If you define bullying as preying on psychological and/or physical vulnerabilities, even parents, mothers included, do this. Its the quickest shortcut to addressing an anxiety or uncertainty on your part by displacing it onto the victim. Without external address, victims begin to identify with their suffering as a metaphysical certainty, something that must happen in order for the universe to keep on ticking correctly. Freud called this kind of adaptation a "secondary fixation" and can take years to peel back in order to address the core anxieties and uncertainty that's been deeply implanted.

It doesn't help that American culture has a particular distaste for empathizing with "weak people". Everybody is suppose to present some narrative of being a winner however narrowly scoped. It's no wonder "Chad or Virgin" memes are ubiquitous, people will never avow publicly to it but I suspect enough teeter on perceiving reality as if that kind of toxic binary was metaphysical in nature and therefore beyond empirical reproach.