Stop Bullying on the Spot
When adults respond quickly and consistently to
bullying behavior they send the message that it is not acceptable. Research
shows this can stop bullying behavior over time. There are simple steps adults
can take to stop bullying on the spot and keep kids safe.
Do:
• Intervene immediately. It is ok to get another adult to help.
• Separate the kids involved.
• Make sure everyone is safe.
• Meet any immediate medical or mental health needs.
• Stay calm. Reassure the kids involved, including bystanders.
• Model respectful behavior when you intervene.
Avoid these common mistakes:
• Don’t ignore it. Don’t think kids can work it out without adult
help.
• Don’t immediately try to sort out the facts.
• Don’t force other kids to say publicly what they saw.
• Don’t question the children involved in front of other kids.
• Don’t talk to the kids involved together, only separately.
• Don’t make the kids involved apologize or patch up relations on the
spot.
Get police
help or medical attention immediately if:
• A weapon is involved.
• There are threats of serious physical injury.
• There are threats of hate-motivated violence, such as racism or
homophobia.
• There is serious bodily harm.
• There is sexual abuse.
Anyone is
accused of an illegal act, such as robbery or extortion—using force to get
money, property, or services.
Get Help Now
When you, your child, or someone close to you
is being bullied, there are many steps to take to help resolve the situation.
Make sure you understand what bullying
is and what it is
not, the warning
signs of bullying, and steps to take for preventing and responding to bullying, including how to talk
to children about bullying, prevention in schools and communities, and how to support
children involved.
After reviewing that information, if you feel
you have done everything you can to resolve the situation and nothing has
worked, or someone is in immediate danger, there are ways to get help.
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The problem
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What you can do
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There has been a crime or
someone is at immediate risk of harm.
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Call 911.
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Someone is feeling hopeless,
helpless, thinking of suicide.
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The toll-free call goes to the
nearest crisis center in our national network. These centers provide 24-hour
crisis counseling and mental health referrals.
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Someone is acting
differently than normal, such as always
seeming sad or anxious, struggling to complete tasks, or not being able care
for themselves.
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A child is being bullied in
school.
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Contact the:
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Teacher
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School counselor
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School principal
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School superintendent
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State Department of Education
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The school is not adequately addressing
harassment based on race, color, national
origin, sex, disability, or religion.
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Contact:
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School superintendent
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State Department of Education
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Prevention at School
Bullying can threaten students’ physical and
emotional safety at school and can negatively impact their ability to learn.
The best way to address bullying is to stop it before it starts. There are a
number of things school staff can do to make schools safer and prevent
bullying.
Getting Started
Assess school prevention and intervention
efforts around student behavior, including substance use and violence. You may
be able to build upon them or integrate bullying prevention strategies. Many
programs help address the same protective and risk factors that bullying
programs do.
Conduct assessments in your school to determine
how often bullying occurs, where it happens, how students and adults intervene,
and whether your prevention efforts are working.
It is important for everyone in the community
to work together to send a unified message against bullying. Launch an
awareness campaign to make the objectives known to the school, parents, and
community members. Establish a school safety committee or task force to plan,
implement, and evaluate your school's bullying prevention program.
Create a mission statement, code of conduct,
school-wide rules, and a bullying reporting system. These establish a climate
in which bullying is not acceptable. Disseminate and communicate widely.
Establish a school culture of acceptance,
tolerance and respect. Use staff meetings, assemblies, class and parent
meetings, newsletters to families, the school website, and the student handbook
to establish a positive climate at school. Reinforce positive social
interactions and inclusiveness.
Build bullying prevention material into the
curriculum and school activities. Train teachers and staff on the school’s
rules and policies. Give them the skills to intervene consistently and
appropriately.
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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.
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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.
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Community Strategies
Study community strengths and needs:
• Ask: Who is most affected? Where? What kinds of bullying happen
most? How do kids and adults react? What is already being done in our local
area to help?
• Think about using opinion surveys, interviews, and focus groups to
answer these questions. Learn how
schools assess bullying.
• Consider open forums like group discussions with community leaders,
businesses, parent groups, and churches.
Develop a comprehensive community strategy:
• Review what you learned from your community study to develop a
common understanding of the problem.
• Establish a shared vision about bullying in the community, its
impact, and how to stop it.
• Identify audiences to target and tailor messages as appropriate.
• Describe what each partner will do to help prevent and respond to
bullying.
• Raise awareness about your message. Develop and distribute print
materials. Encourage local radio, TV, newspapers, and websites to give public
service announcements prime space. Introduce bullying prevention to groups that
work with kids.
• Track your progress over time. Evaluate to ensure you are refining
your approach based on solid data, not anecdotes.
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Additional Resources
• The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency
Prevention’s (OJJDP’s) Model Programs Guide (MPG) contains information about evidence-based juvenile justice and
youth prevention, intervention, and reentry programs.
• The FindYouthInfo
Program Directory features evidence-based programs whose purpose
is to prevent and/or reduce delinquency or other problem behaviors in young
people.
• Three Bold Steps for School Community
Change: A Toolkit for Community Leaders 
(Safe Schools/Healthy Students). This kit
shows how partnerships with people from different parts of a community can
create positive, lasting change for students.
(Safe Schools/Healthy Students). This kit
shows how partnerships with people from different parts of a community can
create positive, lasting change for students.
Striving to
Reduce Youth Violence Everywhere (STRYVE) is a national youth violence prevention
effort. STRYVE Online helps communities with access to information and tools,
effective strategies, training and technical assistance, and online community
workspaces.
is a national youth violence prevention
effort. STRYVE Online helps communities with access to information and tools,
effective strategies, training and technical assistance, and online community
workspaces.
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Getting Started
The Bullying Prevention Training Module
Presentation is research-based resources that can help you lead bullying
prevention efforts in your local community.
Show
Get the Training Module
Organizing a Community
Event
The Community Action Toolkit includes
materials to create a community event using the research, ideas and bullying
prevention and response strategies that you learned about in the Training
Module.
Show
Get the Toolkit
Working with Stakeholders
The User Guides are tailored to 11
audiences that play a critical role in bullying prevention and include
information for delivering this training.
Show
Get the User Guides
Trainings for Educators
and School Bus Drivers
The
National Center of Safe Supportive Learning Environments (NCSSLE) offers
bullying prevention training toolkits filled with research-based, user-friendly
materials trainers can use for events and workshops. Each Training Toolkit
includes a step-by-step facilitator's guide, a customizable power point
presentation, handouts, and feedback form.
Bullying Victims
When it
comes to bullying victims, it becomes apparent that bullying has serious and
lasting effects. Bullying victims often experience a series of emotional
problems that can last the rest of their lifetime. The effects of bullying are
detrimental and dangerous for the victim.
Many bullying victims take on years of therapy and
treatment in order to help get over the psychological pain that bullying has
caused. In many tragic cases, this type of physical and emotional toll on
a person can damage their self esteem so much that it results in suicide for
the bullying victim. In an effort to prevent that kind of unfortunate ending,
here are a few tips about bullying and how to know if your child is a bullying
victim.
Signs
that may indicate your child is a bullying victim:
• Comes home with unexplainable injuries
• Comes home with damaged clothing or
other belongings
• Frequently "loses" items like
books, electronics, clothes or other valuable items
• Tries to find excuses to avoid going to
school, is often sick or has other excuses
• Hurts themselves like with cutting,
burning or eating restrictions
• Loses interest in friends or
participating in extra curricular activities
• Acts afraid of going to school or
school activities
• Appears moody, anxious, depressed or
withdrawn
• Feels helpless
• Exhibits low self-esteem
Another
way to help prevent your child from being one of the many bullying victims is
to know what the risk factors are of your child becoming one of the bullying
victims. When it comes to being a bullying victim, the children, teens and
adults who are the highest risk are those who don't get along well with others,
have few or no friends, is less popular than others their age, does not conform
to social or gender norms, has low self esteem or if they are suffering from
anxiety and depression. If your child is exhibiting any of these behaviors they
might be at risk for becoming a bullying victim.
It is
important to help your child become more social or make friends that are kind
and loyal. Having your child around a healthy environment and good group of
friends is helpful in keeping them from becoming one of the bullying victims.
It is also helps them see their self worth and self value raising their esteem
to where they are able to handle bullies by not allowing themselves to become a
target.
When it
comes to the serious issues surrounding bullying victims, there are many
emotional issues involved. If your child or teen has been a bullying victim and
does not show signs of recovery or returning to being their regular self, it is
a good idea to consult outside help in the form of counseling or a support
group. Many parents forget that even though the actions of the bully has
stopped, that does not mean their teen or child has recovered from the
emotional damage they received as one of the bulling victims. Bullying can
often do long-lasting damage to a person's self esteem. Without being able to
resolve some of these emotional issues, your child is at risk of becoming a
bully themselves or might project the lingering feelings of rejection and hurt
onto themselves. Children and teens who do this often will face struggles with
eating disorders, cutting, burning and other forms of self mutilation. In the
most severe cases, teens may not be able to handle the bullying, or may not be
able to cope with the after effects of bullying and instead will resort to
drastic measures like suicide to escape their pain.
With bullying,
the first thing to do in order to protect your child is to stop the bullying.
This may be through encouraging your child to report the incidents to a teacher
or the school administration. As a parent, you may have to help your child
report the bullying to school administrators. The next step is to get help for
your child. If they were one of the bullying victims, it is important to get
them help. For some children and teens, they just need an outlet for their
emotions maybe through art, writing in a journal, sports or other outlets.
However, some teens face higher-risk emotions and need to be professionally
treated. Through counseling or support groups, bullying victims can learn to
move on and let go of their pain.
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- It is estimated that 160,000
children miss school every day due to fear of attack or intimidation by other
students. Source: National Education Association.
- American schools harbor
approximately 2.1 million bullies and 2.7 million of their victims. Dan Olweus,
National School Safety Center.
- 1 in 7 Students in Grades K-12 is
either a bully or a victim of bullying.
- 56% of students have personally
witnessed some type of bullying at school.
- 15% of all school absenteeism is
directly related to fears of being bullied at school.
- 71% of students report incidents
of bullying as a problem at their school.
- 1 out of 20 students has seen a
student with a gun at school.
- 282,000 students are physically
attacked in secondary schools each month.
- Those in the lower grades reported
being in twice as many fights as those in the higher grades. However, there is
a lower rate of serious violent crimes in the elementary level than in the
middle or high schools.
- 90% of 4th through 8th graders
report being victims of bullying
- Among students, homicide
perpetrators were more than twice as likely as homicide victims to have been
bullied by peers.
- Bullying statistics say revenge is
the strongest motivation for school shootings.
- 87% of students said shootings are
motivated by a desire to “get back at those who have hurt them.”
- 86% of students said, “other kids
picking on them, making fun of them or bullying them” causes teenagers to turn
to lethal violence in the schools.
- 61% of students said students
shoot others because they have been victims of physical abuse at home.
- 54% of students said witnessing
physical abuse at home can lead to violence in school.
- According to bullying statistics,
1 out of every 10 students who drops out of school does so because of repeated
bullying.
- Harassment and bullying have been
linked to 75% of school-shooting incidents.
Bullying can take many forms but it
usually includes the following types of behavior:
• Physical – hitting, kicking,
pinching, punching, scratching, spitting or any other form of physical attack.
Damage to or taking someone else’s belongings may also constitute as physical bullying.
• Verbal – name calling, insulting,
making racist, sexist or homophobic jokes, remarks or teasing, using sexually
suggestive or abusive language, offensive remarks
• Indirect – spreading nasty stories
about someone, exclusion from social groups, being made the subject of
malicious rumours, sending abusive mail, and email and text messages (cyber
bullying).
• Cyber Bullying - any type of
bullying that is carried out by electronic medium. There are 7 types including:
1. Text message bullying
2. Picture/video clip bullying via
mobile phone cameras
3. Phone call bullying via mobile
phones
4. E-mail bullying
5. Chat-room bullying
6. Bullying through instant
messaging (IM)
7. Bullying via websites
Suicide remains among the leading causes of death
of children under 14. And in most cases, the young people die from hanging.
(AAS)
A new review of studies from 13 countries found
signs of an apparent connection between bullying, being bullied, and suicide.
(Yale School of Medicine)
Suicide rates among children between the ages of
10 & 14 are very low, but are "creeping up." (Ann Haas, Director
of the Suicide Prevention Project at the American Foundation for Suicide
Prevention)
The suicide rate among young male adults in
Massachusetts rose 28 percent in 2007. However, that does not reflect deaths
among teenagers and students Carl's age. (Massachusetts Dept. of Public Health,
in a report released April 8, 2009)
• Since 2002, at least 15 schoolchildren ages 11
to 14 have committed suicide in Massachusetts. Three of them were Carl's age.
("Constantly Bulled, He Ends His Life at Age 11," by Milton J.
Valencia. The Boston Globe, April 20, 2009)
• Suicide rates among 10 to 14-year-olds have
grown more than 50 percent over the last three decades. (The American Association
of Suicidology, AAS)
• In 2005 (the last year nationwide stats
were available), 270 children in the 10-14 age group killed themselves. (AAS).
- http://www.makebeatsnotbeatdowns.org/facts_new.html.
