Bullying can dramatically affect your students' academic and social progress. A safe and fear-free school environment calls for a comprehensive bullying intervention plan that involves all students, parents, faculty and staff.
Anti-bullying programs work
An anti-bullying program focusing on interventions at the school, class and individual levels can cut bullying in half. It includes:
1. An initial schoolwide questionnaire that is distributed to students and adults.
- Helps justify intervention efforts
- Helps students and adults become aware of the extent of the problem
- Serves as a benchmark to measure the effect of improvements in school climate once other intervention components are in place.
2. A schoolwide parental awareness campaign.
- Can be conducted during parent-teacher conference days and PTA meetings and through parent newsletters
- Goals are to increase parental awareness of the problem, point out the importance of parental involvement and encourage parental support of program goals
- Makes parents aware of the results of the initial schoolwide questionnaire
3. A classroom program that includes anti-bullying rules that teachers and students develop together.
- May use formal role-playing exercises and assignments that teach alternative methods of interaction to students directly involved in bullying
- Shows students how they can assist victims and how everyone can work together to create a school climate where bullying is not tolerated
4. Individual interventions for bullies and victims.
(ERIC Review: School Safety: A Collaborative Effort)
Consequences of bullying
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There appears to be a strong correlation between engaging in bullying as a child and experiencing legal or criminal troubles as an adult. In one study, 60 percent of those characterized as bullies in grades 6-9 had at least one criminal conviction by age 24 (Olweus, 1993).
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Chronic bullies seem to maintain their behaviors into adulthood, diminishing their ability to develop and maintain positive relationships (Oliver, Hoover and Hazler, 1994).
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Victims often fear school and consider it an unsafe and unhappy place. As many as 7 percent of American eighth-graders stay home at least once a month because of bullies.
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Victimization increases some students' isolation because their peers do not want to lose status by associating with them or do not want to increase the risk of being bullied themselves.
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Being bullied can lead to depression and low self-esteem, which can extend into adulthood (Olweus, 1993, Batsche and Knoff, 1994).
Interventions for bullying
The bully's aggression occurs in social contexts where teachers and parents are generally unaware of the extent of the problem, and where other children are reluctant to get involved or do not know how to help (Charach, Pepler,and Ziegler, 1995).
Effective anti-bullying interventions must involve the entire school community, rather than focusing only on the perpetrators and victims. Recommended measures include schoolwide bullying policies, curricular measures, improvements to the school grounds, and training for students in conflict resolution, peer counseling and assertiveness techniques (Smith and Sharp, 1994).