Latest research, please, on Bullying

[Dioptre]

I don’t have the cites handy, but recent research I’ve read suggests that the most effective anti-bullying policy is not based on either victim or bully.

The trick is to educate the third parties - bystanders and friends of the bully or bullier - about acceptable and appropriate interventions.

One difficulty with offender and victim approaches is that there are multiple causes of the behavior and if you target the wrong cause you can aggravate rather than mitigate the behavior.

Perhaps someone with more time at the moment can google this stuff.

[DSeid]

Ivan thank you for clarifying some terms and I will return the favor - “Exposure to domestic violence” means that you are a witness in your home to someone else being bullied in a physically abusive manner. The study found that witnessing such abuse, say a father who beats up (bullies) the mother regularly, is associated with the child becoming a bully but not with the child becoming a victim.

Anyway, I suspect that someone who is “game” is often still the object of being bullied - by the group. Certainly that was my limited experience. I was never afraid of a fight as a kid, had a bit of a temper problem actually, and got into many. Both defending myself and standing up for those who were being picked on* … some then egged me on just because they knew I’d react. Not quite the same as the chronically bullied but a point that being “game” is not per se protective of being targeted.

As for your next point - by now I think it has been established that bullies are not always the identified school “toe rags” - the leaders at least are often socially agile kids with friends who endorse beating up on the identified weaker and more socially isolated “other” as acceptable behavior and as a sort of bonding experience to their group dynamic. The bullied OTOH are often the kids who for whatever reason have fewer friends and are identified by the administration as having “been in fights before” (he’s been picked on before usually) - fighting back is the weaker socially isolated kid against a kid who is often bigger and stronger and who has a group ready to step in and help him at any time. And what if if the bullied gets in a good hit and gives the bully an injury? The satisfaction the bullied wants is to not get assaulted again and again, not that of hurting someone else. That hit will not do much to accomplish it; the bully will get his gang and find the kid later to teach him a lesson.

Dioptre, the cites you seek are in my posts above. It really raise the issue though: is the question really why bullying occurs or what stops it from occurring? I tend to think that our human nature is to identify some weaker “other” and to exert our physical dominance over them - whether it is on an undersupervised playground or at Abu Graib. What stops it is the culture around us. Function outside of those cultural constraints and “bullying” - be it a schoolyard beating or the abuse of Abu Graib - are at high risk to occur. The key is making sure that those cultural constraints are extant at all times.

• Funny story, met my best friend growing up when he was mildly picking on someone else (snapping his belt in front of the other kids face) and I came to that other kids defense. We went behind the school and had a fight. We came to some kind of draw and then became friends.

[norinew]

I wouldn’t post in GQ without answers, except that the question has gotten lots of cited answers already. So, here I go spouting opinions :
The best solution to kids being bullied is for the victim to have a network of adults who will look out for them, and for the kids doing the bullying to be taught that this behavior is simply not acceptable. I think we (in my area at least) are moving in the right direction on this one.

When my oldest daughter (now 22) was in middle-school, there was a group of three girls who constantly mocked her, ridiculed her, name-called, etc. so I called the school and reported it. I was told (by the principal) “Unless they threaten violence, there’s really nothing we can do. . .” so a few weeks later, when one of the girls threatened to “smash [my daughter’s] face into the parking lot”, I called the principal again. Now that violence had been threatened, surely they’d do something, right? Nope. At that point, I was told “Well, we can’t really do anything until the girls actually take violent action against your daughter”. WTF? I mean, when you’re an adult, a threat of violence is a legal offense, it’s assault, and can be prosecuted. But because the people in question are 14, nothing can be done??

Fast forward some number of years. Nine-year-old mudgirl had a bully named Matthew in her class last year. He mocked her. Went out of his way to get in her way. Told her he was going to come to her house, take her up to her room, and “punch [her] in the face”. I reported it to the school. Seems ol’ Matthew had been playing the bully game with a lot of girls in the school, and her school had a “no bullying” policy. Mudgirl’s desk was moved out of Matthew’s proximity immediately, and within two weeks, he had been suspended. Apparently he didn’t learn his lesson, though, because by the end of the year, he’d been transferred to a school for “problem students”.

I truly think bullying is this generation’s ‘sexual harassment’. When I was in elementary and middle school, back in the late '60’s to mid-70’s, sexual harassment was brushed off. It just wasn’t seen as that big of a deal. You could report it, sure, but the admins would shrug their shoulders and says something along the lines of “well, boys will be boys”, and that was it. At some point, it became unacceptable. Not that it doesn’t still happen (even at school), but it’s much less common for the perpetrator of it to just “get away with it”, especially when the event is witnessed. This is how bullying has been in the past, and we are headed in a direction where all children will be taught that it just isn’t acceptable. That won’t stop 100% of it, but it sure will slow down the perps who are only bullying to fit in. And it will give the victims a safety-net.