Newswise — Schools ignore the problem of classroom bullies at their peril, according to researchers at The Menninger Clinic in Houston.
Bullying is a pervasive behavior problem with profound and long-range consequences that can influence and shape the lives of young children. Bullies have been linked with school shootings and child and adolescent suicides. The victims can be affected severely to the point they need mental health care. The bullies are at higher risk for violence and criminal behavior.
Interrupting the tendencies of bullies and their victims is important and possible, said Stuart Twemlow, MD, a Menninger psychiatrist and an international authority on community and school violence. "Bullying requires a bully, target and bystander. Bystanders aware of threats or physical or psychological acts can fuel the bully's actions. The school climate and vulnerable children suffer."
In high school, bullying is harder to detect, said Dr. Twemlow. "Bullying is nothing but child abuse by peers," said Menninger Child & Family Center Director Peter Fonagy, PhD, an internationally recognized authority in infant and child development. "In a typical Midwest school, 88 percent of the children are likely to observe bullying, and 77 percent are likely to be victims of it at one time or another. Bullying leads to violent crime. Sixty percent of playground bullies will have a criminal conviction by age 24, and 90 percent of young offenders were themselves found to be victims of bullying.''
"In more than two thirds of school shootings," Drs. Twemlow and Fonagy wrote in a published paper on threat assessments, "there was clear and obvious bullying by social groups and individuals. The larger social and environmental issues involved in school shootings include factors such as easy access to violent and hate-laden media, weaponry and information on strategies for terrorist attacks. Less frequently noted is the school's response to fixed patterns of teasing, ostracism and bullying among various groups in the school. A school climate that tolerates physical and relational aggression, especially by popular groups such as athletes or economic elites, is at high risk for violence."
From a three-year, ongoing study known as the Peaceful Schools Project, Menninger researchers have devised an integrated set of low-cost school violence prevention techniques developed under the rigorous scrutiny of scientific evaluation. Since so few programs develop their interventions relying on evidence based on randomized, controlled studies, the ongoing Peaceful Schools Project is believed to be the most ambitious privately-funded study of its kind.
"There are literally hundreds of anti-violence and anti-bullying programs across the U.S.," Dr. Twemlow said, "but the number that have been as thoroughly evaluated as this one has is very, very small."
Some of the program's learned lessons include:
- Without bystanders watching passively or being vocal from the sidelines, bullies lose power under a school-wide policy of zero tolerance for bullying behaviors;
- Unifying the school also means initially isolating, but not ostracizing, the bully; the program embraces the bully and offers alternate behaviors and rewards for non-violence;
- Martial arts physical education classes teach children ways to resolve conflict and problems without hitting.
Additionally, the study's findings indicate that the Menninger approach effectively improves school atmosphere, raises academic scores, and perhaps more importantly, breaks "a natural underlying process of deterioration" in the behaviors of elementary school children, Dr. Fonagy said.
The program halts a natural inclination among children to gradually feel less and less responsible for intervening when other children are victimized.
"Children begin to share a different set of social customs about what is the right thing to do.'' Dr. Twemlow said. "And when they do that, they feel better; they enjoy school more and they want to go to school. They learn more and classes are better and the whole thing sort of snowballs."
RSS