Whose Responsibility Is It to Stop Bullying?

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No single stakeholder can do it all: A multi-tiered approach can stop bullying and its harm.

Key Points

Introduction

Bullying, defined as intentional, aggressive behavior that is repeated over time and involves an imbalance in power (Olweus, 1993), is recognized by The White House (2011), The American Academy of Pediatrics (2009), and the American Psychological Association (2004) as a serious national health issue affecting U.S. youth. Bullying behaviors include direct physical and verbal aggression, as well as indirect or relational aggression and can take place in both offline and online contexts (Olweus, 2013). Recognition of the critical need to address bullying and its impact on youth derives from the growing body of research underscoring its ubiquity across cultures and the wide-ranging harm that results for targets of bullying in childhood and adolescence (Juvonen & Graham, 2014) and longer term into adulthood (Wolke, Copeland, Angold, & Costello, 2013).

The large body of research on bullying within schools that developed between the early 1990s and now (see Olweus, 2013 for trends) demonstrates that scholars and those who work in schools do not view bullying as a harmless rite of passage; rather, they agree that because bullying is harmful to individual students and to the school climate as a whole, reducing or even eliminating bullying is a priority. This article demonstrates the unique responsibility that each of four major stakeholders, peers, parents, schools, and new media, can hold for stopping bullying. The theoretical or practical rationale for their level of responsibility, as well as the latest research evidence, together suggests how policy can best hold each stakeholder responsible. To begin, peers can play a role in stopping bullying, as they are the individuals most directly affected by bullying. Next, parents hold potential. After that is the role of schools—in particular, key aspects of school-based interventions offer promise for stopping bullying. Schools have shouldered the burden for responding to bullying, especially given a decade-long surge in legislation at state levels to deal with school-based bullying. Finally, because bullying now also occurs in online contexts that may or may not have anything to do with school peer relationships, critical issues relate to who has the responsibility for dealing with bullying that takes place in new media platforms.

The Peer Group

The promise of using peers to stop bullying stems from the representation of bullying as a group phenomenon, which emphasizes peer-group goals over those of individual members of the peer group (Salmivalli, 2010). This idea reflects the reality that peer bullying incidents are not necessarily dyadic bully–victim interactions. Rather, bullying incidents can involve one or more bullies, and other witnesses who are not directly involved in the incident are also often present (Nishina, 2012). Moreover, the rewards for perpetrating bullying include higher social status within the peer group, whereas victims of bullying experience compromised social status (Pouwels, Lansu, & Cillessen, 2015).

An emphasis on the group-based nature of bullying implicates all peers in its perpetration, continuation, and resolution. Key participant role players in this process include (Salmivalli, Lagerspetz, Björkqvist, Österman, & Kaukiainen, 1996) bullies (i.e., the perpetrators), victims (i.e., the targets), assistants to bullies (i.e., those who join the bullies), reinforcers of bullies (i.e., those who provide positive feedback to bullies), defenders (i.e., those who stand up for the victims), and outsiders (i.e., those who are not directly involved). With the group conceptualized this way, defenders are thought to be key to stopping bullying.

Scholarship on the importance of such defending behavior has exploded over the past 10 years. Witnesses are often present when bullying occurs, yet they rarely intervene (Craig & Pepler, 1997). Those peers who do intervene are more likely to be a friend of the victim, as opposed to someone who does not know the victim (Bellmore, Ma, You, & Hughes, 2012), and they are less likely to have previously experienced bullying as a victim or bully (Oh & Hazler, 2009). When witnesses opt to do nothing, this may reflect their perceptions of the peer dynamics at play because we know that they are motivated by a desire to avoid peer relationship problems that may occur as a result of supporting a victim (Rogers & Tisak, 1996).

Despite the barriers in place for peer defenders, also called upstanders (Cohen & Freiberg, 2013), defending works. Peer bullying incidents stop soon after a witness intervenes on behalf of the victim (Hawkins, Pepler, & Craig, 2001), and the classroom defending climate as a whole is associated with levels of bullying, such that bullying is perpetrated more in classrooms where victimized classmates are not defended, compared with classrooms where victimized classmates are defended (Salmivalli, Voeten, & Poskiparta, 2011). Students’ perceptions that their peers were using more defending behaviors mediate the effects on self-reported bullying of the KiVa anti-bullying program (KiVa emphasizes the role of changing perceptions and attitudes within the whole peer group as a mechanism for reductions in bullying behaviors by individuals; Saarento, Boulton, & Salmivalli, 2015).

Informing and empowering students about the effectiveness of active defending behaviors seem like promising routes to hold the peer group responsible for stopping bullying. The empirical foundation for doing so is strong, and it is a process already in place by some peers already. The challenge is to encourage more students to defend vulnerable peers.

Several considerations should inform doing so in the best way possible. First, bullying participant roles are fluid, such that one incident’s defender may be the next incident’s victim (Frey, Pearson, & Cohen, 2015). Students are right to perceive this real risk (Huitsing, Snijders, Van Duijn, & Veenstra, 2014) when deciding whether to actively confront a bully. They should be made aware that defending can take other forms that do not place them at such risk. These include sharing emotional reactions, offering support to victims, and scaffolding peaceful alternatives with victims (Frey et al., 2015). Second, passive witness behavior stems from known social-psychological processes, such as diffusion of responsibility, where witnesses’ sense of their responsibility to assist the victim decreases when other witnesses are also present, which may be amplified in school contexts. In schools, students may be particularly likely to designate responsibility to a teacher or other adults, based on the perception that they should be the leaders within the school (Thornberg, 2007). This is crucial as many incidents are likely to take place out of view of adults. Students must receive the message that adults can only be effective when they know (either through observing themselves or hearing about from others) about bullying incidents. Third, although this approach emphasizes the role of peers, the overall process must be instigated and supported by adults within school and at home. Adults have a larger tool box for choosing and implementing a response. Also, the potential social rewards of being a bully or not defending a peer are not relevant to adults in that context.

Parents

Among all adults who can play a role in stopping bullying and its negative effects, parents are at the top of the list. A recent meta-analysis of 70 studies published between 1970 and 2012 reported small to moderate effect sizes for the association between a child’s status as a victim or bully/victim (i.e., a victim who also bullies others) and exposure to both positive and negative parenting behaviors (Lereya, Samara, & Wolke, 2013). The specific negative parenting features most strongly associated with a higher likelihood of victim and bully/victim status were abuse, neglect, and maladaptive parenting; the specific positive parenting features most strongly associated with a lower likelihood of victim and bully/victim status were high parental involvement and support, and warm and affectionate relationships.

The importance of parenting to bullying has also been put to the test in randomized controlled trials of interventions that incorporate (the most common approach) or focus explicitly on parenting. A meta-analysis of school-based anti-bullying programs identified parent training and meetings as one of the most important anti-bullying program elements associated with decreases in bullying in schools (Ttofi & Farrington, 2011). Trials that focused exclusively on parenting also show some success. In one study, facilitative parenting, defined as parenting that supports the development of children’s peer relationship skills, decreased victimization for elementary school-aged students previously designated as chronically victimized (Healy & Sanders, 2014).

For parents to best apply the effective, positive features of parenting, they need to know about what their child has experienced. Yet, many parents feel that they are not aware of their child’s experiences with bullying (Harcourt, Jaspere, & Green, 2014), and accordingly underestimate the extent to which their child is involved (Mishna, Pepler, & Wiener, 2006). Several forces converge to prevent parents from getting this knowledge. Child disclosure to parents about their bullying experiences is minimal (deLara, 2012), and schools do not always inform parents about bullying incidents (Harcourt et al., 2014). Parents, then, must rely on soliciting information from their child (and school) to be sure that they get the information needed to lessen risk of victimization or bullying of their child (Stavrinides, Nikiforou, & Georgiou, 2015).

Because parenting matters, mechanisms that facilitate knowledge about bullying are needed. This could take the form of schools or communities providing training in relevant parenting skills. It could also result from closer relationships between schools and parents to better ensure information sharing on both sides. These types of opportunities have the potential to benefit the bidirectional relationship between parenting and children’s bullying experiences. They are also likely to benefit parents who do not have children at risk for bullying or victimization. For example, parenting training might focus on upstanding to bullying and how to promote upstanding behaviors in their own children.

Schools

Many school-based anti-bullying intervention programs have been designed and implemented, yet only some of these have been rigorously evaluated (Bradshaw, 2015). A 2011 meta-analysis of 44 evaluations of anti-bullying interventions allows for cautious optimism about the efficacy of the programs to reduce bullying so far (Ttofi & Farrington, 2011). In this analysis, the key components of programs that decreased bullying and victimization included the use of school rules, discipline, playground supervision, and parent informational and training meetings. Programs that contained more—more elements, longer duration, and more intensive intervention—were also most successful in decreasing bullying. Because the most extensive and intensive programs perform best, it is not wise to dismiss such approaches as impractical and pursue simpler programs until identifying the most critical components for meeting the objective of reducing bullying (Bradshaw, 2015).

In analyses of the best practices that schools can employ for choosing an effective anti-bullying intervention program, a range of scholars offer guidelines that share related emphases. The first guideline is that any school-based bullying intervention must develop from theoretical perspectives on the nature of bullying (Hawley & Williford, 2015). One of the earliest school-based interventions, the Olweus (2013) Bullying Prevention Program, recognizes that bullying behaviors anchor in a social context that requires attending to peer-group power dynamics, understanding bully/victim problems as inseparable from larger units such as classrooms and schools, acknowledging that bullying produces short- and long-term consequences for the youth involved and for their society, and reflecting that whole-school anti-bullying approaches will benefit all students in a school. The need to attend to nested social contexts and their influence on youth is also evident in approaches to bullying that draw from social-ecological models (Espelage & Swearer, 2004). The social-ecological framework views bullying as shaped by interactions between characteristics of students and the nested contexts in which they reside, including classrooms, schools, families, neighborhoods, and culture (Bronfenbrenner, 1979).

A second guideline encourages schools to consider reducing bullying as beneficially promoting a more positive school climate for all students. This perspective should nudge schools that are on the fence about addressing bullying systematically because they are worried about the time and resources taken to implement a well-developed program. Widely adopted frameworks such as school-wide positive behavioral interventions and supports and social-emotional learning programs reduce bullying and aggression in schools, while also improving school climate, even though the programs do not specifically target bullying behaviors (Bradshaw, 2015). With wide-ranging benefits displayed, schools may be more motivated to pursue a program.

A third guideline requires a program to have demonstrated success through rigorous evaluation. Scholars want schools to be critical consumers of the numerous available bullying interventions. Schools should seek only evidence-based programs, but they should not stop there. Schools must also approach the implementation of any program cautiously and evaluate it within their specific context and population (Swearer, Espelage, Vaillancourt, & Hymel, 2010).

Decisions schools must make about whether to implement a program and what type of program to implement come with higher stakes, as schools have been made responsible for stopping bullying through legislative acts. As of 2015, laws in all 50 states detail the rights of youth and the responsibilities of schools to protect youth from bullying. All of these laws require schools to develop policies for dealing with school bullying. Some go further to identify prohibited conduct, emphasize the importance of communicating the policies to all members of the school, and support training and preventive education (Lovegrove, Bellmore, Green, Jens, & Ostrov, 2013).

The rapid-response legislative action that states have taken (frequently in response to high-profile bullying incidents) appears to reflect a new-found concern about bullying at the societal level. What is missing is evaluation and evidence for the positive impact of these laws. Apparently, states have not enforced the legislation they have developed, and school districts do not ensure their policies meet the latest legislative requirements (Toso, 2012). States’ policies provide neither directions nor resources to schools (Hawley & Williford, 2015), and the policies intensify the existing inequities in the disciplinary rates of Black students, compared with students from other ethnic/racial backgrounds (Vaught, 2014). Yet, when schools do meet the requirements, initial evidence suggests that the result may be positive from the perspective of school staff. Educators’ perceptions of their schools’ alignment with bullying-related mandates in the state of New York were associated with perceptions of positive school climate, less perceived severity of bullying in their schools, and less perceived need for improvement in school anti-bullying practices (Cosgrove & Nickerson, 2015). Whether these results extend to other states and to other sources of evaluation—including the students whom the laws are meant to protect—remains to be seen.

New Media Platforms

With technological advances and a movement into Web 2.0, where user-generated content dominates websites and online interactions, cyberbullying has emerged. Debate considers how to define cyberbullying, whether it is a qualitatively different form of bullying, and whether interventions should contain cyberbullying-specific components (Bauman & Bellmore, 2015). But there is no debate that the “problem” of cyberbullying has captured the interests of the public and scholars alike (Olweus, 2013). There is also no debate that the phenomenon touches the lives of youth. A meta-analysis of youth cyberbullying research reported that prevalence rates typically range between 10% and 40% (Kowalski, Giumetti, Schroeder, & Lattanner, 2014). The same meta-analysis reported that being a victim of cyberbullying was most strongly associated with stress and suicidal ideation among a host of psychological adjustment variables.

Cyberbullying presents unique challenges for those who are targeted by it. These should be considered in any response to reducing it. Affordances of online contexts that present risks include the potential permanence of bullying acts (e.g., posting a private picture that can never be erased), the massive audiences who may observe or become aware of a bullying act, the possible anonymity of bullies, the constantly changing social media platforms, and the lack of supervision by adults.

These same affordances also provide some potential new benefits. The flip side of the permanence of bullying acts captured online is that a record is created of an incident that can be used as evidence against a known perpetrator. The potential that events are seen by a large audience can work to a victim’s advantage, if people respond with denunciations of the bullying act and demonstrations of support for the victim (Bellmore, Calvin, Xu, & Zhu, 2015). Anonymity may allow people to use platforms to cope with bullying experiences in a safe context among similar others (Davis, Randall, Ambrose, & Orand, 2015). Constantly changing social media platforms may create flexibility for individuals to use only those in which they feel safe.

Many unanswered questions remain about what to do about cyberbullying. Researchers believe that cyberbullying should be explicitly included in school anti-bullying policies (Smith, 2015). But schools need guidance in determining the boundaries for their involvement. For example, should they actively monitor all of their students’ public social media interactions? Should they request access to private social media interactions? Also, while clearly a school should handle cyberbullying that involves students who all attend that same school, it is unclear what role a school plays in cyberbullying that involves one of their students and other individuals not affiliated with the school. Who should take responsibility for cyberbullying episodes where school involvement is questionable? Based on a recent study of police officers’ perceptions of cyberbullying, the criminal justice system apparently will not offer much support. The study reported that police officers do not believe cyberbullying per se is a crime, but becomes a crime when an incident includes behaviors such as harassment and threats (Broll & Huey, 2015). In response to public opinion that the platforms themselves have some culpability, the companies that run the largest social media platforms of today have put mechanisms in place to better secure the safety of their users. Both Facebook and Twitter have resource pages devoted to bullying. They each also have a reporting mechanism for online abuse; notably, Facebook also allows users to report bullying they witness. Each also allows users to block the accounts of other users who are bothering them.

Conclusion

Bullying is harmful to youth who experience it directly, to the schools in which it resides, and to the broader public. The responsibilities of key stakeholders reviewed here were defined in relation to empirical evidence about where they can be most effective. The fact that there are so many ways to intervene provides hope for stopping bullying and its negative effects. Yet even with a mound of evidence about what may work, we still face many challenges to implementing these changes, as the most effective approaches are likely to require action on many fronts.