Years ago, bullies loved to beat you up on the playground. Today they get their kicks by dominating you in the workplace.

And once a workplace bully decides to pick on you, your choices are pretty much the same as when you were a kid.

You can cry uncle and let the bully win. Or you can knuckle down and fight back. But no matter which path you follow, odds are you will soon be looking for another job.

There is little hard data on the extent of bullying, or psychological harassment, in the American workplace. However, a smattering of surveys suggests that:

About one worker in six is bullied in any given year.

A woman is the target in eight of every 10 cases.

In six of 10 cases, a woman is the bully.

Seven times out of 10, the bully outranks the target.

"We are all lambs being led to the slaughter, we really are. Some of us are more sensitive to it than others," said Chauncey Hare, a clinical psychologist in California, onetime workplace bullying victim and co-author of "Work Abuse: How to Recognize and Survive It."

Some of the most common bullying tactics, according to a 2000 survey, include making unreasonable demands, yelling and screaming, insulting or putting down a worker, taking credit for someone else's work, blaming others for mistakes, casting doubt on the quality of another's work, creating arbitrary rules and isolating a worker.

Over time, that kind of treatment takes a toll on workers' physical and mental health. Bullying can leave victims battling severe depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.

"We've made the workplace a war zone," said Gary Namie, a social/organizational psychologist who co-founded the Workplace Bullying & Trauma Institute in Bellingham, Wash., and co-wrote "The Bully at Work."

And when workers hurt, companies pay. Bullying costs companies in increased sick time, lost productivity and employee turnover.

"Take a look at the dollars that these jerks cost," Namie said. "You don't have to be a tender-hearted fellow. If you're just a cold-blooded, cost-benefit kind of guy, you'd understand that the bully has to go."

Yet in most cases, it's the bully who gets to keep his or her job while the target hits the road. Seventy percent of the time, the target either quits to escape the situation or gets fired for raising a stink about it, according to a survey that Namie's nonprofit institute took last year. Bullies, on the other hand, often enjoy their boss's support.

Namie tells about a consulting job he did for a federal agency in Virginia that had a bully problem. Twenty of 24 people in the bully's division had health problems linked to stress. Still, the agency director resisted asking the bully to step down because he was "a great conversationalist and a lunch buddy."

Closer to home, a Northeast Ohio company with about 1,700 employees recently fired an employee for bullying after an investigation supported co-workers' complaints. The company, which asked to remain anonymous, is now adding psychological harassment language to its employee conduct policy.

For the good of their organizations, higher-ups need to deal forthrightly with bullies on their staffs, said Rickie Banning, a human resources consultant in Boston who advocates greater attention to the problem among HR managers.

"The tone is set at the top," she said. "It's real tricky if the CEO's the bully."

Though bullying is all about power, it doesn't always come from the top down. About 30 percent of targets are in jobs of a rank equal to or higher than the bully's, the workplace bullying institute says. In those cases, the bullies often gain leverage by controlling information.

Women make up the majority of bullies because, as astute observers of the workplace culture, they see that aggression is rewarded, Namie said. They are more likely to pick on other females because women overall tend to be less confrontational than men.

Now for some really bad news: None of this is illegal, as long as the offender is "an equal-opportunity bully," said Neil Klingshirn, who hears from about two workplace bullying victims a week at Fortney & Klingshirn, an employment and labor law practice in Bath Township.

If the bully does not touch the victim, if no sexual harassment is involved, if stalking is not a concern and if the bully's targets do not all fall into a class protected by federal law, such as minorities or the disabled, then no laws apply. Unlike many European countries, the United States has no federal or state laws that broadly outlaw workplace harassment.

"It's very frustrating because you can't tell the victim that there's an easy way to stop it," Klingshirn said.

The Workplace Bullying & Trauma Institute helped introduce workplace bully bills in California in 2003 and in Oklahoma this year. Neither made it out of legislative committee, Namie said. The group will try again next year in Washington state.

Bullied workers can find some comfort in support groups like Nineveh, an Internet site created especially for them. Since moderator Guy Croyle cofounded Nineveh (groups.yahoo.com/group/Nineveh/) three years ago as a lay outreach mini stry of a United Methodist church in central Pennsylvania, about 450 people have registered to participate in the online forum.

"They come to us very scared and very lonely," Croyle said. "Very angry, also."

Nineveh may be a godly approach to healing the hurt and the anger. But healing also comes in the form of something less righteous: revenge.

With little chance of building a court case, workers who want to stand up to the bully have two choices. They can pin their hopes for justice on a company's grievance procedure. Or they can go outside normal channels by documenting a pattern of bully behavior and presenting it directly to someone who ranks higher in the company than the bully's boss.

Both paths are fraught with danger. Few companies have written policies specifically prohibiting bullying, Namie said, simply because the law does not require it. Workers who complain risk being labeled as whiners or troublemakers -- like spousal abuse victims before domestic violence was seen as more than a private clash.

Either approach can send your career on a death march, so figure out an exit strategy before you begin, Namie advises. Although you might need to find another job, there is an upside.

"If you leave hopping mad and fighting and exposing, not only do you have a chance of bringing them down," he says, "but you're a lot healthier."