"I'm fine."
How many times a day do you say this lie?
Bullying is NOT okay.
What does it lead to? Bullying is the main factor of depressed, self-harming, etc. people. A bully can go from a mean school mate, a verbally abusive sibling, an abusive parent and a taunting co-worker. So many suicide cases are pertaining to getting bullied.
How to prevent or lower the problem? Many ways to prevent bullying in schools would be: enforcing the "no bullying" rules, having more assemblies or broadcasts about it and just educating a lot of students on the symptoms and affects of bullying. You can't really stop bullying completely because a lot of cyber-bullying also goes on outside of school that principles can't do anything about, and sometimes not even parents. But you can lessen the problem, which will take more than just signs and a "slap on the wrist."
General Statistics on bullying
- Nearly 1 in 3 students (27.8%) report being bullied during the school year (National Center for Educational Statistics, 2013).
- 19.6% of high school students in the US report being bullied at school in the past year. 14.8% reported being bullied online (Center for Disease Control, 2014).
- 64 percent of children who were bullied did not report it; only 36 percent reported the bullying (Petrosina, Guckenburg, DeVoe, and Hanson, 2010).
- More than half of bullying situations (57 percent) stop when a peer intervenes on behalf of the student being bullied (Hawkins, Pepler, and Craig, 2001).
- School-based bullying prevention programs decrease bullying by up to 25% (McCallion and Feder, 2013).
- The reasons for being bullied reported most often by students were looks (55%), body shape (37%), and race (16%) (Davis and Nixon, 2010).
Suicide
There is a strong association between bullying and suicide-related behaviors, but this relationships is often mediated by other factors, including depression and delinquency (Hertz, Donato, and Wright, 2013).
- Youth victimized by their peers were 2.4 times more likely to report suicidal ideation and 3.3 times more likely to report a suicide attempt than youth who reported not being bullied (Espelage and Holt, 2013).
- Students who are both bullied and engage in bullying behavior are the highest risk group for adverse outcomes (Espelage and Holt, 2013).
Bystanders
- Bystanders’ beliefs in their social self-efficacy were positively associated with defending behavior and negatively associated with passive behavior from bystanders – i.e. if students believe they can make a difference, they’re more likely to act (Thornberg et al, 2012)
- Students who experience bullying report that allying and supportive actions from their peers (such as spending time with the student, talking to him/her, helping him/her get away, or giving advice) were the most helpful actions from bystanders (Davis and Nixon, 2010).
- Students who experience bullying are more likely to find peer actions helpful than educator or self-actions (Davis and Nixon, 2010).
Interventions
- Bullied youth were most likely to report that actions that accessed support from others made a positive difference (Davis and Nixon, 2010).
- Actions aimed at changing the behavior of the bullying youth (fighting, getting back at them, telling them to stop, etc.) were rated as more likely to make things worse (Davis and Nixon, 2010).
- Students reported that the most helpful things teachers can do are: listen to the student, check in with them afterwards to see if the bullying stopped, and give the student advice (Davis and Nixon, 2010).
- Students reported that the most harmful things teachers can do are: tell the student to solve the problem themselves, tell the student that the bullying wouldn’t happen if they acted differently, ignored what was going on, or tell the student to stop tattling (Davis and Nixon, 2010).
- As reported by students who have been bullied, the self-actions that had some of the most negative impacts (telling the person to stop/how I feel, walking away, pretending it doesn’t bother me) are often used by youth and often recommended to youth (Davis and Nixon, 2010).