INTRODUCING PEER BULLYING

Myths
There are a lot of widespread beliefs in society. Sometimes those beliefs are more myths than facts:
★ People are born bullies: bullying is a learned behavior and behaviors can be changed.
★ Being a victim can build character: bullying is not a normal part of childhood. Research
showed that bullying experience increases the vulnerabilities of victims.
★ It is easy to spot signs of bullying: emotional, verbal and online bullying can cause serious
damages (as much as physical bullying) without showing scars.
Understanding facts versus myths about bullies and victims is very important in order to generate an
optimal intervention. The course adopts a research based on social ecological approach to offer a
multidisciplinary analysis of children.
Human aggression
Bullying is one of the most important forms of peer-directed aggression, but not the sole one.
Human aggression: any form of behavior directed toward the goal of harming and injuring another
living being, who is motivated to avoid such treatment.
While bullying always implies aggressive behavior, not all aggressions are bullying.
There are two main forms of aggression
1) Reactive aggression: the concept was originally derived from the frustration aggression
model *: frustration causes aggression.
Reactive aggression: defensive reaction to a perceived threatening stimulus or
provocation. This is for defense of retaliation. It focuses on the past.
* Frustration aggression model: aggression is the result of blocking or frustrating a person’s effort to obtain a goal.
2) Proactive aggression: unprovoked aversive means of influencing or coercing another person
and is more goal oriented than reactive aggression. Children likely learn to associate
proactive aggression with its positive outcomes, which reinforce aggressive behavior.
Proactive aggression: non impulsive cold blooded aggression. It focuses on
the future: it is goal-oriented.
Proactive aggression includes bullying and instrumental aggression. The latter (quest’ultimo)
refers to aggressive behavior used to achieve a particular goal or privilege without the
deliberate purpose of hurting another person.
The distinction depends on the functions of aggressive behavior.
School bullying
Although bullying has gathered significant attention over the past years, there’s still a scientific
debate on the exact definition of bullying. In 2014 a panel of experts convened by the Center of
Disease Control and Prevention in the US has proposed a uniform research definition. The definition
was mainly derived from Professor Olweus’s work who was the pioneer of bullying research.
Bullying is any unwanted aggressive behavior by another youth or group of youths who are not
siblings or current dating partners that involves an observed or perceived power imbalance and is
repeated multiple times or is highly likely to be repeated.
Bullying definition includes three main characteristics:
1. Intentionality: As any aggressive behavior, bullying is intentional. Therefore, an accident is
not considered as an act of bullying, despite the possible negative consequences. Moreover
the term “unwanted” in the definition refers to the fact that the targeted youth wants the
aggressive behaviors by the perpetrator to stop.
2. Power imbalance: Bullying occurs with an asymmetric relationship. The power imbalance
between the perpetrator and the victim can involve factors like social standing, resources
and physical size or influence.
3. Persistence: Bullying usually does not apply to single episodes; rather it is characterized by
repeated aggressive acts toward the same victim. There could also be strong concern that a
 single aggressive behavior has a high likelihood of being followed by more incidents of
aggression.
What distinguishes the new definition with the previous ones is its emphasis not just on repeated
behaviors but also behavior that are likely to be repeated.
Sticks and stones: Recognizing the forms of bullying
Bullying may take different forms:
- Direct bullying: a clear form of aggression in which the bullying attacks the victim in a face to
face interaction. It includes both physical aggression and verbal bullying.
- Indirect or relational bullying: This consists in a more subtle form of aggression and it is more
difficult to detect. Indeed the bully attacks the victim mainly by damaging their relationship
with peers or feeling of inclusion by the peer group. Examples:
➔ Deliberate exclusion of the victim from the group.
➔ Withdrawal of friendships or acceptance unless the victim does not conform to the
bully’s or the group’s requests.
➔ Spreading malicious rumors in order to damage the victim’s reputation.
Despite the stereotypic perception of bullying as a “boyish” problem findings on gender differences
in bullying are not always consistent across studies. Some studies report that girls are bullied as often
as boys, but they are less often found in the role of bully. However, findings from other studies
analyzing different forms of bullying did not support the idea of bullying as more typical of boys.
According to the latter studies the real difference between boys and girls lies in the types of
aggressive behavior enacted (overt VS covert). There are no significant gender differences regarding
verbal bullying. Besides, studies have repeatedly reported that boys are more likely than girls to
engage in physical bullying. And girls are often described as more engaging in relational bullying.
However, this latter result is still controversial: there are still mixed findings regarding boys and girls
active involvement in bullying. Almost all bullying studies have quantitatively measured the
difference between boys and girls in bullying behavior or attitudes. A less explored area of research is
the relation between gender roles and bullying, that is how bullying might be associated with the
social schemas and expectations that are part of youth’s gender identity.
Gender schema theory argues that many of our behavioral choices are influenced by cultural
expectations of our gender. Boys and girls’ groups differ on several important dimensions, such as
activity preferences, friendship, group size, strength and power.
The researchers developed two cultures. Social and cultural stereotypes relegate girls to a passive
and submissive role. Boys are expected to be active and dominating. Boys not conforming to these
social expectations can be judged in a negative way. Our society is more prone to accept male
aggression. The two cultures approach may offer explanations for the different ways in which boys
and girls bully: boys may use overt bullying to gain acceptance within the peer group, this behavior is
commonly judged more positively in boys than in girls. On the other side, girls as young as 3 years old
are encouraged by adults not to express anger overtly and to value close relationships more than
status and dominance (boys, on the contrary, should value more status and dominance). As a consequence some
girls may think damaging others’ friendships through relational bullying is the best way to hurt other
girls. Instead relationship manipulation might be an effective way of securing high status in the group
Different social goals may lie underneath the different forms of bullying between boys and girls. In
particular boys tend to prefer themes of instrumentality and physical dominance, as a consequence
they may tend to use overt forms of bullying. Girls' friendship interactions are more focused on
relational issues. The fact that girls are more self disclosing and involved in more intimate
relationships than boys makes girls more vulnerable to social gossip.
Bullying in the cyberspace
Cyberbullying: aggression that is intentionally and repeatedly carried out in an electronic context
against a person who cannot easily defend themselves. It includes both verbal and relational forms of
 aggression. In the latter case the social group in which the cyber-bullying takes place can be both the
real peer group of the cyber victim or the social network of which the cyber victim is a member.
Cyber-bullying shares with traditional bullying three primary features: intentionally, power
imbalance, repetition. The power imbalance in cyberbullying can take different forms (social,
relational, psychological). The fact that one person is more technologically skilled than another can
create a power of imbalance.
In spite of the similarities between traditional bullying and cyber-bullying the two behaviours are
distinct from each other in critical ways:
- Anonymity: may increase the threat for the cyber victim, who doesn't know who the bully is
nor have the possibility to report the cyberbully to authorities.
- Lack of empathy: the perpetrator cannot see the victim’s emotional reactions. As a
consequence empathic responses that should stop the bully from further aggressions are
much less possible and the cyberbullies might ignore or trivialize their misbehaviour.
- Audience: cyber-bullying allows participation by a potentially infinite audience.
- Time space: traditional bullying occurs more frequently at school; individuals who engage in
cyberbullying on the other hand can perpetuate aggression 24 hours a day. At any time they
can find ways to generate aggression throughout the internet.
In sum, it is not a new phenomenon, it is another form of bullying. The nature of information and
communication technologies and the ways youths interact through such technologies can shape how
aggressive behaviours happen online.
Bias - based bullying
Bullying can also be based on bias: cultural, linguistic, religious, gender, sexuality, disability and so on.
When we speak about bullying we don’t think about bullying as a prejudice.
Children who act as bullies tend to engage in bullying against someone that is different (LGBT+ or
people who are non confirmative in role gender or gender).
But biased-bullying goes beyond: it can happen when there is a racial discrimination against people
from different countries.
There are results that show that the socialization process is more complicated from garden-variety
bullying (harassment based on differences) to a bias-based bullying.
In 4th and 5th grade kids that engage in bullying actually escalete in for example, homophobic epithets
at kids, in middle school. This bias-based bullying then leads to sexual harassment.
Sexual harassment: unwanted sexual commentary, sexual rumors-spreading.
It is important to avoid a language based on prejudices: language can shape behavior and reality.
The use of a language full of prejudices can influence kids, so language has to be inclusive or it will
not be possible to prevent and reduce bullying acts.
A GLOBAL PUBLIC HEALTH PERSPECTIVE
Global issue, different perspectives
Prevalence figures of bullying appear to vary somewhat across countries and depending on how
bullying is measured. Large-scale cross-national studies have estimated that around 10-20% of pupils
have been bullied by peers during their school years, while around 5 to 15% have bullied others. A
smaller percentage of pupils (about 3 to 6 %) often report dual involvement as bully-victim, that is,
both bullying and being bullied.Moreover about 10-15 % of adolescents have been victimized online.
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child states that children’s rights entitle them to
protection from all form of physical and mental violence, injury or abuse, neglect or negligent
treatment, maltreatment or exploitation (including sexual abuse) while in the care of parents, legal
guardian or any other person who has the care of the child.
Bullying is considered as a violation of human rights. It is the moral responsibility of adults to ensure
these rights are respected and that healthy development and citizenship are promoted. In 2004 the
American Psychological Association adopted a resolution on bullying among youth to strongly
promote research on bullying behaviour and evidence-based intervention against this problem.
Other important professional societies such as the American Academy of Pediatrics and the
American Public Health Association have endorsed similar positions. Likewise, in 2007 a group of
researchers from several countries mostly from the psychological field, met together and signed the
Kandersteg declaration, pledging the commitment and determination to work against bullying. This
represented an important initiative from the scientific community to raise awareness about bullying .
Finally another important initiative at the international level is the Bullying Research Network based
at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This network is led by prof. Susan Swearer and prof. Shelly
Hymel and currently consists of more that 150 researchers from 16 different countries. Its purpose is
to bring together internationally known researchers in the area of bullying and to serve as a virtual
clearinghouse to support international research initiatives in bullying prevention and intervention.
Public health approach to bullying (Matthew Masiello from Children’s Institute)
Definition of public health
Institute of medicine, 1988: is what we, as a society, do collectively to assure the conditions in which
people can be healthy.
Charles Edward Winslow, 1920: the science and art of preventing disease, prolonging life and
promoting physical health, and efficiency through organised community efforts for the sanitation of
the environment, the control of community infections, the education of the individual and principles
of hygiene the organisation of medical and nursing services for the early diagnosis and preventive
treatment of disease, and the development of social machinery, which will ensure to every individual
in the community a standard of living adequate for the maintenance of health.
The approach: a pediatrician and a clinical nurse instructor (1990) in a rural area in Pennsylvania
invited the school nurses to come into a hospital system to provide them with education on pediatric
issues. They asked the audience what the issues were, these were professionals who represent and
have a keen awareness of the health issues pertaining to all the children in the country.
- “What were their top three concerns regarding the health of children in the schools?”.
- “Lack of services, obesity and bullying”. Especially the issue relating to childhood obesity and
bullying in this period of time were not yet on the national agenda.
Cambria country is where the clinical nurse instructor and the professor worked and lived. They had
the opportunity to respond to this issue: they were able to bring in a college student into their office
setting and asked her to go through the literature to identify those bullying prevention programs that
have an evidence based foundation to them. They then found an evidence based program, and they
studied it and they realised that the particular program was probably going to work for them, in the
region where they were living. It is important, not all evidence based programs fit every community.
So they became students of this evidence based program, they identified funding for the evidence
based program. In identifying a public health approach to bullying they had the issue, the people
who were concerned about the issue identified: an evidence based program, funding to implement
and sustain the program over several years. They also began bringing in a team of professionals that
for them were very fortunate to live in the community that could become the experts on this
particular bullying prevention program. They were so well welcomed in Cambria schools.
Bullying in kindergarten
Studies on bullying in preschool children are in a limited number compared with research on bullying
among school aged children. However, the presence of bullying behaviour in young children has been
demonstrated in several countries. Studies show that the extent to which victimization occurs in the
early childhood years is comparable with that in grade school. Such experiences are also an
immensely stressful event for young children.
Children do not need to be “mean” to bully peers, they just have to learn that their behaviour is
rewarding and they will keep on with their attacks.
Not many people are impressed to see preschoolers acting aggressively (like taking toys from each
other, getting physical and expressing negative emotions...). 3 to 5 years old are expected to have
outbursts as they are still learning how to interact appropriately with peers and they are less
experienced in solving the problems that arise when playing with others. Thus they may use
aggression to solve problems rather than more effective ways to conflict resolution.
Prior to elementary school kids learn about important life skills: making friends, sharing toys and
solving disagreements. Since these skills are not intuitive for young kids they can be very difficult to
master, leading to frustration and acting out.
When preschoolers and kindergarteners get frustrated they often react by saying or doing things that
hurt others: they may yell, call names, push and shove or banish children from their group of friends.
Bullying is aggression, but not all aggression are bullying: bullying is repeated over time. Sometimes
when a child acts aggressively they gain some positive rewards, like being considered by peers as the
strongest child in the kindergarten. The role of adults is really important and crucial: if they do not
promptly intervene to teach the appropriate way to handle conflicts that are, at the same time,
useful to reach a good social status the harassment may become patterns of bullying.
Development of bullying
Bullying can start early in childhood afterward it can persist through the school years, peaking during
the school transitions. The use of power and aggression in relationships generally drops off as
children learn that this is an ineffective means of maintaining relationships. Some youth however
persist in the use of power and aggression through adolescence and into high school. From early
adolescence new forms of aggression carried out from a position of power emerge with developing
cognitive and social skills. Children became aware of others’ vulnerabilities and of their power
relative to others. Bullying then diversifies into more sophisticated forms of verbal, social and
electronic bullying, as well as dating aggression. It would be erroneous to think that bullying
behaviour increases for all youth, it is critical to assess more systematically which groups of youth.
For example, high aggressive boys remain on aggressive trajectories and which youth desist in these
behaviours over time. Similarly, we need to distinguish between individuals who experience
occasional victimization and individuals who experience persistent and chronic victimization.
A longitudinal study among Canadian youth from age 10 to 17 revealed four different pathways in
bullying.
● 10% of the sample reported consistently high levels of bullying, from late elementary
through high school, this was the so-called “high-bullying group”.
● 13% reported bullying at about the same level as the high group in the late elementary
school, but their levels dropped to almost no bullying by the end of high school, they were
named “desist group”.
● 35% of the sample reported consistently moderate levels of bullying throughout the school
years: they are called the “moderate group”.
● 42% of students almost never reported bullying.
Overall, bullying behaviour tends to diminish as youth mature, still studies have documented
increases in bullying that correspond with transitional changes from elementary school to middle
school, which are then followed by decreases in bullying. Relevant to this transition are: changes in
pupil-pupil relationships and in pupil attitude to adults and school, greater risk-taking and anti-social
behaviour generally and increasing stability of victim and bullying tendencies, with age.
Bullying occurs more often in the middle school and early teen years, because kids are transitioning
from being a child to an adolescent. They have a strong desire to be accepted, to make friends and to
be a part of a group. The desire of acceptance leads to bullying, because kids are intensely aware of
what it takes to fit in. As a result, they easily spot others who don’t fit the accepted norm and focus
on that: kids bully others who look, act, talk or dress differently.
There are also organizational explanations of bullying changes during school transition. In many
countries and school systems indeed middle schools are larger than elementary schools, with more
complex organizational levels. Moreover, in the absence of a classroom teacher with very clear
responsibility for pupils in their class, teachers in secondary schools might see responsibility for
dealing with bullying as more diffused, and therefore might be less likely to take action.
Much ado about nothing?
Bullying is harmful. There are few topics in which the clash between popular beliefs and scientific
findings is as blatant as it is regarding the consequences of bullying. Far from being a conflict
interaction that helps people become tougher, bullying is neither inevitable nor beneficial. In
contrast, frequent involvement in bullying during child development as either bullies or victims is a
significant risk factor for serious health, psychological and behavioural problems.
1. First, bullying can negatively affect children’s health. Indeed, victims and bully-victims are
two times more likely than uninvolved peers to show a variety of psychosomatic problems
(headache, abdominal pain, sleeping problems, poor appetite, skin problems and vomiting).
2. Being bullied has also negative consequences in the psychological domain, especially
because of the relative stability over time of this traumatizing experience. Compared to
non-victimized peers, bullied children show more psychological problems (anxiety, stress, low
self-esteem, low self-worth, depressive symptoms, loneliness, self-blame). Moreover, being
repeatedly bullied has been associated with an increase risk for suicidal ideation, suicidal
attempts and self-harm. These problems are not limited to the moment of victimization.
Long-term studies report that bullied children show adjustment problems also in late
adolescence and even in adulthood.
3. The third area where bullying can have negative consequences is social and behaviour
adjustment. Indeed both being bullied and bullying others are associated with social and
academic adjustment (low GPAs, absenteeism, drop out, substance abuse, weapons,
fighting). Bullies are also at increased risk for a variety of antisocial behaviour, violence, and
criminality. Because they begin early in adolescence and are extremely stable over time,
bullying prevention may be considered a critical aspect of crime prevention at the societal
level.
4. Another area that is receiving growing attention in recent years is the connection between
bullying and substance use. Engaging in one deviant behaviour increases the likelihood of
engaging in the other one. A possible explanation for this positive association may be related
to bullies’ desire to gain social status and to be perceived by peers as cool and attractive.
During adolescence smoking and drinking is indeed a behaviour that contributes to the social
image of the individual among peers. Moreover adolescents within the same peer's context
tend to socialize each other’s anti-social attitudes and behaviour and share problems
behaviours, a phenomenon known as “homophily”.
Potential negative consequences of bullying may also affect students who do not fall into the typical
roles of bullies and victims. When classmates who are bullies or victims are affected then everyone’s
education suffers. Witnessing peer victimization at school is indeed associated with: low sense of
safety, more negative perceptions of school climate, decreased school engagement, increase of
anxiety and school aversion. Even when students are seemingly not involved in bullying they may be
negatively impacted in ways that can impede the learning process. In general schools with a high
prevalence of bullying may have students who are less engaged, less able to concentrate during
curricular activities and more prone to school avoidance.
Risk and protective factors
As children grow and reach their developmental competencies, there are individual and contextual
variables that promote or hinder the process. These are frequently referred to as protective and risk
factors. Within a developmental psychopathology framework:
Risk factor: a characteristic at the biological, psychological, family, community or cultural
level that precedes and is associated with a higher likelihood of problem outcomes, of
developing a disease or disorder or being involved in a dangerous situation.
The key concept is that of likelihood. Any risk factor is not seen as a cause, which would imply that it
has a sure inevitable effect. Rather a risk factor increases the probability that a certain outcome
emerges in a child’s life. The stronger and closer the risk factor the higher the probability of the
problem outcome. Moreover, risk factors can interact and influence each other thus changing their
final effect. For example two risk factors within the family, say lack of emotional support and parent’s deviant
behavior may co-occur and strengthen each other. In this way the negative outcome for the child’s
well-being is worse than the effect of any single risk factor alone.
Risk factors can be classified based on their temporality in children’s life. Thus we have clearly
identifiable episodes, such as hospitalization, parental divorce or a sibling’s birth. These risk factors
have definite temporal limits, but the effects may be long lasting. Other risk factors instead are
chronic life conditions, such as poor socio-economic conditions or negative family climate.
Contrary to risk factors, protective factors are characteristics that are associated with a lower
likelihood of problem outcomes or that reduce the negative effects of risk factors. Therefore,
protective factors have a positive impact on children’s life and adjustment, by directly improving their
quality of life, favouring the development of particular skills or adaptive strategies or buffering the
negative effects of risk factors.
Social cognition
Social cognitive framework suggests that behaviour is led by cognition. Therefore, it is not the
specific situation that needs to be analysed, but one’s interpretation of it and personal motivations
guiding behaviour. Individual differences in behavioural responses to social situations would be
caused by individual differences in mental processing.
Social information processing theory (Crick and Dodge, 1994)
This theory was developed to investigate cognitive processes that guide behaviours and was soon
applied to explain antisocial and aggressive behaviours. It consists of an automatic process in 6
circular steps. Each step is linked to the previous one and leads to the next one. Cognitive biases and
distortions in processing in any step may result in maladjusted behaviour, and aggression particularly:
1) Encoding of cues: the person focuses on particular cues in the social situation, such as
provocation or rejection by a peer, encodes them and selects the most relevant ones.
2) Interpretation of cues: casual reasons are attributed to events and intentions to others’ acts.
3) Clarification of goals: people select a goal that they want to achieve, it can be relational or
instrumental.
➔ Relational goals are oriented to benefit social relationships.
➔ Instrumental goals are aimed at achieving power, status or influence in relationships.
4) Response, access or construction: people access responses from their long-term memory or
create new responses if the situation is unfamiliar.
5) Response decision: it is evaluated each response in order to choose the best one. They
consider its content, the self efficacy in performing it and the outcome they expect from it.
6) Behavioural enactment: the actual behaviour takes place. It is then perceived and evaluated
by the other person in the interaction.
Past events form social knowledge schemata or scripts, which are stored in long-term memory and
influence the way in which social information is processed and social behaviour.
Children with frequent reactive aggression show problems mostly in the first two steps of the
information processing. They tend to search for fewer social cues than well adjusted children and to
focus only on aggressive ones. On one hand, they more often interpret ambiguous social cues as
hostile, on the other hand the latter process is usually called “hostile attribution bias”. Moreover
compared to their peers, these children generate a smaller number of social responses, which are
usually more unfriendly and hostile. Bullies instead do not tend to show particular difficulties in the
first two steps. However in step 3, they can be more prone to choose instrumental goals aimed at
reaching personal vantages. In contrast, socially adjusted children usually aim at enhancing the
relationship with others, e.g.: by playing together, cooperating or mediating conflict resolution.
Bullies often feel more self-confident in performing aggressive behaviour in social interactions and
expect more positive outcomes from such strategies. Emotion and morality have been integrated
into the social information processing framework, because when perceiving others individuals use
their cognition, but also emotional cues and moral judgment.
Theory of mind
In a paper published in 1999 Sutton and colleagues have proposed the so-called: “skilled manipulator
model”. Stressing the role of adaptive motivation they argued that bullying may be seen as a socially
undesirable way to reach a socially effective goal, such as the leadership within a group. They stated
that bullies may sometimes be skilled individuals, who may perceive their social world quite
accurately and may take advantage of their social-cognitive competence to reach personal benefits,
such as interpersonal dominance. This model has been applied in studies about theory of mind.
Theory of mind: ability to attribute mental states to understand intentions, beliefs, motivation of others.
Findings indicate that some bullies have average to good theory of mind skills. This suggests that
having a grasp of the mental states of those involved, along with an ability to manipulate these
thoughts and beliefs, may be crucial for the bully in developing and maintaining such inter-role
relations. Bullies should not necessarily be seen as individuals with specific social skills difficulties. In
contrast, they may sometimes be skilled individuals, who take advantage of their social cognitive
competence to reach personal benefits (interpersonal dominance) through a Machiavellian conduct.
Emotions
Lemerise and Arsenio have been the first authors asserting that emotion plays a critical role in each
step of the SIP model. They focus on the two emotional factors, namely emotionality and emotion
regulations.
- Emotionality refers to how easily emotions are aroused by their duration and their intensity.
- Emotion regulation involves the management of the duration, intensity and expression of
emotions.
For example: when an individual interacts with other people their effective cues are important sources of
information that need to be encoded and interpreted.
At the same time individuals’ mood in a certain moment can lead them to get cues that are coherent
with their mood: angry people are more prone to catch unfriendly or hostile cues from other people,
sometimes overestimating their presence.
Similarly emotional experiences can influence:
★ Goal selection
★ Response generation
★ Decision
★ Enactment
For example:
1. The anger resulting from a perceived hostile situation may contribute to the selection of an antisocial
goal and in the end of an aggressive behaviour.
2. At this point the ability of managing anger and regulating emotions can play a crucial role.
3. Indeed, the individuals could choose an assertive behaviour instead of an aggressive one if they are
good enough in managing their emotions.
4. In the behavioural enactment step emotional expectancies after the behaviour play an important role.
Indeed, if a child expects to feel better after acting aggressively, they will probably prefer this
conduct, instead of other behavioural alternatives, whose positive consequences are not anticipated
or are considered too distant in time.
Lemerise and Arsenio in their integration of the SIP model attribute a special importance to a
particular kind of emotion, called empathic emotions.
Empathy is an emotional dimension that received great attention from bullying researchers.
Empathy is a multidimensional construct and involves both cognitive and affective components.
The cognitive component refers to the people’s ability to understand another person’s emotion, the
affective component refers to a person’s capability to experience another person’s emotions.
The emphasis on feelings of other people distinguished empathy from the construct of “theory of
mind”, which is mainly focused on mental rather than emotional states.
In general empathy is commonly considered one of the bases for different kinds of prosocial
behaviour. The more empathy people experience for others, the more likely they are to act
prosocially. In contrast, low levels of empathy are a risk factor for aggressive and antisocial behaviour.
In 2015 van Noorden and colleagues review forty studies on the association of cognitive and affective
empathy with bullying. The results show that bullying is generally negatively associated with affective
empathy. Concerning cognitive empathy results are mixed. Indeed, half of the studies report a
negative association and the other half report no association. The findings indicate that students
who bully their peers are not necessarily incompetent in understanding what others feels, although
they are less able to fell vicariously what others feel.
Motivation
Bullying is an instrumental aggression mainly used as a tool to gain or keep a prominent position
among peers and obtain higher levels of resource control. Recent approaches have indeed described
bullying as a strategic, goal oriented and even skilful behaviour, it aims at changing the structure of
the peer group at manipulating peer relationships and at gaining social power by intentionally
inflicting harm.
Bullying others is a means by which the perpetrators can feel powerful and dominant. When the
victim is scared and submissive the perpetrators reach their goals, and the negative behaviour
patterns are reinforced.
A second important goal of bullying is the perpetrator’s wish for affiliation, this means that
perpetrators also bully others to be together with others and to feel close with particular others.
= The victims play an important role in establishing and maintaining group coherence, if the
harassment of the victim is a reason for a closer bond within the bullying group the perpetrators
reach their goals, and the negative behaviour is reinforced. To this respect has been often associated
with achieving a high social status.
School bullies are often thought of as outcasts, whose actions lead to rejection by their peers.
However research shows that many bullies are actually popular kids who raise their social standing
by picking on others. Recent literature on peer group networks recognise the existence of two
different forms of social status, reflecting the child’s social position among peers that is social
preference and perceived popularity.
● Social preference: it reflects the extent to which a child is liked or disliked.
● Perceived popularity: it reflects the level of individual visibility, power and prominence
among peers. Is associated with the higher levels of dominance and resource control in the
peer group.
Even though an overlap exists between social preference and perceived popularity they are usually
oppositely related to peer aggression. Bullying is associated negatively with social preference and
positively with perceived popularity, in contrast, prosocial behaviour is usually associated with both
social preference and perceived popularity.
Recent studies have suggested that having high status among peers either as socially preferred or
perceived popular promotes the kind of behaviour likely to keep the influential position within the
peer group and the associated rewards. This is the so called “status as a motivator” hypothesis.
For example, high perceived popularity often gained by means of bullying is likely to motivate them to continue
to bully. In contrast, a high status as socially preferred may inhibit bullying and promote defending.
Indeed, youth who are well accepted by peers wish to continue to be liked, they should refrain from
bullying others, because this behaviour is disliked by peers. Rather they should be motivated to
defend because this behaviour is rewarded by peers- acceptance.
Bullying is successful if there is a peer group who awards high social standing to the bullies.
Morality (Prof. Kay Bussey, Sydney University)
One factor that has been receiving increasing attention in terms of understanding bullying is morality.
Morality: Is concerned with human welfare justice and right issues.
Bullying involves repeated and intentional harm to a weaker person and qualifies as an immoral
behaviour as it impacts the welfare and rights of victims.
The initial approach focused on moral judgements. It was assumed that if children and young people
know that bullying is wrong they will not engage in bullying. However the research evidence did not
support this position. Children and young people who knew that bullying was wrong did enact
bullying. Although it is important to understand children’s moral reasoning and moral knowledge and
how they relate to bullying, an exclusive focus on moral reasoning does not help us to fully
understand why children bully. It does little to resolve the paradox of why children who know that
bullying and aggression are morally wrong engage in these behaviours.
So, despite even young children as young as three years of age having developed moral standards,
whereby they know that aggression is wrong, many of these children still bully others.
To understand this mismatch between moral standards and moral behaviour, a number of
approaches have been advanced. The first study of moral emotions in the field of moral development
dates back as far as Freud, who investigated the superego, conscience and this relied on self
judgements which led to potential feelings of guilt for not conforming to the dictated of the
superego.More recent approaches have been articulated by Malti among others. In this approach
moral emotions are typically linked to self and involve self reflection and self evaluation (guilt, which
involves a cognitive component such as perspective taking as well as an emotional component).
In the moral emotion approach, the focus has been on the interplay between moral reasoning and
moral emotions focusing on developmental factors. Although this approach considers both
cognitions and emotions, there is a little concern for how they are related to behaviour.
Whereas, an alternative viewpoint which does consider behaviour is that provided by moral
disengagement, and it attempts to explain more directly this mismatch between moral reasoning and
moral behaviour. That is knowing that bullying is wrong, anticipating self-censure for bullying, and yet
bullying others without feeling any remorse.
Moral disengagement is the process which enables those who censure bullying in general to bully
others in certain situations by electively disengaging their moral standards so that they feel no
remorse. Moral disengagement is part of the social cognitive theory of moral agency.
Moral standards: students’ beliefs about the rightness or wrongness of bullying.
Children develop standards of moral conduct from observation, evaluative feedback and direct
tuition from various sources (peers, family...)
The standards provide the guidance (can value or devalue aggression/bullying).
Anticipatory self- sanctions provide the motivators (self- satisfactions and a sense of self – worth
versus self- censure).
Self – sanctions keep conduct in line with personal standards.
Self regulation operates through a series of psychological sub-functions that must be developed and
mobilized.
1. First of all, students need to monitor their moral conduct or their bullying conduct. They may
make judgements in relation to whether this conforms or not to their personal standards,
and they self- evaluate their conduct by either praising themselves for their behaviour or
censoring themselves.
2. The regulation of behaviour shifts from predominantly external sanction and mandates to a
stronger role for self- sanctions guided by personal standards:
- external regulation –> anticipation of sanctions from others for bullying behaviour
- self regulation -> anticipation of self sanctions for bullying behaviour
- moral disengagement-> disengagement of self sanctions from bullying behaviour
Moral disengagement is actually the selective activation and disengagement of internal controls that
permits different types of conduct, with the same moral standards. It can be disengaged from
detrimental conduct in 4 ways:
1) reconstruing the conduct: moral justification, euphemistic labelling, advantageous
comparison.
2) obscuring personal causal agency: displacement of responsibility, diffusion of responsibility
3) misrepresenting or disregarding the injurious consequences of one’s actions: distorting the
consequence of action.
4) vilifying the recipients of maltreatment by blaming (attribution of blame) and devaluing
them (dehumanization).
The moral disengagement practices have been associated with high levels of aggression and bullying.
So, the more the children use disengagement practices, the more likely they are to engage in
aggression and bullying behaviour. Recent research has shown that children who scored highly on
moral disengagement were more aggressive, say over an eight month period, than children with
lower moral disengagement scores, even after controlling children’s initial levels of aggression.
Moral disengagement is not only associated with traditional bullying and aggression, but it is also
associated with cyber bullying. Further studies have also confirmed that higher levels of moral
disengagement are associated with greater reported cyberbullying.
Intervention programs need to focus on more than teaching students that bullying is wrong, and to
feel remorse for such behaviour. Programs need to focus on reducing the use of moral justifications,
both at the collective and at the individual level that exonerate bullying.
And this is going to be no easy task, as moral justification enables students to turn bullying behaviour
into a virtuous activity. And if students believe that their behaviour is right then there is no reason to
change. Unless we focus on changing these justifications, it is going to become difficult to change
bullying behaviour. We need to find a way to change and reduce students’ use of moral justifications.
BULLYING AS A GROUP PHENOMENON
Adopting a social-ecological framework
Multilevel approach
Bullying results from a complex interaction of individual and environmental influences. Therefore, it
has to be studied through a multilevel approach, where the individual child is part of a social group,
for example the classroom, which is embedded in a school. In turn the school is surrounded by a
larger community, including the neighbourhood and the whole society.
This idea is consistent with the Ecological systems theory, originally proposed by Urie
Bronfenbrenner. He was born in Moscow in 1917, but during childhood his family moved to the
United States, where he worked for his entire life. In 1979, he published his most famous book titled
“The ecology of human development”. In that book he proposed the Ecological systems theory.
Bronfenbrenner described the process of human development as being shaped by the interaction
between an individual and his or her environment. More than 30 years ago, this theory was the key
in changing the perspective of developmental psychology by calling attention to the large number of
environmental and societal influences on child development.
Gain of applying Bronfenbrenner’s theory to the study of bullying (Dorothy Espelage, educational psychologis
The social-ecological framework gives an understanding of how we can understand bullying and
other adolescent risky behaviours, or in general how children are socialized. The framework includes
a number of structures. These kinds of structures are built, almost as they’re nested within one
another, to understand child development and child socialization, and indeed this framework has
been applied in the area of bullying. Structures:
● Micro structures: they include my own individual characteristics, the characteristics of my
family, the kids I hang out with, the types of schools that I go to and the community in which
my family resides. When we think about bullying in the structure of micro we know that kids
have certain individual characteristics that place them at risk for being engaged in bullying
towards others, as perpetrators or being the targets, or even being those kids that are both
victims and targets of bullying, and also perpetrating bullying themselves. We know that they
may have anger-control issues, they may come from families in which violence is modeled, or
they may come from families in which there’s just not a lot of training around pro social
behaviour or social emotional learning.
● Mesosystem: the interactions between those microsystems. So it could be that I engaged in
bullying at school (microsystem), because there is bullying among my siblings (family
microsystem). That means it includes the multiple interactions that occur between the
microsystem, to understand how kids engage in bullying or actually are targeted.
● Esosystem: is the outside of the individual child but influences children’s socialization. It does
not directly influence a youth engaging in bullying or being a target, but actually may do it
 indirectly. And that could be the implicit assumptions that teachers have about bullying: that
bullying is just a part of growing up, or that it’s not the teacher’s role to intervene in bullying.
● Macrosystem: it is the cultural blueprints and understanding what are the cultural
underpinnings that may predict bullying perpetration or victimization in our schools. There
aeìre a wide range of cultural practices, generally just how these would contribute to bullying
● Chronosystem: any kind of historical event that could happen in society, or some historical
change that’s happened to the child, that could be impacting bullying perpetration. And
indeed, as we’ve seen an increase in the awareness of bullying, really at an international
level, that would be one implication, is that the chronosystem here has been changed
because there’s been a recognition that bullying is not benign, that in fact it is a serious
public health issue that needs to be addressed.
But it is not just in the largest society that we see changes but in fact in the individual children: they
may experience divorce in the home, a loss of a parent, and that may impact their own microsystem
and may contribute to engaging in bullying behaviours. So, when we think about why it is that kids
bully, or why are kids targeted, it is really complex. But the social-ecological framework really gives us
some understanding, some framework to begin to understand why bullying is initiated, sustained and
the prevention programs need to match that social-ecological framework. We can no longer just look
at prevention as working with the individual child, but we’re got to work within all of those
structures, and all of those systems, that are so important to understand child socialization.
Beyond the bully-victim dyad
It is quite frequent to hear the media or people in general talking about bullying as if the bully-victim
interaction happened in a social vacuum. As if only the bully’s and the victim's characteristics matter.
But in the social environment there are also other people, students and teachers. In general terms
we can call them “bystanders”.
So there is a bully-victim-bystander triangle on the stage, this representation is also called the drama
triangle. It was proposed for the first time to describe the roles of characters in fairy tales where
often there is an aggressor, a victim and some bystanders. And their relations involve in some way
the use and misuse of power.
Subsequently, a similar representation with different names has been also applies to real tragedies,
such as genocide or civil war and so on. Similarly also in the bullying field the bully, the victim and the
bystanders can be seen as three characteristics in a tragic but real play performed daily.
The participant role approach
To understand bullying we have to go beyond the bully-victim dyad, and consider bullying as a group
phenomenon where also bystanders matter.
Participant role approach: systematic study on different participant roles children may play in the
bullying process was started by Christina Salmivalli and colleagues in 1996 in Finland. In their
research apart from bullies and victims the authors distinguish a further fourth behaviour student
can act during bullying episodes. Firstly, students can decide to support the bully. There two ≠ ways:
1. Some children and adolescents keenly join and actively participate in the bullying
behaviour that someone else started. For instance, they may physically restrain a
victim. These students are called “Assistants of the bully”.
2. Other students offer positive feedback to the bully, even if they do not actively attack
the victim. For instance, they come to see what is going on., incite the bully by
laughing, through encouraging gestures. Thus providing a cheering audience, these
are the ”Reinforcers”.
Altogether, Assistants and Reinforcers are called “bully’s followers”.
- Then there are the “Defenders”, these students take sides with the victims, try to comfort
them and to make the others stop bullying. They can do it directly facing the bullies or telling
an adult what’s going on.
- Finally, a remarkable number of students tend to stay away, they don’t take sides with
anyone and make their own business. They are called “Outsiders” or “Passive bystanders”.
 These students are not really uninvolved, instead, they may contribute indirectly to the
bullying situation. For example their silence might be interpreted as a silent approval of the bullying
behaviour by the bully and the other bystanders.
After the first Finnish studies several researchers from different countries have adopted the
participant role approach. Since then, studying bystanders behaviour in bullying has allowed
researchers to better understand this phenomenon.
Roles
Social roles are clusters of socially defined expectancies that individuals in a given situation are
expected to fulfil. So, roles arise in social interactions and are determined by both individual
dispositions and expectations of others. Individuals’ own behaviour naturally gives guidelines to what
others may expect of them in future interactions.
At the same time the needs and the expectancies of the other group members determine what kind
of role is possible for a certain group member.
Different people, different reactions
Pro-bullying roles: individual characteristics associated with these two roles are quite similar to those
of bullies. For example, a bully's followers usually show pro-bullying attitudes, they seem to lack
empathic understanding for the victims and are prone to use moral disengagement mechanisms.
But there are also students who decide to defend the victims: in recent years several researches
across the world have focused their attention to this, partly because of its importance for
anti-bullying interventions.
Defenders and passive bystanders both share some characteristics and differ on other dimensions.
Both defenders and passive bystanders are low in aggression, they usually do not meet aggression
with aggression and do not use it to achieve their goals, either. Both of them show average-to-good
theory of mind skills, in terms of their ability to understand other people’s feelings, intentions and
beliefs. Moreover, they do not differ in social information processing, so that they process social
information in every step without using aggression. They don’t tend to make hostile attributions and
rarely select antisocial goals such as retaliations. From the point of view of emotional competence
defending behaviour is associated with a high level of empathic responsiveness.
However, in a study directly comparing defending and passive bystanding behaviour, empathy as a
whole was found to be positively associated with both behaviours. This suggests that empathy may
be necessary but not enough to explain active intervention in favor of a bully peer.
In short, these results indicate that having good social-cognitive and emotional skills per se does not
necessarily mean that children will use these abilities to stand up for a victim.
Finally, similarities in the moral domain between the two roles have been reported. Some authors
argue that high moral sensibility can explain helping behaviour. However, defenders and passive
bystanders usually show comparable levels of both moral competence and moral disengagement.
Differences between defenders and passive bystanders are also documented. For example, defenders
usually report good levels of self-efficacy beliefs in the domain of interpersonal relationships and a personal
responsibility to intervene which are lower in students who don’t intervene.
Moreover, differences have been found regarding so-called “coping strategies” that are strategies
students use to deal with bullying. Problem solving and seeking for social support are positively
associated with active help toward a bullied peer and negatively related to passivity.
In contrast, distancing strategies that are behavioural, cognitive and emotional activities oriented
away from a stressor to avoid it are positively associated with passive bystanding.
Finally, asking students to pretend to be the bully in hypothetical bullying scenarios researchers
found that passive bystanders feel less guilty or ashamed compared to defenders. Regarding these
results some authors hypothesize that passive bystanders may nor experience what Hoffman called
“the moral conflict of innocent bystanders”, according to which the one who witnesses someone in
pain, danger or distress would experience the moral conflict of whether to help or not.
Concerning this last point, passive bystanders are unlikely to be a uniform group. To this respect
Obermann distinguished between the unconcerned bystanders, who witness bullied peers without
feeling responsible, and the guilty bystanders, who do nothing to help victims but feel guilty about it.
She found that unconcerned bystanders have significantly higher moral disengagement than both
guilty bystanders and defenders. This finding is intriguing but we need more studies to better
understand characteristics differentiating these two passive bystander roles. Such studies could cast
a new light on bystanders’ behaviour in bullying.
What we can learn from social psychology
In social psychology there is a classic model to explain bystanders’ behaviour during potentially risky
situations. It is known as the Latané and Darley’s five stage model:
To intervene and help a victim people must:
1. Notice that something has occurred
2. Interpret event as an emergency
3. Take responsibility for intervention and provide help
4. Know what to do to help
5. Decide to help ⇒ provide help
Helping responses can be inhibited at any stage of the process and subsequently no help is provided.
So each step influences the following ones. In a recent study they tested whether the Latanè and
Darley’s model could help to explain defending and passive bystanding behaviour in bullying
situations during late childhood and early adolescence. In particular they focused on the second,
third and fourth steps of the model. The three steps of interest:
1) Interpreting the event as an emergency was measured through attitudes toward bullying.
Social behaviour can be considered as a function of the individual’s perception of the
situation, which is strictly linked to attitudes toward that situation and toward people
involved. Student who perceive bullying as something funny and not serious at all and who
consider victims weak people who deserve to be bullied could be more indifferent when
bullying happens and less likely to think that it requires their intervention
2) Taking responsibility for providing help was measured through personal responsibility to
intervene. Another important factor for acting prosocially is assuming responsibility for the
welfare of others. Several experiments in social psychology demonstrated that when
individuals feel personal responsibility they are significantly more likely to help. This is a
crucial part of the model, because after bystanders have understood the emergency nature
of a situation they must decide whether to take personal responsibility and intervene. For
example, during an emergency bystanders can notice the event and interpret it as an emergency,
however each can believe that someone else would help and consequently doesn’t feel personal
responsibility for intervention. Helping the victim of bullying should be regarded as a complex
behaviour that includes not only the positive attitude toward the victim, but also a moral
assumption of personal responsibility to intervene.
3) Knowing how to help anticipate the actual behaviour and concerns the decision about “what
to do“. Bystanders have to determine the most appropriate strategies for reacting to bullying.
If people do not know what to do or prefer distancing themselves from such situations they
will not intervene despite their attitude or their sense of personal responsibility. To
investigate this step they analyzed participants’ coping strategies when they witness bullying,
distinguishing between approach strategies such as problem solving and seeking social
support and distancing coping strategies.
Results: students who consider bullying as something wrong and unacceptable are more likely to
think that they have the responsibility to do something. Both negative attitudes toward bullying and
the assumption of responsibility lead students to adopt coping strategies aimed at resolving the
situation, the so-called “approach coping strategies”. This sort of coping response is positively related
to defending behaviour and negatively related to passive bystanding behaviour. In contrast, this last
behaviour stems from the selection of distancing strategies that in turn are linked with positive
attitudes toward bullying and with a lack of personal responsibility for intervention.
Social networks
Bullying can be used to enhance the status in the peers group. So peers’ norms can affect individual
levels of bullying. Kids within social networks, in particular friendship networks, are often found to be
similar to each other in terms of social behaviour, including bullying behaviour. A way to explain such
similarity are selection and socialization processes among friends.
Selection: refers to the fact that kids tend to become friends of peers with whom they share some
common characteristics, like attitude and behaviour. Therefore kids who bully may choose as friends
other bullies.
Socialization: refers to the influence friends exert on the individual. Kids within a friendship network
tend to become more similar to each other over time.
Friendship groups of bullies typically include other peers participating in bullying and friends may
encourage each other’s bullying in school, which in turn facilitates becoming and remaining part of
such a friendship group.
Similarly, in friendship groups in which bullying is typically low, bullying may be perceived as more
negative and consequently individual bullying may decrease over time.
A few, mainly cross-sectional studies have found some support for selection processes with regard to
bullying behaviour. However, longitudinal studies on adolescent aggression suggest that similarity
between friends is more likely to be the result of peer influence.
In a recent study they employed longitudinal social network analysis to test these effects within
friendship networks. Briefly, they have found that peer influence was related to the development of
bullying among middle school students. Young adolescents in our sample became more similar to
friends in terms of bullying over a one-year period. Moreover, moral disengagement moderated peer
influence on bullying. Indeed, adolescents with higher levels of moral disengagement tended to
become more similar to friends in terms of bullying. It thus appears that mechanisms of moral
disengagement can exacerbate the effect of peer influence on changes in individual bullying.
In sum, there is some evidence that similarity between friends in bullying is mainly the result of peer
influence and, to a lesser extent, the result of selection. Therefore, bullying is a group process.
Kid’s perspective about bullying (Robert Thornberg)
Most of the research is qualitative and some of them are based on a mixed methods research design
and a few of them are quantitative studies. This topic has mainly been investigated by interviews,
focus groups, questionnaires and ethnographic fieldworks.
The deviant victim
Research has shown that common explanations among kinds about why bullying occurs is that the
victim is different, odd or deviant in some way. Victims are often perceived or constituted as
someone who doesn’t fit in. The deviance of both the students was seen as a reason for bullying and
according to a survey study conducted by Hoover and colleagues. Items of possible factors
motivating bullying: is that the victim didn’t fit in, in some ways, which all can be interpreted as
expressions of being different or deviant.
In a recent ethnographic study in which Thornberg investigated school classes with identified bullying
cases, he found that the core process of bullying was the social construction of the bullied kid as
different, odd or not like us with a negative meaning. Victim’s appearance, personality and behaviour
were repeatedly attacked and defined as deviant or odd or different in a negative way both in direct
verbal bullying and in more indirect forms of bullying. Another significant theme found in many
studies investigating children’s and adolescent’s representations of bullying causes is the struggle for
status, power and friendship. Those who bully want to manifest, maintain or boast their power,
status, popularity, according to many kids. Whereas both boys and girls often explain bullying as
motivated by a need for power and social status, girls also seem to attribute bullying as a result of a
desire to be included in the group and having close friendships. Terasahjo and Salmivalli related this
issue to what they called “girls talk”. They concluded that the most crucial meaning of bullying is
closely related to fear of losing important friends and acceptance.
The disturbed bully
Another bullying explanation among children and adolescents is attributing bullying as a result of the
disturbed bully. Bullying takes place because the bully is a person who has a low self confidence,
malicious personality, is mean, lacks empathy, is insecure or has family problems. Among the
explanations from the kids, the bully could be regarded as a child who is unhappy, who has a bad
temper, an angry personality or ADHD, poor self esteem, feels insecure... and some students connect
this kind of disturbed bully explanation with family problems.
Other reasons associated with this behaviour are:
- Having fun and avoiding boredom
- Peer pressure (if you don’t join in and start bullying too)
- Mindless bullying (a thoughtless happening: the bully doesn’t think at all about what they are
doing and why they are doing it = they don't realize that they are actually bullying the kid).
HOW OTHER CONTEXTS INFLUENCE BULLYING
The role of teachers
Teachers can observe bullying in their schools or classroom, and may respond to bullying behaviour
among their pupils. Considering the ecological systems theory, it should be clear that teachers are
important in the bullying dynamics, because they are, like students, active members of the classroom
microsystems. Moreover, being the adult within this system, they play a vital role in establishing the
climate for bullying in the classroom. Teachers may affect bullying in several ways.
● One key factor is teachers’ attitude toward bullying. There is considerable variability among
teachers in terms of their attitudes toward bullying. The majority of them have negative
attitudes toward bullying, they consider it a problem because it harms students’ well-being,
violates school rules and makes learning more difficult. But sometimes they may
underestimate the seriousness of this problem. For example, some of them fail to recognize
verbal and even more apparently relational bullying as “real” bullying. Conversely, teachers
frequently label any physical conflict as bullying and show less concern toward situations
with the potential for social and emotional harm. The subjective interpretation of bullying
incidents by teachers is likely to influence their perception of student’s bullying behaviour
and the likelihood that they intervene in favor of the victims. Empirical studies have found
teachers reporting lower prevalence rates of bullying as compared with students’ reports. A
majority of pupils believe that their teachers are unaware that students are being bullied.
● There are some faulty beliefs about bullying: if teachers accept them as true they may nor
perceive bullying as a serious problem and do not intervene more often in bullying
situations. Some teachers may also believe that the behaviour of some students caused
them to be victimized, because of such beliefs they underestimate the seriousness of
bullying and its consequences. Studies show that bullying is more likely in classrooms where
teachers hold such beliefs. Conversely teachers’ disapproval of bullying and explicit support
of anti- bullying behaviours decrease the risk of students being victimized.
In sum, how teachers perceive the incident impact upon their likelihood to intervene. Therefore, a
second issue we need to consider in the analysis of teachers’ role is the way they react to a bullying
episode. Teachers can use different strategies to deal with it: they can directly talk to students and make
the bully apologise, or they can refer students to a counselor or talk to victims’ parents. Moreover some
teachers respond to bullying in a constructive way: talking to the bully or protecting the victim. In
contrast, others prefer a punitive approach: punishing the bully or sending the bully to the principal.
We know from empirical studies that teachers’ inadequate responses to bullying impact on the
problem itself and its consequences. For example, when students perceive a lack of teachers intervention
or such intervention is only punitive this tends to reinforce the aggressive behaviour of the bully and increases
the sense of helplessness and isolation of the victim. No matter whether this was intentional or not on
the part of the teacher. Conversely, prompt and clear responses from teachers can stop bullying
effectively. Most bullying takes place in locations like hallways, playgrounds and restrooms where
adult supervision is minimal. Therefore, it is important for teachers to be more visible in these places
and to respond to all bullying incidents that they witness. A response by a teacher communicates to
bullies that their actions are not acceptable and it helps victims feel less powerless. Overall, the
frequent presence of adults in all areas of the school gives students a feeling of safety.
Teachers’ perceived self-efficacy in handling bullying is an important factor to be taken into
consideration with responding to bullying. Research reveals that some teachers don’t feel confident
in their ability to resolve bullying incidents and that this has an effect on their willingness and ability
to involve themselves in dealing with bullying. Almost all bullying prevention programs acknowledge
the importance of the involvement of school personnel.
Class influences
Several studies show that the context in which bullying takes place is likely to influence students’
perceptions, attitudes and behaviour. Indeed, processes of social influence can be particularly
pervasive; this is not surprising given that school classes represent one of the most salient social
contexts for children and adolescents. For example, in many countries students remain in a single
classroom with the same classmates for the full school day and sometimes for more than one year.
Classrooms, like other social groups, are characterized by social norms. These norms may implicitly or
explicitly confer varying levels of approval toward bullying and affect the behaviour of group
members, even when they do not reflect their private attitudes. Early adolescents’ behaviour in bullying
situations is more influenced by what their current peers in the immediate network tend to do in similar
situations than by their own previous behaviour.
Moreover, students’ expectations about the social consequences of pro and anti-bullying behaviours
contribute to explain behaviour during episodes in the classrooms. There are different types of norms
concerning bullying at school: individual beliefs about bullying and measures of individual students’
pro-bullying or pro-victim attitudes, students’ perception of what other classmates expect from them.
This is called “perceived normative peer pressure” to adopt a specific behaviour.
In a class as a whole it is likely to identify at least three types of norms:
1) Class attitudes: are conceptualized as the average pro-victim or pro-bullying attitude in a
class, regarding bullying.
- The majority of students consider bullying wrong, stupid or unacceptable.
- Most students believe that bullying is funny and acceptable. Probably this normative
climate can have an influence on single students’ behaviour, even when they don’t
personally agree with the most common attitudes in the classroom.
2) Injunctive norms: a type of behaviour that is considered appropriate and desirable by the
group. We have seen that each student has his or her beliefs about other people’s
expectations on behaviour during bullying episodes. Moreover, the student is a member of a
class in which each classmate has his or her perception of normative pressure.
Peer injunctive norms are the class perception of the behaviour that is considered desirable by the
whole group of classmates. It contributes to set the class normative climate surrounding bullying.
3) Descriptive norms: the extent to which various behaviours exist in a group. Thinking about
different participant roles in bullying in each class we can have a descriptive norm for
bullying, one for defending, one for passive by standing and so on. On the basis of this
definition classes can have different profiles: high bullying, low defending, high passive
bystanding. Or low bullying, high defending, low passive bystanding ecc. The influence of
descriptive norms on individual behaviour has been widely studied in social psychology.
Latané and Nida’s studies suggest that bystanders are less prone to intervene if people
around them do nothing. They call this phenomenon “audience inhibition effect”. Note well
that this passiveness can convey several meanings about the episode observed. For instance,
people may think that if no one intervenes, the event is not actually as serious as they thought it was
or even that the victim deserves what is happening to them.
Some results of a study on defending and passive bystanding behaviour in bullying in a sample of
primary and middle school students. Defending behaviour is more common among students who
have pro-victim attitudes and think that classmates expect they intervene. In contrast, both these
variables are negatively associated with passive bystanders behaviour. Regarding class norms the
results are really interesting. Overall findings confirmed that different class norms uniquely
contribute to explain variability among classes of defending and passive bystanding behaviour.
Pro-victim class attitudes are associated with high levels of defending behaviour and low levels of
passive bystanding behaviour in the class. Peer injunctive norms are negatively associated with
between-class variation in passive bystanding behaviour. Finally, regarding the role of the descriptive
norms the incident of the behaviour in the class positively predicts consistent conduct. Moreover, the
descriptive norm about defending behaviour negatively affects the average level of passive
bystanding behaviour in classes. In short, these results may be regarded as an example of how
individual variables and social cues present in the class context in the form perceived pressure for
intervention, class attitudes, injunctive and descriptive norms might help to explain bystanders’
behaviour in bullying.
Collective moral disengagement
Collective construct or variable: refers to the extent to which a belief, an attitude, a thought is shared
in a specific group. An example of collective construct is collective efficacy: the beliefs in a group’s
ability to achieve a collective outcome. It is not just the sum of each individual member’s sense of
efficacy. Students within a classroom may share the idea that they as a group are not able to contrast and stop bullying.
Moreover, collective efficacy does not require each member of the group to feel personally able to
intervene. Rather, it is a measure of a group property.
Two studies conducted in Australia in 2011 used school classes as the reference groups to analyze
collective efficacy beliefs. These studies showed that high levels of collective efficacy beliefs in the
ability of students and teachers to work together to stop peer aggression were associated with
higher frequency in defending behaviour over time. Low collective efficacy beliefs were instead
associated with more frequent aggression.
Another collective construct in relation to bullying is collective disengagement. Individual moral
disengagement is a series of self-serving cognitive distortions that can lead to aggressive behaviour.
In this social cognitive theory of moral agency, in addition to the construct of individual MD, Bandura
has defined the concept of collective MD as an emergent group-level property arising from the
interactive, coordinative and synergistic group dynamics. Collective MD operates through similar
processes to individual MD differing only in the unit of agency. That is, collective MD includes the
same mechanism as individual MD, but it refers to the beliefs in justifying negative actions that are to
some extent shared within a significant social group. The study of the role of collective MD in
bullying-related behaviour has considered the classroom as the relevant social group unit. So, what
has been analyzed in bullying literature can be better described as classroom collective MD.
Example of an hypothetical and unusual class composed of only 6 students: if I want to investigate
individual moral disengagement I can ask students how much they personally agree with questions
like: is it alright to fight to protect friends? Each student will give a different answer, on a 5 point scale
However, if I want to investigate collective moral disengagement I will not ask students about their
own agreement with disengagement justification, rather I shall ask them to report how many kids in
the classroom think that it is alright to fight to protect friends. Each student’s answer refers to
individual perception of the degree to which disengaged justifications are shared by members of their
class. That is, it measured students’ beliefs about the extent to which members of their group use
such mechanisms in everyday interactions.
For the sake of clarity the researchers refer to this concept as students perceived collective moral
disengagement. The aggregate of all students’ answers within a classroom represents our measure of
classroom collective moral disengagement. In a recent study they investigate whether individual and
collective MD, each contribute to the explanation of different levels of aggressive behaviour.
Moreover, the study aimed at investigating whether different levels of classroom collective MD were
associated with differences in the presence of this behaviour in the class.
Results: bullying is more likely when students are personally prone to use disengagement
justifications and at the same time believe that such justifications are common in their classroom.
Results showed that aggression and passive bystanding were more frequent in school classes
characterized by higher levels of collective MD. Conversely, defending was more frequent in the
classroom with lower levels of shared disengagement mechanisms.
School climate
School is a relevant social context for children and youth. It is not merely the place where students
learn. It is a complex social environment. There are several features of school that can influence
students’ behaviour. One of the most important is the school climate. Although there are many
different definitions of school climate, it is consistently described as the character and quality of the
school culture or the overall ethos of the environment. This culture is created through the values,
goals, norms, expectations, teaching practices, leadership and bureaucratic structure of a school.
As such, it is best conceived as a multidimensional construct, with psychosocial, organizational and
academic components.
The factors of bullying (Prof. Amanda Nickerson)
Bullying is affected by many factors: individual, family, culture, community and school climate.
School climate is the quality and character of school life that reflects norms, goals, values, learning
practices and organizational structures. Much of the focus on school climate has to do with
connectedness: bonding, being engaged in school, but also perceptions of safety, teaching and
learning and then more environmental, physical structural aspects of the school.
Much of the research on school climate has looked at its effect on academics, for instance, more
positive perceptions of school climate are related to improved graduation rates and better academic
achievement, as well as a sense of belonging for the students within the school. It predicts
internalizing and externalizing behaviour, that is, a more negative school climate is also related to
more depression, anxiety and acting-out behaviour. The researcher has investigated perceptions of
individuals who are involved in bullying and those who aren’t and perceptions of school climate:
students that defend in bullying situations, or try to stop it, have the highest perceptions of school
climate. Those that aren’t involved in bullying at all, also have more positive perceptions of school
climate. In some of our own studies they found that it’s the perpetrators of bullying that have the
perceptions of the most negative school environment. In terms of academics, their sense of belongin
and sense of fairness. Victims of bullying also have lower perceptions of school climate, in terms of it
being a safe place for them to be, and feeling connected. Those people that are more affected by
bullying, when victimization is more chronic, have the lowest perceptions of school climate.
It is important to acknowledge that although we need to intervene with people that are bullying, and
the targets of bullying, to try to change that behaviour and to provide the support necessary. We also
need to intervene at the school climate level, both in terms of the peers, the students in that setting,
as well as the teachers. Students observe almost all bullying incidents, but they are not likely to
intervene to try to stop it. There’s a norm in many schools, particularly in secondary schools, that
bullying is cool and that using power to put others down is a way to maintain social status. It is one of
the reasons why it’s so hard to try to change bullying. Bystanders should learn to talk to adults,
reporting it in the environment, reaching out to the person that has been bullied, to try to provide
support and decrease that sense of isolation. It’s both structure in the environment and support
from the adults in the environment that are important to decrease violence and bullying. Schools
need to have clear expectations for behaviour that are enforced consistently and fairly, but they also
need to provide the support to say, “we don’t want people to be mistreated in this way”. It can really
empower the students in that environment, who see it and know about it, to do something. Indeed,
the research has shown that acts of school violence that have been thwarted have shown that it’s
someone seeing something in the environment that is not okay, reporting it and letting people
investigate it and stop it. To sum up, school climate is a clear example of how environmental features
come into play in bullying. Establishing a healthy school climate is essential for a safe school plan to
prevent bullying and other disruptive behaviours and to foster positive youth development.
Parent-child relationship
Bullying is often regarded as a school problem and the role played by children’s families is frequently
neglected. There are three extremely important aspects of the family context:
1) Parental support: it includes several dimensions, such as providing advice or feedback,
emotional and material support to the child. In general, children who experience high
parental support are better socially adjusted and are able to cope with stressful events and
report higher levels of life satisfaction. In contrast, lack of parental social support is
associated with school failure, risky behaviours and lower levels of life satisfaction.
2) Family’s affective climate: affective climate within the family also influences child
development. Higher levels of positive emotion expression in the home are related to
children’s ability to manage emotions and to understand other people’s feelings, conversely,
parents’ depressed affect is associated with children’s emotional dysregulation and risk for
later academic, social and psychological problems.
3) Parenting styles: it refers to the normative patterns that parents use to socialize and control
their children. Following the classic model proposed by Baumrind we can describe different
parenting styles based on the combination of two dimensions: control and warmth.
Combining these two dimensions we can identify four parenting styles:
1. Authoritative parenting: high control and warmth. Parents communicate high expectations,
provide clear standards for behaviour and monitor child behaviour. At the same time
discipline is based on reasoning and explanation rather than power assertion or withdrawal
of love.
2. Authoritarian parenting: it is similar to authoritative parenting in terms of being demanding.
However authoritarian parents are more likely to use power assertive discipline techniques
and rely on love withdrawal to gain child obedience.
3. Permissive indulgent parenting: is typified by low levels of control and maturity demands,
but high levels of socialization and demonstrations of warmth.
4. Permissive uninvolved parenting: is described as being relatively low on both warmth and
control. At its extreme this style is considered to be rejection or neglectful of children.
Relations between all these family characteristics and involvement in bullying as bullies-victims and
bully-victims: children who usually perceive low levels of parental social support, particularly
emotional support. Parents of children who bully tend to use physical punishment as the primary
discipline strategy and to display an authoritarian parenting style. Regarding the affective climate in
the family it has been found the bullies often come from families where a lack of empathy is
displayed and where no effective model is provided for children to learn about dealing sensitively
with others. Regarding victims, one of the most consistent findings concerns enmeshment,
specifically with parents, characterised by emotionally intense positive interactions and
overprotection. It has been associated with increased risk for victimization, especially for boys and it
has been hypothesized that these emotionally intense parent-child relationships may encourage boys
to display passive or dependent behaviours which then place them at an increased risk for
victimization. Another interesting finding concerns victims’ perceived levels of parental social
support. In particular, it has been found that perceiving parents’ social support reduces victims’
probability of displaying symptoms of anxiety and depression. Bully-victims have more troubled
relationships with parents and report the lowest levels of parental support. Bully-victims indicate
that their parents are low in accurate monitoring and warmth yet high in overprotection and neglect.
This pattern suggests inconsistent discipline practices that are not mitigated by warmth.
It has been theorized that the lack of affection and low monitoring by parents may leave
bullies-victims feeling like they have to fend for themselves. This combined with repeated exposure
to violent and aggressive models of coping may lead children to approach social situations in an
ambivalent way, resulting in vacillation between aggression and victimization.
The role of siblings
Having a sibling is important for children’s social, cognitive and emotional development. A balance of
affect and conflict usually characterizes sibling relationships. Conflicts are almost inevitable in sibling
relationships. If conflict is mitigated enough by affect, the relationship can provide a positive context
for learning social abilities, such as meditation skills, respect for other people, empathy and
understanding of others’ perspective. Moreover, positive relationships among siblings promote social
adjustment and boost self-esteem. However, sibling relationships can also influence children’s
development negatively. This is especially true when high levels of conflict and low levels of affect
characterize the relationship. For example, high levels of physical aggression or hostility among
siblings are linked with behavioural and mental health problems, including anxiety, problematic peer
relationships and antisocial or delinquent behaviour.
To define if aggressive behaviour among siblings is bullying, it is useful to remember the three
characteristics of bullying: intentionality, repetition over time and imbalance of power. Bullying
among siblings can exist, but not all the conflicts between brothers and sisters are actual bullying.
There are similarities between school and sibling bullying: for example, sibling relationships similar to
peer relationships in the classroom are involuntary. This means that like children cannot choose their
classmates, they cannot choose their siblings they live with. Moreover, similar to classmates, siblings
spend a lot of time together often without adult supervision. An important difference is that quarrels
and fighting at home are so common that they are usually less explicitly disapproved of by adults
than they are at school. Indeed, aggression between siblings is one of the most commonly occurring
forms of aggression within families, but it is also viewed as harmless or as a normal part of family life.
Connections between sibling and school bullying
A review written in 2012 by Wolke and Skew found that sibling bullying is quite common. Up to 50%
of 10 to 15 years old, are involved in bullying every month, and between 16% and 20% are involved
in bullying several times a week. Moreover, being both a perpetrator and a victim, that is a
bully/victim, appears to be the most frequent role taken in sibling bullying involvement. This is in
contrast to peer bullying, where the most frequent role is either victim or bully. In addition, sibling
bullying remains relatively stable over time, at least between 10 and 15 years of age. Experience of
bullying between siblings transfers to peer relationships and bullying involvement in school. In other
words, it is likely that children who are bullies or victims at home maintain their roles at school.
Finally, if a young adolescent is involved in bullying at home, in particular as a bully/victim, and is also
bullied at school the risk for emotional and behavioural problems are exponentially increased
compared to an adolescent involved in bullying in one context only.
The role of culture
Bullying is a problem that transcends culture. The individual characteristics and group dynamics that
underlies social values may vary across cultures and countries. However, the abuse of power to
control or distress another person is regularly observed. Studies show that the prevalence of bullying
varies across countries and cultures, but involvement in bullying is consistently present. Also the
negative consequences associated with frequent victimization are comparable across countries.
Where culture may play a role is: in shaping particular types of bullying. Imagine a collectivist culture
where group membership is highly valued and great emphasis is placed on integrating people in
cohesive groups. Likely, bullying behaviour would be more group-based than in individualistic
cultures. Moreover, in a collectivistic cultural context, peer influences on individual bullying
behaviour would be particularly strong.
A clear example of a culturally specific phenomenon is so-called “Ijime” in Japan.
Ijime is one of the severe problems in Japanese schools.
Ijime: is a type of aggressive behaviour by someone who holds a dominant position in a
group-interaction process, by intentional or collective acts, causes mental and/or physical suffering
to another inside a group. [Morita e Kiyonaga, 1987]
Difference between bullying and ijime
ijime in Japan is assumed to happen more often among friends, with more pupils involved who are
in the same grade. Bullying in England is assumed to happen more often with fewer pupils involved,
who are in a higher grade and are not friends of the victims. Ijime and bullying should be local names
for repetitive aggression in a relationship among peers. The core of bullying and of ijime as repetitive
aggression in a relationship.
● “In a relationship” implies the nature of the relationship problem.
● “Repetitive” indicates a high frequency of showing aggression in a certain period of time.
The three steps of ijime [Nakai]:
1. Isolation: it begins with targeting to let others know who is marked out to be attacked,
followed by spreading propaganda to justify the victimization.
2. Helplessness: the victim learns it through violence from which they are not protected.
Punishment for turning to adults and punishment for psychological resistance. Due to this
process the victim comes to look as if they are obeying voluntarily. The completion of this
process makes the victim surrender simply by being threatened.
3. Invisibility: the victim gradually loses pride and dignity, and with the conspiracy of the
onlookers, ijime then cannot be recognized. The perpetrators control the victim
psychologically. Eg: depriving them of the right to speak out against ijime by forcing them to join in
with ijime toward other pupils. The weakened victim cannot escape from the relationship with
the perpetrators.
Results from cross-national research: as for the Austrian result, we can see that if the victimization is
not frequent, we can see most of the perpetrators are one or two, but if it’s frequent half of them are
grouped. And then, this tendency is much more salient in Japanese samples: when ijime is frequent,
80% of perpetrators are grouped. From such results, we can say that if the process is in the
beginning, it should be called aggression and there are many victims, but, if repeated then it can be
called bullying. And, if it comes to be more serious, very few victims are there and it can be a crime.
So we need prevention before bullying is happening and intervention before it comes to be a crime.
The most problematic situation is when many bullies are coming to fewer victims. Such situations can
be shown with a number: bully-victim ratio = How many bullies are coming to one victim.
𝐵 (𝑛𝑢𝑚𝑏𝑒𝑟 𝑜𝑓 𝑏𝑢𝑙𝑙𝑖𝑒𝑠)
𝑉 (𝑛𝑢𝑚𝑏𝑒𝑟 𝑜𝑓 𝑣𝑖𝑐𝑡𝑖𝑚𝑠)
The bigger the number is, the worse the victim suffers.
PREVENTING AND TACKLING BULLYING
Why is bullying difficult to change?
Some programs against bullying have reduced the phenomenon, but overall, we do not sustain these
effects over time. When we think about bullying prevention programming, we need to really think
about whether our prevention programs map onto what we know about the etiology of bullying. If
we know that bullying is best understood from a socio-ecological framework, then our prevention
programs should address both individual propensity towards bullying or being a target, it should
address family, peer influences that are so critical during middle school that maintains bullying. We
should understand how communities should partner together, and how policy should impact
bullying. If we take a socio-ecological framework to bullying, we see that most of the prevention
programs really focus on individual children and then some programs are emerging are focusing on
modifying the school climate. But very few programs address those family characteristics that may be
contributing to this, and the societal kind of policy issues as a whole. So, bullying is a complex
phenomenon, embedded in a large number of social structures.
Miss Ersilia Menesini: Bullying is difficult to change because of several reasons.
1) It is related to the impact and the diffusion of this problem. Several surveys on the
phenomenon tell that it is quite frequent, and often involves around 20 to 30% of students,
the fact that it is so common also makes people treat it as unavoidable or fairly innocuous
during childhood.
2) It can be related to the complexity of the problem. Bullying is often influenced by several
factors, personal characteristics of the children, and contextual factors such as group norms,
beliefs and attitudes are highly relevant. How the group reacts to bullying can be important.
The behavior of possible bystanders, how much they can be involved in bullying, or in
defending the victim. All these aspects are relevant to predict if this problem will remain
stable or worsen during a certain period.
 3) Is connected to how bullying can progressively change moral values, attitudes and feelings
over the participant. If bullying is highly frequent, it can become normative and participants
may find many reasons to justify their negative behavior.
4) A fourth reason is connected to the frequent attitude of minimizing the problem and not
intervening. On one hand, adults think that bullying is just part of growing up, and the way of
young people to learn to stick up for themselves. On the other side bullying can take many
forms, some of which can be hidden. So, adults and peers often don’t recognize the
seriousness of the problem, and tend not to intervene firmly.
Through interventions, the problem can be changed. This has been demonstrated in several studies
that showed that intervention reduces both bullying and victimization consistently. From the meta
analysis of Ttofi and Farrington, and from the experience in Italy, systematic intervention can reduce
bullying and victimization by about 20 to 30 percent. There is a similar figure in the trial using
NonCadiamolnTrappola and the higher degrees of almost 50 percent in the trial of KiVa in Tuscany.
The most important ingredient of the change is the whole school involvement, duration of the
project, and degree of involvement of school components (teachers, students and school staff). The
involvement of students and the possibility to change the group dynamics is particularly relevant. In
fact, they often state that peer bystanders are part of the bullying problem, but when they intervene,
they can be part of the solution.It takes time and effort, but bullying can be stopped, if there is an
investment and commitment of the community.
Prof. Frey: there are two main factors:
➔ The role of retaliation in maintaining bullying.
➔ The role of rewards in sustaining people’s involvement in bullying and retaliation, particularly
self-rewarding cycles.
One reward that many kids aspire to is to escape bullying. Unfortunately, one route is to become a
bully yourself. According to their observations on the school playground the kids who bully directly
face to face experience reductions in victimization over the school year. Of course, for the other kids,
it makes their situation worse. Those who retaliate impulsively see increases in victimization over the
school year. This often leads to escalation cycles in which the episodes become more intense as the
bully and the victim each react to the prior offense of the other. Those are very unfortunate events
and it has bad impacts on the kids and it spreads aggressions throughout the playground. Taking
revenge on behalf of a friend is common behavior both on the playground, it is also common in the
street violence and battlefield. Violent retaliation is one way in which young people try to deal with
their feelings of injustice on behalf of their friends, or their grief at how their friends have been hurt.
Culture and peers have a big influence on whether victims will retaliate, whether they’re reconciled
with people around them, and whether they’ll be protected from future attacks.
The study of Prof. Frey shows that kids usually feel guilty when they have done it. They tell her that
they often have selfish motivations, maybe they dislike the adversary and they are hoping that their
friends will make them suffer because they put their friends at risk. The sense of guilt is connected
with a negative impact on their self-identity. Identity processes are very important for understanding
and reducing bullying. There are also positive impacts on self-identity, positive peer influences that
discourage retaliation. Some schools have social rituals that help victims to regulate their emotions
after they have been attacked. Ex: a friend who sneers to the victim's friend that the bully is not worth
revenge. This is really positive, it provides a face-saving way for the victim to avoid retaliation. It stops
the impulsivity and it provides an outlet for the person. If we want peace norms to take effect, we
have to start with these gestures. When the friend says that the bully is not worth revenge, the
friend is reducing the humiliation that the victim has felt. And they’re also restoring a sense of status
to the person. It is clear that the victims really appreciate the intervention of the friend, they feel like
their friends are taking care of them. They also feel a sense of obligation to return the favor. This also
has very powerful positive effects on the friend. The friend has made a very public display of being a
good, loyal and caring friend, they feel a sense of purpose so this has very positive effects on
self-identity. And, because of the self-rewarding nature of this behavior, there is the possibility that
again, a positive beneficial cycle of behavior will be instituted where they’ll be motivated to repeat
this kind of positive behavior. So, it is really important to help the development of self-identities of
the kids that they really want to develop. Adults need to acknowledge and honor their generous and
loyal impulses when they help their friends avoid retaliation. It also means providing them with skills
that will enable them to be successful in their efforts. This has the potential to reduce bullying.

Evidence-based interventions
It refers to treatments that have been proven to positively change the problem being targeted. As
such, evidence based interventions are likely to be effective in changing target behavior if it is
implemented with integrity. In general, the intervention has been effective at achieving outcomes
through some form of evaluation. There are five key features of a good model program:
1. The intervention is explicitly based upon a theoretical model that explains why the
intervention works and sets specific goals.
2. It is oriented toward the social system in which children live, not only to individual variables.
3. The intervention requires the collaboration of different professionals.
4. It provides detailed information about time, evaluation and outcomes of the program.
5. It can be replicated or adapted to other contexts, because it provides information about the
main components of the program and the mechanisms of its success.
Regarding specifically bullying, a number of meta-analyses have looked at the impact of anti bullying
programs. While there are some mixed findings, the majority of reviews concludes that programs
have a positive impact in reducing bullying and victimization. Ttofi and Farrington conducted a
systematic review to assess what elements of anti bullying programs were associated with decreases
in bullying. They found that the most important element included parent training, improved
playground supervision, school conferences, disciplinary methods, classroom rules and classroom
management. Evidence-based interventions are validated for a specific purpose in a population. As
such, they are only useful for a range of problems and must be paired up with the right situation.
Implementing evidence-based programs in real world settings (Dr. Masiello)
This program is about an 18 month program introduced to individuals who were trained for this
particular program and then worked with the staff and students over a period of time. Key point:
there is a need to have individuals trained in the program that have a continued relationship with the
program. It was also evaluated the program further, with a post survey. The researchers had a survey
going in and a survey going out, and they were able to then give a clear impression of what they
were able to do with high fidelity, success or not. It was a success.
Once identified the evidence-based program and realizing it works, then it’s encumberment upon
the team, who have the responsibility of implementing the program with the highest level of fidelity.
So schools need to be ready for this because it is a program with funding and trained specialists to go
into the schools to work with them on bullying. With that initiative and that experience came
recognition. They were able to be identified at the national level for what they were doing.
The Highmark foundation was very much dedicated to the mission of developing programs in inner
cities and rural areas in Pennsylvania, that will improve the health and well-being of children and
families. This foundation recognized what they were doing, giving them the opportunity to expand
their program in the region. This helped to implement an evidence-based bullying prevention
program to 200,000 children, involving 400 schools and many teachers and parents. They had the
opportunity, with significant funding, to more clearly direct or identify what a public health approach
is to bullying prevention. It is really important to identify the issues related to the community, and
have the community buy into the issue, realizing that the health professionals, the public health
researchers, would then identify an evidence-based program for that community.
Bullying of course was and is a real problem, so there was no doubt that these schools were ready to
seek help and support, and become part of a team that would address the issue of bullying.
They made every attempt to make sure the schools were ready for this. They went into the program
making sure that they were going to present the program with the highest level of fidelity, and in
another very important public health approach to an issue, they evaluated the children pre and post.
They did it over a period, and worked very closely, not only with the schools, but with Prof. Olweus
and Prof. Limber. What they identified as a public health approach to bullying prevention, and they
found that the issue was for the community.
Therefore, they implemented the evidence based programs with highest level of fidelity, realizing
that they were going to have funding for a significant period of time, to make sure they were going to
be successful not only with the implementation of the program, but in their ability to evaluate pre
and post program, as well as train even further and a large number of individuals and trainers to go
out and get into the schools. They also worked with different universities, in developing education
sessions to support the Olweus bullying prevention program, and the educational sessions and this
group effort. It was designed for the school administrators, teachers and parents. They evaluated the
program and its impacts and what people did to support that program: they evaluated the outcomes
and also the cost-benefit of a bullying prevention program. Because of the large population they
were serving they were able to extrapolate what they know about the cost of health issues in
general, and related it to the issue of bullying commenting about the cost of bullying as it relates to
academic failure, to society and crime later in life, when the child is exposed to bullying and their
success using their evidence-based intervention program.
Working with the community
Possible anti-bullying strategies by focusing on the community in which children live.
Community-based participatory research as a strategy to prevent bullying.
This is a partnership approach to research, involving a collaboration between community members,
organizational representatives and researchers, in all the aspects of the research process.
In this approach the partners integrate their competencies to increase the understanding of a
problem. They work together to identify the risk factors associated with the problem, and use the
gained knowledge as a basis for intervention. Community-based participatory research might be an
effective strategy for bullying prevention. Youth may understand the problems better than adults,
and identify more creative solutions. Moreover, intervention designed and implemented by youth
increases the appeal and the acceptance of the intervention for the other youth. Despite these
benefits, including children as community-based participatory research partners is rare.
In a study (2005), Gibson and colleagues evaluated the effects of a community-based participatory
research project for bullying prevention implemented in three schools. In this project students
collected data about bullying in the schools and implemented activities based on the findings
obtained in the research: each school identified the lack of awareness about bullying as a priority,
and decided to focus on raising awareness about bullying within their schools.
The evaluation of this project showed that one school experienced a decrease in fear of bullying. Two
schools saw an increase in perceived peer intervention to fight bullying, and two schools saw an
increase in perceived school staff intervention to stop bullying.
Findings from the evaluation of this project show that youth effectively conducted and analyzed data
on bullying at their schools, and also developed effective interventions. Considering these results,
the use of community-based participatory research should be considered as a strategy to prevent
bullying. All parts contribute expertise and share decision making and ownership.
This not only improves the understanding of bullying, but also has the potential of producing changes
in policy and improving the health and quality of life of community members.
Working at the school level
Whole School Approach: the preferred model of anti-bullying intervention.
This model aims to involve the school community as a whole and all its components in preventing
and managing bullying. Interventions at the school level are based on 2 assumptions:
● The whole school is responsible for students’ wellbeing.
● Bullying is a complex problem that needs broad spectrum educational strategies.
The starting point is defining an anti-bullying school policy that represents the framework for all the
subsequent interventions. Main steps for developing an effective school policy:
 1. Defining bullying: all school components, including students, need to share knowledge of
what bullying is, its characteristics, forms, consequences and the different participants roles
students may play.
2. Referring to existing models: this doesn’t mean copy and paste from other policies. The rule
is: if something works elsewhere and try to adapt it to a specific context.
3. Reporting guidelines: the ways in which specific episodes of bullying can be reported by
students, parents, school staff should be well-defined.
4. Providing help to the victim: protection and support for the victim should be a priority.
It is important to consider how listening and help will be provided to the victim. This is needed not
only to ensure the victim’s physical safety, but also for the psychological wellbeing. To this end,
referring to professional resources, such as psychologists, should be considered.
Beside school policy, there are other interventions at the school level aimed at modifying school
climate and that are associated with a decrease in bullying episodes. Some examples: school
conferences, improvement of monitoring practices of student’s activities and specific training
dedicated to teachers and school personnel. The involvement and the motivation of the school staff
is always part of a successful intervention. Concerning teacher training, it differs from one-shot
conferences because its form is more similar to group works based on cooperative learning.
Some critical aspects usually included in training are:
- Learning to recognize bullying and its different forms, and how to deal with it.
- Increasing teachers’ pro-victim attitude and sense of responsibility for intervention.
- Expanding teachers’ knowledge about prevention strategies and students’ wellbeing
promotion.
- Learning classroom management techniques and effective communication strategies
By means of such training, part of the school staff become in some way expert in bullying and able to
implement intervention activities in the first person. Moreover, over time, they can train other
colleagues, according to a “training the trainers” approach. Another way to improve school climate
concerns school discipline. There are two models:
1) It is based on a punitive climate and it is characterized by high levels of control and low levels
of support for school members. This is a rather common model, but this kind of school
climate doesn’t represent a fertile ground for a successful anti-bullying intervention. Indeed,
“zero tolerance” policies, which entail pre-determined punitive consequences for negative
behavior, school suspension or expulsion, are not effective in changing individual behavior
nor in maintaining discipline nor in improving school climate and students’ sense of safety.
2) A more effective alternative is the so-called restorative justice. It is based on cooperation and
responsibility values. Transgressions are offered the opportunity to take responsibility for
their negative behavior and to propose possible solutions. The focus is not only on single
individual students, but it also takes into account the social context in which misbehaviors
take place and the emotions of all the students involved.
Working with the classroom
When teachers are informed about anti-bullying interventions, their first reaction can sometimes be
to ignore that curricular activities they perform daily can be really useful to overcome organizational
difficulties and tackle issues associated with bullying. Indeed, through curriculum work on bullying
teachers can achieve two very important objectives:
1. They can raise awareness among students about bullying behavior.
2. They can challenge attitudes toward bullying, increase understanding for victims and help
build an anti-bullying ethos in the classroom.
Even if the curriculum work is unlikely to achieve long-term changes on its own, it can play a key role
in bullying prevention. This approach has the benefit of ensuring that the issue of bullying is
introduced progressively in an age, gender and culturally appropriate way. Moreover, bullying
prevention became part of everyday classroom life instead of being treated in a “one-off” lesson.
Curriculum-based work on bullying: is a matter of including bullying related content in school
subjects. In some cases, it will be quite easy to introduce the issue of bullying in the classroom, for
example by proposing the reading of a text or watching a movie in which there are episodes of abuse
involving some characters. These materials can be used as stimuli, on which students can work as in
a standard lesson. For example, teachers can ask them to perform logical or grammatical analysis on the text,
or write a composition inspired by the movie presented. At the same time it’s important to spend some
time discussing and reflecting on the specific topic of bullying. This can be done through role-plating
or group works focused on bullying motivations, consequences, solutions and on the role of the
group. In this kind of activity, it is important that students be stimulated to transfer what they have
learnt to their real life.
For some school subjects the possibility to talk about bullying could be less apparent. However it is
always possible to find curricular concepts that can be relevant to understand the phenomenon such
as: power, oppression, violence, prejudice or inequality on the negative side; value of diversity,
conflict resolution, mutual help or effective communication on the positive side. These are more
general issues compared to bullying that can easily be discussed in history, geography…
So, all the subjects lend themselves in a more or less direct way, to this type of work. Consider the
opportunity to use the choir as a metaphor of positive group relationships during a music lesson. Or
to analyze the answer of a questionnaire on bullying during a math lesson. Or again think of the great
number of activities (such as games of knowledge, confidence games, cooperative games and so on)
that can be played during the physical education hours. These are just a few of the main examples
teachers can think of for their own subject and the age of their students.
The usefulness of these activities is only partly related to the specific material teachers use. Indeed,
the ways in which activities are presented, managed and supervised take on great importance and
should be based on principles such as cooperation, empathy and personal responsibility. Therefore,
successful bullying prevention through curriculum is both based on suitable learning content and
appropriate teaching methodologies. Moreover, curricular activities can have a better impact on
students if more than a single teacher is involved and the work continues during the academic year.
Two other areas useful in the work within the classroom are:
➔ Emotional education: the concept of emotional literacy refers to the ability to educate
individuals’ emotional competence by learning emotional language and expression. Being
emotionally competent includes different skills such as the ability to properly recognize and
name emotions and express and control them in a proper way. The highest level of emotional
development should be empathy, which is a key factor in preventing aggressive behavior and
promoting helping and supporting behavior, as you may recall from previous lectures.
➔ Moral education: concerning the relation between bullying and distortions in moral cognition,
a path in the classroom focused on these moral dimensions can be very fruitful. In these cases
the help of external figures (psychologists and educators) is a resource to consider.
Peer support programs
A peer supportive intervention project can be useful both for individual students and for the whole
school. Indeed, it allows victims to identify someone to turn to and to perceive that the school is
taking steps to help them. Moreover, victims feel more understood, protected and more motivated
to cope with the situation. On the other hand, peer helpers, who are students trained to support and
help victims, acquire important socio-emotional skills, a sense of self-efficacy, develop a greater
sense of responsibility and are gratified by doing something in person for the improvement of school
climate. Finally, there are also positive consequences for the school as a whole that will be perceived
over time as a more and more secure environment that takes care of its members. Such changes may
even lead to an improved reputation among parents and the local community. Some approaches are:
1. Befriending approach: its main goal is to change class values by promoting respect,
cooperation and mutual help. For example, peer helpers can support new students by involving
them in games and social activities or can provide listening and support to classmates who are bullied
or isolated. To fulfil the role of peer helpers, students typically participate in a training session
during which, concrete strategies and best practices for helping, listening, empathic
 communicating and problem solving are discussed. After that, students begin their activity as
peer helpers in their school under the supervision of a teacher who coordinates the project.
The adult supervisor has several tasks, including aiding peer helpers think about their actions
and helping them to face difficult situations. At the same time, they monitor that peers'
helpers don’t take charge of serious problems beyond their actual role, such as the family
problem of a classmate. Moreover, the supervisor has to check that peer helpers do not
abuse of their relative power over schoolmates to reach personal goals. Peers helpers are in
office for 2/3 months and after this period new peers helpers are elected. So that all
students have the opportunity to participate in the training and play the role of peer helpers
once.
2. Peer counselling: is a more structured form. Indeed, it can include group listening activities,
the activation of a help phone line or the creation of a physical or virtual space to receive
help requests. The counselors are students who have attended a training about listening
skills, effective communication, empathy, problem solving and so on. During the project, the
peer counsellor are supervised by an expert adult, as a psychologist or a teacher trained for
that purpose. This type of intervention should be regarded as additional to the support given
by adults in school, not as a replacement of it.
3. Peer mediation: in this case the goal is to reach a situation of mutual agreement after a
conflict, in which both parties are satisfied. Similarly to the previous cases, students who
perform the role of peer mediators attend a training course, focused on how to conduct a
mediation interview and on conflict management strategies. While this kind of intervention
appears to be effective to reduce school violence, its effectiveness in bullying dynamics is
more controversial. Indeed, conflict mediation is useful when there is an equal relationship
between two people. However, bullying is not a real conflict between two people, but rather
a situation in which one party, the bully, intentionally exerts his or her power over the victim.
In addition, peer mediation can work when the two parties are both motivated to solve their
conflict through mediation. In bullying, however, the bully is often reluctant to accept the
mediation. So, using the peer mediation approach may be dangerous or little effective.
Noncadiamointrappola (Prof. Menesini)
Noncadiamointrappola is a model of intervention they developed in secondary schools (Tuscany).
This is a school-based universal intervention that was launched in 2008 with the aim of preventing
and combating both traditional bullying and cyber-bullying.
This program was progressively revised on the basis of the implementation and evaluation of the
different additions. It is based on a theoretical model which tries to combine recent findings on the
problem. The starting point was a double consideration of the virtual world. On one hand ICT use can
increase the risk of cyber-bullying. Nevertheless, the same technology may also be used to enhance
positive behaviour and to protect students from the same risk they face online. These are complex
behaviours, influenced by the interplay between individual and social contextual factors.
The group dynamic shows that the bystanders have the potential to influence the situation in
different ways. They can reinforce the bully by joining in or passively accepting the situation. Or
conversely, they can distance themselves from the bullies and defend the victim. Literature on victim
support and on bystanders’ role, has underlined the values of involving the group and specifically,
the silent majority, in order to change the dynamics and to stop negative behaviours. Consequently,
an approach focused on peer involvement appears to be promising and suitable for use in anti
bullying and anti cyber-bullying programs.
Peer education and peer support models are based on the assumption that peers have significant
influence on each other. The group norms and behaviours are most likely to change when liked and
trusted group members take the lead to initiate individual and contextual changes.
★ Empathy and attitudes against bullying predict bystanders interventions and
problem-solving coping strategies.
 ★ Perceived normative peer pressure for bystanders is also positively associated with
helping a victim.
★ Having positive attitudes towards the victim leads students to feel greater personal
responsibility for intervention; and both positive attitudes and feelings of
responsibility are positively associated with student’s choice to defend the victims
and to intervene.
They designed an intervention working online and off-line with the sequences of two main phases:
1) The first one is managed by adults, psychology experts.
2) The second one is led by peer educators, a group of students that assume a role of
responsibility both in their classroom and online after a specific training.
- In detail, peer educators online, announce awareness, provide support, in the virtual context
and animate the forum in the virtual context of discussion.
- Face to face peer educators generally work in the class using a cooperative group approach,
focusing on empathy, problem solving and targeting the point of view of the victim and the
bystanders, in order to address the processes that can lead to change in these two roles.
With Prof. Palladino: they attempted both to be responsive to the call for high quality evaluation with
theoretically grounded intervention, and to match as near as possible the standards of evidence
defined by the prevention science. While testing the program, two rigorous trials that involved
students attending the first year of high school in different areas of Tuscany.
1. In the first trial, the sample consisted of 622 students, of which one 171 came from control
school. It means a school that did not implement any kind of intervention.
➔ Results: positive effects on the target variables.
While the phenomena were quite stable in the control group, the experimental group showed a
significant decrease over time in all negative outcome variables victimization, bullying,
cyber-victimization and cyber-bullying. Besides, internalizing symptoms also significantly decreased
as an indirect effect of the program to the decrease of the cyber-victimization.
The program was efficacious and the outcome remained quite stable over time. After six month at
the follow-up, we found significant long-term effects.
➔ They also found secondary effects of the program. The students in the experimental
group were more likely to pass the grade and to be promoted to the following class
of next school year.
2. The efficacy of the program on all the target variables was confirmed also in a second
independent trial with 461 students.
Gender did not have interactive effects with the program, and both males and females of the
experimental group reported a similar decrease of prominence over time of bullying and cyber
bullying. These findings support a model of bullying as a group phenomenon both online and off-line.
- In fact, trying to change individual cognition, coping strategies and values simultaneously
addressing the whole group, appears particularly promising.
The program has also a more general ecological approach addressing individual, classes, school and
community levels.
★ The individual level was targeted with a peer education approach.
★ The class level, through peer educators’ intervention in the classroom.
★ The school level, through a short training for teachers.
★ At the community level, it was targeted through web based activities for peer educators and
other virtual participants.
As an overall result, the intervention succeeded in creating a context that promotes an ethics of
responsibility and enables students, teachers and other participants to stand against bullying and to
support and defend the victim.
Working with families
The family environment is the first place where it is possible to prevent children’s aggressive
behaviour. Parent’s involvement should include some crucial aspects:
 ★ Informing about the phenomenon: parents need to know what bullying is, its characteristics,
forms and consequences, participants' roles and what the role of family is. Information on
bullying can be gotten across to parents in different ways: using informative flyers or talking
about bullying in the school newspaper. These two strategies, albeit efficacious in reaching all
families, have the disadvantage of being extremely impersonal and presume that parents are
able or motivated to deepen the issue and its practical implications by themselves. An
alternative can be involving students in a theatrical performance about bullying and inviting
parents to assist as audience or during its preparation. One of the most common strategies
to inform parents about bullying is organizing conferences or meetings. In this case it’s
important that parents are not relegated to the role of passive listeners, but are instead
actively involved, turning to lectures in experimental laboratories. To this end, the group
should not be too large, so that each participant has the opportunity to ask questions,
discuss and express doubts, practice the learned strategies and so on.
★ Encouraging parent’s active participation in anti-bullying actions: even if parents usually
show supportive attitudes toward bullied children and condemn bullying, these attitudes do
not always translate into appropriate behaviour in the relationship with their children. For
this reason, interventions should provide parents with concrete and doable educational
strategies. These strategies can be focused on aspects that are useful beyond the specific
phenomenon of bullying, such as education practices or how to establish a trust relationship
with children. Contents that should be stressed include: how to communicate effectively with
children and the importance of active listening, how parents can become positive models for their
children and the importance of being consistent as parents (punishments and rewards). Moreover,
talking more specifically about bullying, intervention should discuss with parents what they
can do if their child is either a bully or a victim or a bystander.
★ School-family synergy: parents need to take into account promoting a cooperative
relationship between school and family. A key component for reducing bullying is
represented by the promptness and clarity of information exchanges between these two
contexts. Moreover, it is very important to break the vicious cycle where family blames
school and school blames family for children’s negative behaviour. They should work
together for children’s and adolescents’ wellbeing and be consistent concerning behaviour
that is considered desirable or that cannot be accepted. Establishing a collaborative and
trustful climate between school and family has at least two positive consequences:
- It facilitates parents’ acknowledgement of bullying as a real problem and of school as
a partner in their children’s education.
- It promotes the idea that parents’ involvement in school dynamics can really make a
difference in children’s life.
★ Support to family units who are particularly in trouble: this means that parent training or
psychological therapy could be useful. There is a wide variety of interventions that can be
offered within school anti-bullying intervention or by external experts.
Working with individual students
Frequently both bullies and victims need targeted support to learn non aggressive behavioural
strategies and to acquire skills to manage conflicts and to interact with peers.
Disciplinary policy: is a zero tolerance policy aimed at identifying and punishing the bully are not
really effective in changing individual behaviour. Restorative justice is more effective, where
emphasis is placed on personal responsibility, harm reparation and rebuilding of the relationship.
At the international level, a growing number of schools are adopting this kind of intervention
strategies. Key points:
1. Sharing the different points of view about what has happened.
2. Sharing opinions, emotions that each student has experienced during bullying episodes.
3. Identifying the victims as those who have suffered harm or injustice and who are
experiencing a negative emotional state.
 4. Identifying the needs of all the students involved.
5. Negotiation on how to meet the needs of people involved, clearly defining the agreement
between them and planning a follow up to assess the success of the intervention.
Removing the threat of punishment and the attribution of blame on the bully, paves the way for an
exchange of views that increases emotional awareness and requires understanding other people’s
feelings. Among interventions focused on single individual students, those that are specifically
devoted to victims of bullying are particularly important given the several negative consequences
associated with this condition. For instance, improving self-esteem, self-acceptance and confidence.
Main goals: helping victims to develop positive ways of thinking about themselves, trying to stop
victims’ tendency to blame themselves for their condition, teaching victims to think about what is
happening in a different way. Efforts are also directed to invite victims to take those peers that are
able to deal effectively with difficult situations as models. Usually, these interventions are developed
in different sessions and involve small groups of bullied students.
Victims are encouraged to: recognise their positive aspects and characteristics, experience, effective
ways to deal with bullies, interact with other group members, also, in order to make friends, and talk
about their difficulties in peer relationships and share with the group solutions.
The great part of actions devoted to bullied students included also training aimed at improving
assertiveness, that is the ability to respond in an appropriate and constructive way to aggression.
In particular, assertive techniques encourage the use of clear and direct messages and teach to
recognise and avoid interactions that are blatantly manipulative, threatening or intimidating. The
students are also taught useful skills to talk with bullies in a calm, clear and direct way, despite
bullies’ attempts to intimidate them. Moreover, given that it’s not so easy to keep calm when facing
bullies, these training sessions also teach stress management techniques: physical relaxation or breath control.
● Individual interventions can be efficacious when they protract in time and represent a part of
a more global anti-bullying intervention.
● In some cases imbalance of power between the bully and the victims is so accentuated that
adopting the above mentioned strategies could be doomed or even detrimental. This risk
highlights the need to carefully analyze the specific context in which bullying takes place, in
order to find suitable and appropriate strategies.
The Olweus Bullying Prevention Program
It is a program developed in the 80’s by a Norwegian psychologist: Dan Olweus.
A recent meta-analysis by Ttofi and Farrington, stated that those bullying prevention programs,
inspired by the work of Dan Olweus, work the best.
The program, now disseminated through many countries, has a significant history and success,
especially when done with the highest level of fidelity and when done with the appropriate
evaluation taking place. The program is based on several guiding principles:
1) To reduce bullying adults must show warmth and interest. Though the children feel that they
are doing something, especially when a program is available to them on the issue of bullying,
the perception by the children is that oftentimes the adults are not doing enough. So adults
should recognize the issue and respond to the issue based on the child's needs, with a
warming interest.
2) Establish firm but reasonable rules for unacceptable behaviour. When we are addressing the
issue of bullying we could go the extreme of responding to an issue related to bullying.
Potentially in some schools, there’s a significant population of bullies, it is not possible to
expel all of them.
3) Use consistent and non-hostile consequences when rules are violated. If the rules are broken
make sure the response is also reasonable. You don’t have to be perceived as too extreme.
4) Be a positive role model that sets the tone for how we’re going to communicate with one
another, especially when introducing a bullying prevention program into the schools.
The program is implemented at several levels. To change the environment, wherever we are, we have
to change the culture of a system (school and classrooms). The individual is also very important in
school and in the broader community.
The components of the program are several and very important.
1. The level of training; the first part in this level is to establish a bully prevention coordinating
committee. Usually there are one or two individuals in school that serve as the power behind
the implementation, behind the need of bringing the program into the school, those are the
people you rely on to identify the larger group. The larger group should be other staff that
represent the entire faculty and the parent. Some schools decided to incorporate the student
into the program. The program includes a two days intensive training of the bully prevention
coordinating committee, it is done by a certified trainer. And then the coordinating
committee organizes and implements a full day of training, to introduce the Olweus program
to the school.
2. A very important component of this program is a 42 item questionnaire that should be used
especially if you want to garner maximum results. The questionnaire is given to the students
and to the teachers, prior to the initiation of the program and after 18 months of
documentation.
3. Another component of the program are discussion groups. Ongoing and weekly discussion
groups taking place in the larger school environment, at the staff level, among students ecc.
The discussion must be ongoing. By having these discussion groups it is possible to continue
to disseminate the conversation, the spirit of what the program’s mission is intended to do.
This program is very different from the one/two time event where the expert comes into the
classroom, talks with students and then leaves. It is also shown that is doesn’t really work to change
a culture, the environment of the school for better health and a safer school.
4. There are also rules:
➔ Do not bully others.
➔ try to help victims and left out students.
➔ Inform teachers when you see a colleague being bullied.
➔ Inform teachers when being bullied.
Preventing cyber-bullying
Parents should be aware of what kids do online.
1. Awareness and monitoring: parents should regularly talk with their children about
cyber-bullying and other online issues. However, the positive side of the online experience
should not be neglected. Parents should know the sites their children visit and their online
activities. They should ask where they are going, what they are doing and whom they are doing
it with. Adults should remember that online activities need clear rules, as well as any activity.
2. Establishing rules: it is important to have rules about appropriate use of computers and other
technologies: rules and explanations aim at teaching children how to be safe online.
3. Education and modelling: the main role of adults in cyberbullying prevention is to educate their
children to be smart about what they do online. They should encourage children to think about
what they want to see online or to tell kids to keep their passwords and other personal
information safe and not share them with friends. It is fundamental that adults act as positive
role models when they are online themselves.
If an incident of cyber-bullying has already occurred, parents should suggest not to respond or
retaliate, but to save and document the threats and report them to adults. Then, if the problem is
serious, it can also be reported to the service. Children should also be informed how to block the
cyber-bully’s email address or cell phone number. To this respect, adults should be aware that most
social media apps and services allow users to block the person.
If the cyber-bully is a schoolmate of the child, their school could be informed, since sometimes
schools have established protocols for handling bullying and cyber-bullying.
Cyber-bullying prevention starts at home, but schools can also play an important role in it.
The easiest thing schools can do is to include the issue of cyber-bullying into their bullying prevention
efforts. Sensitizing kids to the harms cyber-bullying does is the most important teacher that a teacher
can do. Additionally, they should make sure that students cyberbullied are given a feeling of comfort
and trust whereby they can actually confide in the adults around them and get help.
Schools could require students and parents to sign off annually on clear rules, expectations and
consequences regarding online and cell phone use and behaviour, including specific disciplinary
processes and procedures for those who use technology improperly.
School staff’s guidance should include information on relevant legal issues and on ways of contacting
mobile phone companies and internet service providers.