Bullying, It's Still Around

Posted by Brian W. Koenig on 22 November 2009 | 4185 Comments

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Since the Columbine tragedy in 1999, there has been a fairly vigorous national effort, albeit disjointed, to stop antisocial behaviors, like bullying, at school. The resulting publicity, research, and array of new programs have accomplished at least three things:

• We have clearer definitions of bullying and the forms it takes.
• We have a near consensus that bullying, harassment, and other mean-spirited behaviors should not be tolerated in our schools.
• We realize there is damage done to kids who are the chronic targets of this behavior.

These are significant accomplishments. Unfortunately, the ultimate accomplishment still eludes our grasp: Consistently stopping bullying in our schools.

The current situation for bullying prevention is best defined by two articles in Denver-area newspapers (http://www.denverpost.com/ci_12174189 and http://yellowscene.com/2009/08/05/the-800-pound-gorilla-in-the-school-yard/) . These stories summarize the results of a three-year $9 million effort in 40 Colorado counties funded by the Colorado Trust, aptly called the Bullying Prevention Initiative. There were many positive outcomes, but this sentence from one of the articles summarizes the results nicely:

"Students who said they participated in or watched physical bullying dropped from 69 percent to 58 percent over three years. For verbal bullying, the drop was 76 percent to 67 percent."

This is an admirable effort that hopefully educators and researchers around the country can learn from. In my opinion – and opinions expressed in these articles – it would have been nice to see a greater change. And these results are consistent with other research conducted in the US over the last 10 years; varying effects and difficulty pinpointing a high-impact prevention strategy.

How often can schools and communities muster this kind of energy and resources for a prevention effort? Colorado’s Bullying Prevention Initiative is probably the crème de la crème of bullying prevention projects, as we know it now.

So I would commend the work that has been done so far, but suggest that educators, policymakers, and researchers consider a paradigm shift to an approach that gives better results and, maybe, at a lower cost.

To do this shift there are 4 broad strategies that would dramatically change the way we approach school climate and bullying prevention:

• Acknowledge that some students cannot manage the complicated social situations we have created in our burgeoning school buildings and offer help.
• To change the climate and culture in our schools, we need to first focus on the adults in our school communities.
• Modify the physical dynamics of the school environment, particularly those environments that are conducive to antisocial behavior and hierarchy.
• Use “deeper” prevention approaches like community building, nutrition, exercise, and meditation.

After 15 years of prevention work and some intense efforts with 7 school districts, I can see that prevention and intervention efforts focused almost solely on students are not sustainable; they result in lots of work with a small return.

We need strategies that start closer to the roots in our schools. Surprisingly, the costs are often lower and the changes can be simple. More on this simplicity in later blogs.


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