by Richie Bernardo
In the next 7 minutes, a child in the U.S. will be bullied.
It may be the son or daughter of someone you know or, worse, it may be
your own. Meanwhile, only four in 100 adults will intervene. And only 11
percent of the child’s peers might do the same. The rest — 85 percent —
will do nothing.
According to the National Education Association, more than 160,000
children miss school every day out of fear of being bullied. Bullying
takes many forms, ranging from the seemingly innocuous name-calling to
the more harmful cyberbullying to severe physical violence. It happens
everywhere, at all times to the most vulnerable of kids, especially
those who are obese, gay or have a disability.
Besides the physical, emotional and psychological tolls it takes on
victims, bullying produces adverse socioeconomic outcomes. The
Association for Psychological Science recently found
that those who are bullies, victims or both are more likely to
experience poverty, academic failure and job termination in their
adulthood than those who were neither. In addition, the affected
individuals are more likely to commit crime and to abuse drugs and
alcohol.
Even our schools take a financial hit from bullying. According to a National Association of Secondary School Principals report,
the average public school can incur more than $2.3 million in lost
funding and expenses as a result of lower attendance and various types
of disciplinary actions.
In light of back-to-school season, WalletHub’s analysts measured the
prevalence and prevention of bullying in 45 states and the District of
Columbia to help bring awareness to the harmful effects of such
pervasive violence not only to America’s young people but also to
society as a whole. In order to conduct such a comparison, we examined
each state based on 17 key metrics, ranging from “bullying-incident
rate” to “truancy costs for schools” to “percentage of high school
students bullied online.”
Read the full study here.
Tuesday, August 23, 2016
Sunday, April 3, 2016
Bullying and School Shootings
There’s a link between high school bullying and active-shooter incidents in school. As with other bullying issues, some researchers suggest the evidence is murky, but there’s plenty of it.
Both bullies and their victims and more likely to carry guns to their high school, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association’s “Pediatrics.”
A 2014 “survey of the surveys” conducted by Mitch van Geel, PhD; Paul Vedder, PhD; Jenny Tanilon, PhD, titled “Bullying and Weapons carrying: A Meta-Analysis,” looked at 45 previous studies for trends.
They found them.
The studies examined had looked at bullies, victims, and bully-victims, which are victims who turn to bullying as a response.
“Victims, bullies, and bully-victims report more weapon-carrying than their peers,” the authors wrote.“In itself, this finding is already cause for intervention because adolescents that carry weapons are more likely to get into fights, be hospitalized, be injured, or injure others than their peers who do not carry weapons.
“Furthermore, perpetrators of high school homicides were more likely the victims of bullying than their peers and the combination of bullying victimization and access to and interest in firearms is characteristic of the perpetrators of high school homicides.”
This is not a surprise.
In 12 of 15 school shooting cases examined, the shooters had a history of being bullied, according to the stopbullying.gov website. There’s certainly a lot of anecdotal evidence, from Columbine High School in 1999 onward, to support the argument that bullying is strongly tied to school shootings.
Then there’s this: according to the State University of New York / Buffalo State, “Bullying has been present in 2 out of 3 school shootings that the US Secret Service has investigated.”
“In a number of cases, bullying played a key role in the decision to attack. A number of attackers had
experienced bullying and harassment that were longstanding and severe. In those cases, the experience
of bullying appeared to play a major role in motivating the attack at school,” the National Institute of Justice Journal said in a report.
The conclusion reached by the Secret Service: “In a number of cases, attackers described experiences of being bullied in terms that approached torment. They told of behaviors that, if they occurred in the workplace, would meet the legal definitions of harassment. That bullying played a major role in a number of these school shootings should strongly support ongoing efforts to combat bullying in American schools.”
Both bullies and their victims and more likely to carry guns to their high school, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association’s “Pediatrics.”
A 2014 “survey of the surveys” conducted by Mitch van Geel, PhD; Paul Vedder, PhD; Jenny Tanilon, PhD, titled “Bullying and Weapons carrying: A Meta-Analysis,” looked at 45 previous studies for trends.
They found them.
The studies examined had looked at bullies, victims, and bully-victims, which are victims who turn to bullying as a response.
“Victims, bullies, and bully-victims report more weapon-carrying than their peers,” the authors wrote.“In itself, this finding is already cause for intervention because adolescents that carry weapons are more likely to get into fights, be hospitalized, be injured, or injure others than their peers who do not carry weapons.
“Furthermore, perpetrators of high school homicides were more likely the victims of bullying than their peers and the combination of bullying victimization and access to and interest in firearms is characteristic of the perpetrators of high school homicides.”
This is not a surprise.
In 12 of 15 school shooting cases examined, the shooters had a history of being bullied, according to the stopbullying.gov website. There’s certainly a lot of anecdotal evidence, from Columbine High School in 1999 onward, to support the argument that bullying is strongly tied to school shootings.
Then there’s this: according to the State University of New York / Buffalo State, “Bullying has been present in 2 out of 3 school shootings that the US Secret Service has investigated.”
“In a number of cases, bullying played a key role in the decision to attack. A number of attackers had
experienced bullying and harassment that were longstanding and severe. In those cases, the experience
of bullying appeared to play a major role in motivating the attack at school,” the National Institute of Justice Journal said in a report.
The conclusion reached by the Secret Service: “In a number of cases, attackers described experiences of being bullied in terms that approached torment. They told of behaviors that, if they occurred in the workplace, would meet the legal definitions of harassment. That bullying played a major role in a number of these school shootings should strongly support ongoing efforts to combat bullying in American schools.”
Monday, March 28, 2016
The Link Between Bulllying and Suicide
There seems to be an aversion in much of the scientific and behavioral health community to make the link to bullying and suicide, despite numerous news media accounts of children who said they felt so victimized by bullying that they did, in fact, commit suicide.
This is to be expected among scientists, who like to be absolutely sure before they reach a conclusion.
Nevertheless, there is evidence that bullying can lead to suicide.
The major study of this subject was done in 2008 by the Yale School of Medicine. It concluded that “bullying victims were two to nine times more likely to report suicidal thoughts than other children were,” and that the bullies themselves “also have an increased risk for suicidal behaviors.”
A 2014 analysis of scientific literature done by three doctors and published in JAMA Pediatrics said “this meta-analysis establishes that peer victimization is a risk factor of suicidal ideation and suicide attempts.”
The researchers found 34 reliable studies that covered peer bullying and suicide; the studies included data on 284,375 kids aged 9 to 21.
Results of the survey: kids being bullied were 2.23 times as likely to have suicidal ideations as those who were not bullied.
By delving deeper, they found that cyberbullying was more likely to lead to suicidal thoughts (raises the risk factor by a factor of 3.12) than the traditional, in-person abuse (increases the risk for suicidal ideation by a factor of 2.16).
“This might be because with cyberbullying, victims may feel they’ve been denigrated in front of a wider audience,” one doctor, Mitch van Geel said, and “material can be stored online, which may cause victims to relive the denigrating experience more often.”
In 2012, an article in Journal of Adolescent Health said, “Involvement in bullying in any capacity is linked to increased risk for suicidal ideation and behavior, and echoes previous literature documenting particularly strong mental health implications for bully-victims.”
This study, conducted by Dorothy L. Espelage, Ph.D, and Melissa K. Holt, Ph.D., surveyed 661 students ages 10-13. It found:
• 60% of bully-victims had thought about killing themselves in the past 6 months (a bully-victim is someone who is bullied and then turns on others and bullies them);
• 43% of bully-victims had actually attempted it;
• Kids were 2.4 times more likely to report suicidal ideation if they were bullied;
• They were 3.3 times more likely to report a suicide attempt if they were bullied.
Anat Brunstein Klomek, Ph.D., of the School of Psychology at Columbia University, said, in 2012, “Frequent victimization (of girls) is associated with later suicide attempts and completed suicides, even after controlling for conduct and depression symptoms. Frequent childhood victimization puts girls at risk for later suicidal behavior, regardless of childhood psychopathology.”
There is a clear link between bullying and suicide. The only question is one of degree.
This is to be expected among scientists, who like to be absolutely sure before they reach a conclusion.
Nevertheless, there is evidence that bullying can lead to suicide.
The major study of this subject was done in 2008 by the Yale School of Medicine. It concluded that “bullying victims were two to nine times more likely to report suicidal thoughts than other children were,” and that the bullies themselves “also have an increased risk for suicidal behaviors.”
A 2014 analysis of scientific literature done by three doctors and published in JAMA Pediatrics said “this meta-analysis establishes that peer victimization is a risk factor of suicidal ideation and suicide attempts.”
The researchers found 34 reliable studies that covered peer bullying and suicide; the studies included data on 284,375 kids aged 9 to 21.
Results of the survey: kids being bullied were 2.23 times as likely to have suicidal ideations as those who were not bullied.
By delving deeper, they found that cyberbullying was more likely to lead to suicidal thoughts (raises the risk factor by a factor of 3.12) than the traditional, in-person abuse (increases the risk for suicidal ideation by a factor of 2.16).
“This might be because with cyberbullying, victims may feel they’ve been denigrated in front of a wider audience,” one doctor, Mitch van Geel said, and “material can be stored online, which may cause victims to relive the denigrating experience more often.”
In 2012, an article in Journal of Adolescent Health said, “Involvement in bullying in any capacity is linked to increased risk for suicidal ideation and behavior, and echoes previous literature documenting particularly strong mental health implications for bully-victims.”
This study, conducted by Dorothy L. Espelage, Ph.D, and Melissa K. Holt, Ph.D., surveyed 661 students ages 10-13. It found:
• 60% of bully-victims had thought about killing themselves in the past 6 months (a bully-victim is someone who is bullied and then turns on others and bullies them);
• 43% of bully-victims had actually attempted it;
• Kids were 2.4 times more likely to report suicidal ideation if they were bullied;
• They were 3.3 times more likely to report a suicide attempt if they were bullied.
Anat Brunstein Klomek, Ph.D., of the School of Psychology at Columbia University, said, in 2012, “Frequent victimization (of girls) is associated with later suicide attempts and completed suicides, even after controlling for conduct and depression symptoms. Frequent childhood victimization puts girls at risk for later suicidal behavior, regardless of childhood psychopathology.”
There is a clear link between bullying and suicide. The only question is one of degree.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)