Bullying in Secondary Schools: What it Looks Like and How to Manage it

Around the world, there is an emerging awareness of the problems associated with bullying. This is not just a normal part of growing up nor something that kids grow out of. It is a problem that a substantial proportion of young children and adolescents experience—as perpetrators, victims, or bystanders, and at some point they may have been involved in each of the three roles. Recent data from 35 countries participating in the World Health Organization Survey of Health Behavior in School-aged Children (2003) confirm the ubiquity and magnitude of the problem of bullying.

Once a problem, such as bullying, comes to the forefront of social consciousness, there is a logical call for strategies to address the problem. This book is unique in that it provides an understanding of bullying in adolescence and provides direction for intervention. To date, the majority of the literature has focused on elementary school-aged children. Recognizing the problem of bullying in adolescence as well as childhood is an important step. The authors of this book, Keith and Ginny Sullivan and Mark Cleary, make a strong contribution to the field by providing a critical developmental understanding of the problem. They address the important issue of the salient developmental challenges in adolescence (e.g., developing intimacy, autonomy and identity) and relate these processes to the relevant social systems that influence bullying. The consequence is that the complexity of bullying is revealed, and an understanding of the complexity of bullying is essential to any successful intervention.

The authors base the book on a central tenet: bullying at any age interferes with the normal developmental process. As such, in order to promote healthy development, we need to address these problems long before any negative consequences develop. Drawing upon cogent case examples, the authors have put a spotlight on the nature of bullying during adolescence and developmentally appropriate interventions to stop the bullying behavior. A key feature of this book is the sensitivity with which the authors portray victimized youth, and the effective ways in which they frame the problem not as a defect in those who are bullied, but within the systems that permit the abusive behaviors to take root.

[Page x]This book not only sheds light on understanding bullying in adolescence, but also on designing and implementing interventions that are both developmentally relevant and systemically appropriate. It provides an overview and understanding of the important social systems that impact on development such as the family, peer group, school, and community. For example, in adolescence the role and influence of the peer group becomes increasingly important, while the role and influence of parents changes. The authors highlight how certain children may fall prey to the aggressive tendencies of their peers and how their low social status and power in the peer group context place them at risk of ongoing torment through bullying. At the same time, there are normal dominance processes that are continually unfolding in the lives of adolescents. Some teenagers find it socially beneficial to establish and reinforce their social power through bullying vulnerable school mates. The challenge in recognizing the changing importance and salience of these social contexts is to design interventions that match these significant social changes. This is what this book does and encourages others to do within their own creative and cultural contexts.

We have here a book that sheds much light on the nature of the problem of bullying in adolescence, the systemic factors that underlie bullying, and specific directions for the design of interventions with developmentally appropriate strategies for responding to the problems. The majority of interventions to date have focused on bullying as a problem in childhood and in primary schools. With this volume, the authors give us information and strategies that are essential for dealing with bullying in adolescence but are often also applicable to bullying in other contexts. While the physical, social, emotional, and cognitive changes that typify adolescence give bullying at secondary school its special character, the underlying factors of abuse, coercion, cruelty, and the wielding of power are of relevance when considering bullying of any type.

This book presents a clear, well-constructed and useful account of bullying in adolescence and marks an important starting point in understanding bullying and designing age-appropriate interventions. Bullying is a form of abuse in youth-to-youth relationships. The time has come to ensure that all individuals have the right to be safe at school and in our communities and this book makes a valuable contribution to that goal.

Associate Professor Wendy Craig, Department of Psychology, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada

Professor Debra Pepler, Director, LaMarsh Research Center for Research on Violence and Conflict Resolution, York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

In this book we are describing a new approach to dealing with bullying. Whereas much bullying research examines how often it occurs, who bullies, and who is bullied, our approach, firstly, sees bullying as part of a social dynamic and, secondly, as part of an unsafe school culture. If the dynamic changes so that the bystanders cease to watch from the sidelines but intervene and show their rejection of the bullying behavior, then the bully will no longer have power over the group and, more specifically, the victim. A change in the bullying dynamic means that individuals are not trapped into their roles and the whole power base upon which bullying relies crumbles. We are also advocating the creation of safe schools that provide positive and enabling learning environments. Reducing bullying is the tool.

Planning for a bullyfree school needs to be done with creativity, imagination, and commitment. And it needs to include as many people as possible from within the school community—students, teaching and other school staff, parents, and others from the wider community. The ideal that these people come up with does not have to stay an ideal; it can become a reality.

In any school, bullying will erupt from time to time. That is a fact of life. But in safe schools, social relationships are founded on respect, students can confidently talk to staff about difficulties, and the school provides a clear set of strategies for teachers to use and offers complete and systemic support. And in such schools, learning can take off and become as enjoyable as it should be.

We have all experienced bullying. We have personally experienced it as children, as parents, and as teachers. It is because we have seen the harm it can do, but also because we have seen that it can be successfully dealt with, that we have chosen to write this book.

The book is divided into four parts. Part I, “Introduction,” consists of three chapters. Chapter 1, “What We Know About Bullying in Secondary Schools,” is based upon research and scholarship from around the world and provides a summary of the most useful information about the nature of bullying in the secondary sector. Chapter 2 entitled “Adolescence: ‘It Was the Best of Times; It Was the Worst of Times’” describes the various changes that occur during the turbulent teenage years of secondary school from the point of view of biological, social, emotional, and cognitive development and also examines the nature of relationships, peer pressure, and problems and disorders. Chapter 3, “The Social Climate of the Secondary School” describes how secondary schools confront students with a massive cultural change at a time when they are changing in a variety of other ways. The authors map out three stages through which students evolve on their passage through secondary school (the first-year students, the middle students, and the finishing students).

Part II is entitled “Why ‘Bad’ Things Happen to ‘Good’ Schools” and is the most challenging part of the book. It argues that although schools often agree philosophically with the intentions of anti-bullying policies and practice, there are a number of obstacles within schools that make this difficult. This is termed the blocked drain syndrome. Chapter 4, “Let's Be Honest about What Schools Do,” provides an overview of issues that schools need to address honestly and fully in order to make things work. It provides case studies of situations where bullying has had insidious and tragic results. Chapter 5 examines “How Teachers Contribute to a Bullying Culture” and Chapter 6 “Parents, the Other Victims.”

Part III, “Making the Whole School Safe,” responds to the difficult issues raised in Part II and builds on the useful information from Part I. Chapter 7, “Developing a Whole-School Approach,”describes how to initiate and implement an effective whole-school program; and Chapter 8, “The Power of the Bystanders,” describes how the third parties to bullying, the bystanders, can be involved to help reduce bullying. In response to the criticism about teachers who either directly or inadvertently encourage bullying (Chapter 5), [Page xvi]Chapter 9, “Authoritative Teaching Practice,” discusses how teachers can carry out their professional practice in a way that is effective for countering bullying and that is supportive of them as well.

Part IV, entitled “The Safe School in Action,” provides a set of interrelated strategies and solutions designed to counter bullying effectively and create safe school environments. It builds on the concepts of a properly constructed whole-school approach, the need to involve the bystanders/peer group, and the development of nonpunitive problem-solving mechanisms. “What to Do When Bullying Happens” (Chapter 10) provides a plan of action to show school staff how to deal with bullying events. Chapter 11, “Using the Curriculum to Understand and Deal with Bullying: ‘In the Cafeteria,”’ provides useful and practical curriculum materials for teaching lessons about the nature of and how to deal with bullying. Chapter 12, “Harnessing Student Leadership,” provides an overview of a leadership program that has been used to help both prosocial and antisocial year 9 students to become school leaders who take on a variety of positive roles in the school including being promoters of a safe school. Chapter 13, “Experiential Learning through Social Theater,” demonstrates how to give students a better sense of the bullying dynamic through the use of social theater. “Supporting Students through Peer Mentoring” (Chapter 14) gives a template for creating a program that involves older students in providing support and encouragement to those who have been involved in bullying (largely, victims, bullies and, sometimes, bystanders) so that bullying stops and its effects are ameliorated. Chapter 15 (overview of a humane and very practical program for reframing student culture and breaking cycles of bullying.

The book finishes with several useful appendices: an overview of key anti-bullying websites, a bullying questionnaire, a typical anti-bullying policy, and materials to supplement information for Chapter 8 (on leadership).

Throughout this book, pseudonyms are used and locations fictionalized where necessary to protect identities.

This book is designed for the use of teachers, parents, students, administrators, counselors, psychologists, youth and social workers, university lecturers, and teacher education students.