusing on Social Bonds theory.
Communities, including families, parents, elders, religious figures, and local leaders, have a role to play in reinforcing the message that every child deserves to belong and to be treated with dignity. These values do not live only in schools. They live, or fail to live, in every relationship young people witness and experience growing up.
And at the national level, student wellbeing, school counselling, and social and emotional learning deserve serious policy attention and real investment.
Bhutan does not need to import these values from elsewhere. They are already here. They are written into the country’s philosophy, its traditions, and its sense of itself. It is even pronounced in the Vision statement of the Education Ministry. The work ahead is not about finding new values. It is about allowing the ones already held to live more fully in the everyday life of every school, every classroom, and every child.
The girl in that video deserved a classroom where she felt she belonged. Every child does. She is the part. Every child in every classroom across this country is the whole. And a nation that means what it says about happiness cannot afford to leave any part of that whole behind.
Suggested Readings
Scheff, T. (1990a). Microsociology: Discourse, emotion, and social structure. The University of Chicago Press.
Scheff, T. (1990b). Socialisation of emotions: Pride and shame as casual agents. In T.D. Kemper (Ed.), Research agendas in the sociology in emotions. State University of New York Press.
Scheff, T. (1994). Bloody revenge: Emotions, nationalism, and war. Westview Press.
Scheff, T. (1997). Emotions, the social bond, and human reality. Cambridge University Press.
Scheff, T. (1999). Being mentally ill: A sociological theory (3rd ed.). Aldine DeGruyter.
Scheff, T. (2006). Goffman unbound: A new paradigm for social science. Routledge.
Scheff, T. (2013). Repression of emotion: A danger to modern societies? In N.Demertzis (Ed.), Emotions in politics: The affect dimension in political tension (p. 84-105). Palgrave Macmillan.
