National Bully Prevention Campaign

Susan Limber: Good afternoon. I was asked to talk a little bit about what we know about what works in bullying prevention, and I've got background music to do it apparently. As Jason is going to describe in just a few minutes, one of the important elements of the bullying prevention campaign will be an online resource kit where people can go to find out information about bullying prevention programs, what they are and a description of those. I'm going to focus my remarks today on just one program, the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program, and I do that for two reasons. One is an issue of time, a second is that this is a program I'm intimately familiar with having implemented it and evaluated it here in the United States. Whether or not you're interested in implementing the Olweus Program, or in fact any bullying prevention program, I hope that by giving you a glimpse into the principles behind an effective bullying prevention program and some of the elements that that can be useful to you in your efforts in your schools and communities more broadly. Before jumping into a description of this prevention program, though, it might be worth reviewing just briefly a little bit about what we know about bullying, what it is, as well as some of the risk factors for it, so that we can address those in our prevention programs. As Mary mentioned, three important pieces of bullying that any prevention program or any of our efforts have to keep in mind that it's intentional, aggressive behavior, sometimes violent but not always. As Mary mentioned, it occurs in a relationship where there's a power imbalance and typically is repeated over time. I think it's useful to keep in mind that bullying takes many different forms. Apparently this is now working on its own. Hang on one second. Okay sorry. Some examples of some of the more obvious direct forms of bullying that we often see kids engage in that you saw in the videotape, which can be physical--hitting, kicking, shoving--verbal forms of bullying, there are also non-verbal forms of bullying that are very effectively communicated between kids, the "look" that kids can give each other, gestures, threatening looks. It's also, though, important to remember that bullying can more subtle or indirect, again, physically, verbally, or non-verbally. And I wanted to point out here under the more indirect non-verbal forms of bullying in particular; excluding children from a group on purpose can be a very hurtful form of bullying. And a new arena for bullying, which we're seeing appear and a lot of educators talk about is "cyber bullying" where kids are bullying each other through cell phone messages, instant messages, emails, and entire websites are now being devoted to children, and you can imagine how hurtful that is to be spread--messages spread so widely. Well, why do we focus on bullying prevention? We know that there are some serious effects of bullying on the targets or the victims of bullying. From research we know these children have, on average, lower self-esteem than other kids. They report feeling less well than other children. They miss more school than their peers, higher rates of depression and anxiety are common, and are more likely to at least talk about committing suicide. We should of course be concerned about bullying, not just for the effects it has on the direct targets or victims, but because of the effects it can have on kids who witness bullying or watch it go on around them. Often these kids report feeling afraid that they may be the next victim. They feel, perhaps, powerless to change the environment of their school or their community, may feel guilty for not stepping in, and over time if they don't see other children or adults intervening to stop bullying, they can in fact feel diminished empathy for their victims over time. Maybe the kids deserve it, kind of attitudes. And you can imagine that all of that really interferes with schoolwork, and we know that if it's prevalent at school can seriously affect the whole climate of the school and affect students staying on task and learning effectively. I wanted to mention briefly before talking about prevention programs that we know that there are a number of multiple risk factors, things that put kids at risk for bullying others. And I think it's important to keep these in mind both in designing our programs and in carrying them out. Let me mention a few family risk factors for bullying that we know about. In the home life of children who bully, we know that there overall tends to be a lack of parental warmth and involvement on the part of parents, less supervision in families with kids who don't bully, tends to be overly permissive parenting practices. When there is discipline, it's inconsistent and it often tends to be harsh and corporal in nature. There are also, of course, risk factors within a school environment. We know that some schools are more likely to have bullying prevalent than others. Well, those school where, again, there's a lack of supervision, particularly during breaks that puts you at higher risk, where staff, perhaps like parents, have indifferent or even accepting attitudes about bullying: "It's part of growing up." "Kids will be kids." More likely to have bullying problems, and of course students pick up on these attitudes as well. So I think it's important to keep those risk factors in mind as we look towards prevention. Well, what are schools in the United States doing right now to address bullying? I won't talk in any detail about many of these, but this is my own snapshot of what I see going on around the country. Of course they range from some schools, of course, doing nothing still to prevent bullying, or individual teachers or administrators focusing on bullying when they see it, but doing nothing in a coordinated, organized way. Other schools are trying hard to simply raise awareness about bullying through PTA meetings or school assemblies perhaps. Others have legislative mandates now to report and track bullying that they see at their schools. We see zero tolerance or student exclusion policies, or "three strikes and you're out" policies in some communities for bullying. There are a variety of strategies as you can see here. Many curricula, scores of curricula, for bullying prevention out in recent years. And finally, last but not least, there are increasingly some good comprehensive or school (inaudible) programs to address bullying among children and youth, and it's here that I'd like to focus my comments, I think. Our data to date suggests that some of these strategies are not effective at all, as you can imagine. Others of these strategies may, in fact, be harmful. For example: Doing mediation with kids who are bullied and putting them together with their tormentor can, in fact, cause more harm than good. And some of these strategies are looking to be very promising, most notably comprehensive programs. I want to talk in particular for a few minutes about one of these programs to give you a sample of what a comprehensive school-wide bullying prevention program looks like. This program was developed in the 1980s in Norway by Professor Dan Olweus, and it's focused really on changing the norms for behavior within a school environment, changing the climate of the school in a sense. It's focused on the school as a system, but also on individual kids who bully, on individual kids who are bullied. It's research-based, as I'll talk about a little bit more in a moment, and importantly, it's not time-limited. It's important to keep in mind that effective bullying prevention strategies should not stop after six lessons. They don't stop after six months. They really should be woven into the fabric of the school. It's part of how you do business at a school, in other words. The goals of the program are very straightforward. To reduce the bulling problems that we already have, to prevent new problems from cropping up, and generally trying to improve both the peer relations at the school as well as the overall school climate. Now keeping in mind the risk factors that I mentioned a few minutes ago, the family risk factors and the school risk factors, I think it's useful to note that this program is built upon the principle that it's absolutely critical to develop a school climate that's characterized by warmth on the part of adults; positive interest by all the adults at the school; active involvement by adults, again, where there are very firm limits to unacceptable behaviors; where there are importantly non-hostile, non-corporal sanctions when kids do violate rules; and importantly, where adults are in charge. They act as authorities and very positive role models, so this is the principle underlying this bullying prevention program. I mentioned it was a comprehensive program and what that means is that there are interventions at a number of different levels. There are some school (inaudible) interventions, some classroom level activities or interventions, individual interventions, and at least in the United States we've worked hard to get communities involved in bullying prevention. And I'm just going to mention some of the interventions at these different levels briefly, to give you a sense of what it looks like to do bullying prevention in the school. We know from experience that bullying prevention or really any prevention work in a school is going to be less effective if it's owned by one person--namely the principal--or perhaps the school counselor or the school nurse. We have found as well that where there's a representative group of committed folks who can take on the issue of bullying that's much more likely to be effective. And what we have found here is that pulling together a teacher from each grade, an administrator, the bus driver, a custodian, a couple of parents, really get a microcosm of the school engaged in bullying prevention. It's much more likely to be successful (inaudible) over time. Of course, we've also learned that we, as adults, don't know everything we need to know about bullying, about its nature and prevalence, but also how we prevent it and how we intervene effectively when we see it. So training for, again, all school personnel has proven to be so important, and this is not just training of teaching staff; bus drivers, cafeteria workers, everybody really needs to be better educated about bullying. Another important piece of any bullying prevention program in your school or community should be an assessment of what it looks like by administering an anonymous survey to students. Asking them about the nature and prevalence of bullying and how they feel about it is an important piece of any school's effort to turn things around at their schools. Schools can look very different in terms of bullying profiles. This seems like a no-brainer, but in my experience many schools and their behavior codes do not use the term bullying. They don't name bullying behavior and as a result--not clear what adult expectations are for kids about bullying behaviors. We recommend that all schools develop very specific rules about bullying, and here are some examples that many of our schools use. And you'll notice that not only are we guiding children regarding what behaviors we don't want them to engage in--in other words, we won't bully others--but we're really focusing rules two through four at our bystanders. What do we expect kids to do if they do witness or suspect there is bullying? So we found it critical to develop school rules about bullying and bullying prevention efforts. I won't go into a great detail about some of these other school-wide elements but just to give you a sense of what seems to be critical. Following up those rules by using very consistent positive and negative consequences is, of course, critical. Taking a look at your data and when we've asked kids, "Where are you bullied at school" on those anonymous surveys, it's important then for a school to take a look at those hotspots for bullying and increase adult supervision in those areas. Holding some regular staff discussion groups so that staff can continue to learn about bullying is important, as well, as of course, actively involving parents all the way. At the classroom level to give you a quick glimpse into what can go on here effectively, teachers can certainly post and should discuss in detail the school's rules and expectations about bullying to make sure kids have a good understanding of what they mean. Again, being consistent in use of positive and negative sanctions is critical. I've seen teachers do very creative things and incorporating bullying prevention themes across the curriculum, language arts, even math classes can incorporate bullying or bullying prevention ideas into them. The fourth element here has proved to be absolutely essential in turning around school climate, putting the books away once a week for 20 minutes or so and talking with kids about peer relations, bullying issues. We found it so important to set aside a time for kids to talk about these issues and allow teachers to try to keep their fingers on the pulse of students' concerns, so class meetings is critical. And finally, of course, it's critical that we work one on one with kids and that adults know how to deal with bullying on the spot in those 30 seconds that they have to deal with bullying when they see it at school, but also how they can effectively follow up both with kids who are bullied and kids who are doing the bullying, and how to engage the parents of both of those groups of kids effectively. In the U.S. we've tried to--in addition to focusing on school-based bullying prevention--look for ways that the community can support the schools' activities and at the same time we can try to get those bullying prevention messages out in to the community, recognizing, as Mary pointed out, that bullying doesn't stop at the schoolhouse doors. Well, a quick glimpse into this program: how effective is it? Sorry, got a little ahead of myself here. The first Norwegian study found pretty dramatic reductions in bullying by about 50 to 70 percent in both students' reports of bullying others and being bullied--found that the longer the program was in effect, the more effective it was. They also found some significant reductions and some related antisocial behaviors. So not only did bullying decrease but we saw reductions in fighting, vandalism, theft, truancy, et cetera. Teachers rated--as well as students rated--an improvement in the climate of the school or the classroom, and these real positive findings have been replicated in a couple of other studies. Well, we know that our culture is not identical to that of Norway. What does it look like here in terms of our effectiveness in reducing bullying? A study that we conducted in South Carolina, not quite as whopping results but still extremely promising. We saw reductions both in boys and girls reports of bullying others compared to a control group of schools, and for boys, at least, we saw reductions in their saying they were socially isolated as well as their reports of victimization and decreases in some antisocial behaviors as well. Now in part, because of our very promising findings and the findings of colleagues in England, Germany, Norway, and elsewhere, this program in particular has been highlighted as one of only 11 blueprint programs for violence prevention. It's also been listed as a model (inaudible) program. And finally I wanted to just mention that whether implementing this comprehensive bullying prevention program or others, there certainly are a lot of challenges, including of course resistance from staff or parents who may either think we really don't have a problem with bullying at our school. It doesn't happen here, or others who may think bullying is a "part of growing up," "kids will be kids," "got to suck it up." Another challenge I see commonly is we're all of course searching for the silver bullet, that simple short-term solution to bullying or bullying prevention, and it simply doesn't exist, but that's a hurdle to overcome in trying to implement comprehensive programs. We know of course in this era of high stakes testing that there's very limited classroom time for anything not directly related to academics, so finding those 20 minutes once a week, even in an elementary setting, can be a real challenge to put books away and talk about social relations. That's another challenge. In many of our schools that are trying to focus on bullying prevention, we're seeing unfortunately that they're also using some strategies that are contradictory to bullying prevention, which can be a problem. For example, pulling together kids who bully in a group for self-esteem enhancement probably will create more confident bullies but may not do anything to really address the bullying problem in your school, and there are other examples of contradictory interventions as well. Finally, although bullying prevention need not be terribly expensive, funding is, of course, a concern for many of our schools looking to implement this or other programs. So I hope that gave you a glimpse into at least one very promising bullying prevention strategy. If you're interested there's a hand out on your table with more information about this program and you can always go to this email to ask for more information as well. Thank you very much.