Skills for the Job: Tackling peer pressure

What is peer pressure?
Everyone is subject to some degree of peer pressure. It is one of the mechanisms that make our communities function, helping to moderate individuals’ behaviours to accepted norms. You could call it the unwritten rules of a community, whether that community is a school, neighbourhood or organisation. In some situations, such as team sports, this pressure can help to bring out the best in group members.

However, when peer pressure is exerted on a young person by an individual or group to manipulate them for the perpetrator’s ends, it becomes a destructive force that feeds on two common fears: the threat to safety – whether emotional or physical – and the threat to our sense of belonging. By supporting young people to identify and challenge negative coercion by their peers, practitioners help young people keep themselves healthy and safe, while also gaining vital skills for life, such as confidence and assertiveness.

What forms can it take?
Peer pressure can be related to a range of subjects, from what music you listen to or TV programmes you watch, what phone you have, what you wear, how you behave, or where and with whom you spend time. It can build to a point of forcing people to do things they don’t want to, or tolerating behaviours from others that they want to resist or stop. These behaviours may also progress; for example, the pressure to smoke can lead to involvement in stealing the cigarettes.

Young people form groups, increasing their need to fit in or risk becoming isolated. By playing on these sensitivities and the need to feel accepted, peer pressure becomes very powerful and hard to resist.

Does peer pressure lead to bullying?
Leap believes that peer pressure is a form of bullying, though it is sometimes even more difficult to identif