Working in the Community
Bullying can be prevented, especially when the power of a community is brought together. Community-wide strategies can help identify and support children who are bullied, redirect the behavior of children who bully, and change the attitudes of adults and youth who tolerate bullying behaviors in peer groups, schools, and communities.
The Benefits of Working Together
Potential Partners
Community Strategies
Additional Resources
The Benefits of Working Together
Bullying doesn’t happen only at school. Community members can use their unique strengths and skills to prevent bullying wherever it occurs. For example, youth sports groups may train coaches to prevent bullying. Local businesses may make t-shirts with bullying prevention slogans for an event. After-care staff may read books about bullying to kids and discuss them. Hearing anti-bullying messages from the different adults in their lives can reinforce the message for kids that bullying is unacceptable.
Potential Partners
Involve anyone who wants to learn about bullying and reduce its impact in the community. Consider involving businesses, local associations, adults who work directly with kids, parents, and youth.
Identify partners such as mental health specialists, law enforcement officers, neighborhood associations, service groups, faith-based organizations, and businesses.
Learn what types of bullying community members see and discuss developing targeted solutions.
Involve youth. Teens can take leadership roles in bullying prevention among younger kids. The nationwide effort to reduce bullying in U.S. schools can be regarded as part of larger civil and human rights movements that have provided children with many of the rights afforded to adults. The nationwide effort to reduce bullying in U.S. schools can be regarded as part of larger civil and human rights movements that have provided children with many of the rights afforded to adults. But so far, protections against harassment apply only to children who fall into protected classes, such as racial and ethnic minorities, students with disabilities, and victims of gender harassment or religious discrimination.
This article identifies the conceptual challenges that bullying poses for legal and policy efforts, reviews judicial and legislative efforts to reduce bullying and makes recommendations for school policy. Two events in 1999 were turning points in the recognition of school bullying as an important societal problem in the United States. First was the shooting at Columbine High School, widely viewed in the press as actions by vengeful victims of bullying. Equally important, but less prominent in the media, was the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education, which established that schools could be liable for failing to stop student-to-student sexual harassment.
Yet after more than a decade of judicial and legislative activity since those two landmark events — as well as a massive increase in scientific research — today's laws and policies about bullying are fragmented and inconsistent. This article examines conceptual challenges in judicial and legislative efforts to address bullying in schools and recommends ways to improve schools' antibullying policies.
Defining bullying
The definition of bullying recognized by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention includes three characteristics: intentional aggression, a power imbalance between aggressor and victim, and repetition of the aggression. Each of these criteria poses challenges for law and policy.
Intentional aggression is broadly inclusive and means that bullying can be physical, verbal or social. As a result, bullying can overlap with many other behaviors such as criminal assault, extortion, hate crimes and sexual harassment. But in its milder forms, bullying can be difficult to distinguish from ordinary teasing, horseplay or conflict. With regard to social or relational bullying, it may be hard to draw the line between children's friendship squabbles and painful social ostracism.
The second criterion — a power imbalance between aggressor and victim — distinguishes bullying from other forms of peer aggression. However, a power imbalance is difficult to assess. Although judgments about physical size and strength are feasible in cases of physical bullying, bullying is most often verbal or social and requires that there be a power differential that requires an assessment of peer status, self-confidence or cognitive capability. In some contexts, the victim lacks power for less obvious reasons, such as sexual orientation, disability or membership in a particular racial or ethnic group. A further complication is that interpersonal power can vary across situations and circumstances.
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