Bullying Interventions in Schools

Six Basic Approaches

Ken Rigby

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781118362679
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Education in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Outlines the existing methods used to address bullying in school, describing when and how each method can be best applied.

• Addresses the six major methods of bullying intervention
• Critically explores the rationale, strengths, and limitations of each intervention
• Evaluates efficacy and applicability of each intervention for different bullying situations encountered in the school setting

Part 1

Interventions in Perspective

Before examining how best to intervene in cases of bullying, we need to place the subject of bullying in perspective. In Chapter 1, I consider how schools respond to bullying – and why their interventions are often ineffective. Especially important are the factors that make responding successfully to cases of bullying difficult and challenging. Tackling bullying is never easy.

Effective action is seen as first requiring a realistic grasp of what is known about the nature of bullying, the forms it takes, and its prevalence and harmfulness to the well-being of students of all ages. Chapter 2 provides a brief account of such essential knowledge.

Once this has been understood, the school can take steps to identify actual cases of bullying; that is, recurring patterns of aggressive behavior that are inflicting pain and suffering upon children who appear unable to defend themselves adequately – and who therefore need to be helped by the school. Chapter 3 discusses how sound judgments can be made about when interventions are required – leading on to the choice of the most appropriate way the school can act.

Chapter 1

The Current Situation

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, bullying in schools became a hot issue and a matter of public controversy. By that I mean a controversy held in public; not necessarily an issue discussed by the public. It was an issue taken up by the media – the newspapers, magazines, television, the innumerable producers of websites and, most distinctively, by radio commentators. And in this new controversy, there were almost always two strident protagonists.

Over there in the blue corner is the sentimental idealist dripping with empathy, full of the milk of human kindness. He or she knows full well what the bully is like. Beneath that belligerent exterior beats the heart of a sensitive and well-meaning person, driven to pathetic posturing by circumstances which the bully cannot control. The ­sentimental humanitarian knows well what needs to be done. The bully needs to be soothed. He must be treated with infinite kindness. At the root of his disorder is wounded self-esteem.

In the red corner, scarcely able to contain himself (or herself), is the emotional ‘brutalitarian’.¹ He or she also knows full well what the bully is like. The bully is evil and must be crushed or otherwise removed. The bully is the enemy; likewise, the hordes of hopeless do-gooders who infest Departments of Education and are thought to be doing nothing about the problem.

We meet these vivid characters when we open a newspaper or listen to talk-back radio. Naturally, it is the brutalitarian who takes the offensive. The sentimental humanitarian is, by and large, a straw man or a straw Department of Education.

Now the interesting thing is that these protagonists, real or imaginary, do their stuff on the public stage only, rather like Punch and Judy in the old days. The vast body of people see things differently. They recognize that each and every one of us is from time to time a bully – and a victim too. They also recognize that there are those in our community who really are a constant and serious menace, and that bullying constitutes a very serious problem indeed. The lives of innocent people are being damaged, in some cases irretrievably. Something must be done about it. But they see it as it is: not simplistically as the sentimental humanitarian and the emotional ­brutalitarian see it, but as a complex problem to which simplistic answers are absurd. The vast majority of the people see it as the American ­journalist H. L. Mencken perceptively observed:

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.²

This book is about what schools can do about this problem – by intervening in cases of bullying that come to their attention. It does not prescribe one method to fit all cases. Rather it seeks to describe what can be done, the reasons for adopting particular forms of intervention, and the evidence (where available) for believing that interventions in cases of bullying can be successful.

Again I must insist that the fact that this book is about interventions in cases of actual bullying should not detract from the highly important work that is being done in schools to prevent bullying from occurring in the first place, so that intervention becomes unnecessary. Like most other writers in this area, I fully commend the ‘whole school approach’ to bullying. This approach includes the development of an agreed school anti-bullying policy that ensures that pro-social behavior is encouraged, especially by working with children in classrooms to promote desirable values and the formation of positive and supportive relationships among children. But efforts at prevention directed toward the total school population without sufficient attention being paid to those who are most directly involved in the problem are not likely to achieve much success. For instance, curriculum-­based social education delivered to all children, however ­desirable, has thus far produced disappointing results. In one recent meta-evaluation of published reports on work in classrooms to ­promote more pro-social behavior, it was found that, in most instances, there was no significant reduction in actual bullying.³

Much more work is needed. Especially, schools need to know what options are available when bullying actually takes place, as inevitably it will. Schools need to evaluate each one of the methods, appraising both its strengths and weaknesses, and exercise the best judgment as to whether it is to be applied in particular cases of bullying.

Perhaps the first thing to be recognized is that successful interventions to stop, or even to reduce, bullying in schools are difficult to achieve. As we have seen, thus far interventions to reduce bullying in schools have been only modestly successful. Reports from students who have sought help from teachers to stop them from being bullied often convey disappointment.

Yet it is fair to say that nowadays most schools, and arguably all educational jurisdictions, are taking the matter of bullying very seriously. Almost daily, schools encounter cases of bullying and do their best to stop them from continuing. Why then are the results so disappointing?

Why is Bullying so Difficult to Stop?

The first answer sometimes given is based upon conjecture about the history of human evolution. Put simply, humans, as well as all other creatures, are seen as programmed to bully others – if they can do so. In short, those who can, bully; those who cannot are the hapless ­victims. Yet as it stands, this is surely an extreme and questionable extrapolation from Darwinian theory. It can also be pointed out that many species, including our own, have survived and indeed thrived because of an inbuilt predisposition among its members to cooperate and work together for the good of all.

Nevertheless, physically aggressive behavior is characteristic of most young children. According to some researchers, it is at its most frequent among children between 18 months and four years. Seemingly, behaving aggressively does not have to be learned.⁴

Fortunately, most humans gradually and over time learn how not to be aggressive and find more socially desirable ways of achieving their aims. But a minority do not. Arguably, this is because their drive to act aggressively is particularly strong and/or they are not sufficiently influenced, largely by adults, to behave otherwise. Whatever the explanation, it is estimated that around 5 percent of children are likely to continue to act very aggressively and eventually to act in dangerously violent ways.

As well as these physically aggressive children, many of whom bully others at school, there are others whose aggressiveness mainly takes the form of verbally harassing others. In fact, most of the ­bullying that occurs involves verbal abuse which may on occasion lead to physical confrontations. In addition, there are more indirect forms of bullying, such as excluding people unfairly and sending nasty e-mails or text messages. The rise of cyber bullying in recent years has added a new dimension to the nature of peer victimization.⁵

When all the different forms of bullying have been summated to produce a general measure of bullying, certain trends have become evident in children’s behavior. It is possible to identify different ­clusters of individual children. There are those children – a large proportion – who rarely or never engage in bullying behavior throughout their school careers. Some others bully to a moderate degree and the extent to which they bully others remains relatively constant during their years at school. Then there are a few who engage in a good deal of bullying to begin with but fortunately desist over time. Finally, there are those who engage in a good deal of bullying to begin with and maintain or increase their bullying behavior. These consist of about 10 percent of children – and they constitute a major problem for schools.⁶

It is these children who are responsible for a very high proportion of the bullying that occurs in schools. It is these children that ­constitute the greatest difficulty that confronts teachers. Understanding why these children bully and how they can be handled is a major challenge for all schools.

We need to ask how these 10 percent or so of children get that way. The first answer I shall give is a highly unpopular one, rarely ­mentioned in writings on bullying. The fact, long dismissed by many developmental psychologists, is that there is a strong genetic influence at work. With the rise and rise of genetic psychology, it has become evident that some children are much more strongly predisposed than others to fill the roles of bully and victim. A careful study of the ­bullying tendencies of pairs of identical and fraternal twins published in 1960 suggested that genetic influence on bullying behavior of ­children was strong. The paper was generally ignored. A much bigger and more impressive study in 2008 produced quite similar results and, given the current zeitgeist, is being attended to. It was concluded that some 61 percent of the variation between children in bullying behavior could be accounted for by genetic factors and a slightly higher proportion (73 percent) in variation between children in being bullied.⁷ From this study, other factors were comparatively unimportant in accounting for variations in children’s bullying behavior or in being victimized by their peers.

It should be understood that genetic factors never operate in a vacuum. They affect behavior only through interaction with what is contributed by the environment. Thus, an environment that helps to overcome a child’s predisposition to act aggressively, even a child who is strongly predisposed to act that way, may prevent a child from ever engaging in bullying. On the other hand, a quite mild predisposition toward behaving aggressively may result in a child becoming very aggressive if that child is brought up in a family or in a neighborhood which in some way encourages or gives license to violent behavior.

Now it is true that some children who are highly aggressive do not necessarily bully others; that is, they do not continually seek to ­dominate and abuse people weaker than themselves. They discharge their aggression in other ways. On the other hand, all bullies are by definition aggressive. Being aggressive by nature increases the chances that a child will bully – if he or she can.

The prime concern in this book is with the subgroup of aggressive children who continually bully others. Besides being predisposed to act aggressively, there are other important influences that help to determine how they will use or abuse their power over others. A good deal is now known, for instance, about how parenting and family life contribute to the genesis of bullying.⁸

It is known that the early experience of insecure attachment to a caregiver can increase the likelihood that a child will subsequently become involved in bully/victim problems at school. Placing young children in inadequate childcare centers at too early an age and for long periods of time can result in a child manifesting antisocial behavior later at school. Children brought up in dysfunctional and uncaring families are less likely than others to form positive relations with others at school. Cold, authoritarian parenting is apt to frustrate children and motivate them to act aggressively toward their peers. Socially prejudiced parents can pass on to their children attitudes that incline them to bully those who do not conform to accepted social stereotypes. These typically include ethnic groups and homosexuals. Neglectful parents who fail to keep track of their children run the risk of them becoming delinquent and acting violently toward others. Enmeshed families that limit the opportunities of their children to mix with other children before they go to school increase the chances that their socially unskilled children will be victimized at school.

I have listed above some major factors that contribute to increasing the difficulties faced by teachers when they seek to intervene, but there is one source of difficulty that will always escape detailed analysis. This difficulty relates to those events which are essentially unpredictable. Prominent among these involve the friendships that children make. Often entirely unexpectedly, a child meets another child or group and a bond or association is formed. How that child behaves subsequently will depend to a large degree on the pressures exerted by the group and the resistance or otherwise offered to those pressures.

In relation to many of these factors discussed above, the school can have, at best, quite limited influence: none as far as genetic influence is concerned; generally little or none in the use of appropriate child care and child rearing; a little perhaps in molding community social attitudes in the neighborhood, but then only in the long run and indirectly through the effects it has on its students. So what a school can do in effectively addressing bullying must inevitably contend with a wide range of countervailing factors, not least of which are the essentially unpredictable nature of individual behavior and the chance associations that members of the school community make with one another. Interventions are never going to be easy.

Try we must. But I say first we need to know what educators are up against in trying to stop the bullying and appreciate why the going is likely to be tough. We need to understand well the social context in which bullying occurs and the forces that can make the task of add...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1: Interventions in Perspective
• Part 2: Methods of Intervention in Cases of Bullying
• Part 3: The Choice of Intervention Method
• Appendices
• References
• Index