At some level, I think all bullying is the same, but I do think there are some differences in the forms it takes, or the consequences. This might be controvers

At some level, I think all bullying is the same, but I do think there are some differences in the forms it takes, or the consequences. This might be controversial, but my personal impressions are that there is more denial about bullying in academic than many nonacademic settings. This is part of the point of the article I think ("breaking the silence" of the title). There's a sense that academics is "above human weaknesses" or something, and there's a certain culture endemic to a lot of entrenched promotion and tenure that denies the existence of these things, or minimizes it. I think this denial leads to certain issues in turn, like more serious consequences for victims. Any field with similar denial would probably be similar. Probably related to this is that the oversupply of academics and competitiveness in it I think leads to more significant consequences for victims, and coupled with institutional denial (if not cultural denial), I think it leads to fewer ways to rectify it, with fewer consequences for aggressors. I think the nature of tenure leads to extreme forms of it. You can't fire at will someone you dislike or want to target, if you're a bully, so you resort to extreme falsehoods and slander basically to get them to leave. Basically (putting aside reasons for leaving like not wanting to do academics anymore, or wanting a change of career, or family issues, etc.), if it takes someone doing something really bad to leave a tenured position, they either have to be doing something really bad, you have to make it look like they're doing something really bad, or you have to make it so bad for them they end up doing something bad. This leads to weird situations where in another field you might just axe an area, but in academics if the political whims shift, you might have the people in power mudslinging about colleagues just because they're not interested in research area X and want to make the entire department look like themselves.