When adults design anti-bullying programs, bullies still win

Bullying is an almost universal experience. At some point during childhood, almost everyone bullies, is victimized, and/or witnesses bullying. In different guises bullies and victims are standard elements of movies and books, and, more recently, they have figured in a popular, albeit controversial “Canis Canem Edit" (Dog Eat Dog) computer game [1], known as plain “Bully” in the US.

In the game, the player takes the role of Jimmy, a 15-year-old student, new to his boarding school and trying his best to earn the respect of his peers. “Standing up to and even fist-fighting bullies to stop them from tormenting geeks and other students is encouraged,” a 2006 New York Times article about “Bully” [2] noted.

An anti-bullying program, recently featured in the journal, Prevention Science, takes a similar perspective on bullying. The best way to prevent it, according to both the game and the anti-bullying component of Youth Matters (which encourages positive relationships among children and adults within a school), is to teach would-be victims to assert themselves.

Unlike the computer game, however, Youth Matters advises standing up to bullies calmly. In common with many other in-classroom initiatives, it also sets out to teach children how to ask for help in bullying situations, how to avoid antisocial behavior and how to build an anti-bullying environment in schools.

University of Denver researchers Jeffrey M. Jenson and William A. Dieterich assessed the impact of the Youth Matters program by tracking students in fourth grade classrooms at 28 public elementary schools over a two-year period. Some classrooms participated in selected modules of the Youth Matters (YM) prevention curriculum; others did not.

They found that victimization declined in all classrooms in the course of the study, and that the decline was slightly steeper in the YM classrooms. However, the program did not appear to have an impact on children’s status as a bully or a victim over time. In other words, kids who were bullies at the start of the study tended to be bullies at the end, regardless of whether they were exposed to Youth Matters.

Jenson and Dietrich note that bullying can appear to be an intractable problem. Although many anti-bullying programs exist, few have been rigorously evaluated. And findings from the few that have been assessed suggest that the rest may have similarly modest effects – or none at all. Thus – in the face of carefully planned programs to reform them (and their victims) – the power of the bully seems to remain strong.

From the University of Georgia, meanwhile, and a journal devoted to group research comes tentative support for the idea that anti-bullying programs that involve groups of kids can be effective.

Arthur M. Horne and colleagues at the University of Georgia observe in Group Dynamics that programs generally fall into two categories: those that involve only victims and/or bullies (“targeted” approaches) and those that involve all students in a school or classroom (“universal” approaches).

Some of these groups, called “psychoeducational groups,” are generally about giving kids information about bullying and coaching them on how to handle bullying situations. “Counseling groups,” by contrast, focus on specific problems, the emotions that attend such problems and on using the group for “catharsis and corrective emotional experiences”.

They go on to refer to the work of Tom Dishion [See Sometimes it can be better to be in with the out-crowd [3]] which suggests that grouping antisocial kids, such as bullies, is likely to exacerbate their problem behavior. The authors also note that grouping victims together might only lead to commiserating and magnifying feelings of helplessness.

However, they also point to research that suggests that group approaches are about as effective of individual approaches in reducing bullying – and thus, rather meekly, recommend group approaches for their cost efficiency.

• Summaries of “Effects of a Skills-based Prevention Program on Bullying and Bully Victimization among Elementary School Children” by Jeffrey M. Jenson and William A. Dieterich in Prevention Science, Volume 8, Number 4, December, 2007, pp285-296 and “Group Approaches to Reducing Aggression and Bullying In School” by Arthur M. Horne, Jennifer L. Stoddard, and Christopher D. Bell in Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice, December 2007, Volume 11, Issue 4, pp262-271.

• More about the photograph [4]