Bully Prevention

Posted by James Alan Fox, Crime and Punishment August 31, 2010 11:15 AM

Damali Keith, Reporter

HOUSTON – How was your child’s first day back to the books?

Did you get details when you asked him or her that question?

One reason knowing the answer is so important is to help stop or avoid bullying.

Thirty percent of teenagers are estimated to be bullied or are bullies themselves.

Experts say one way to help keep your child from being a victim of bullying is to simply have a good conversation with them everyday after school.

Really listen to your kids. If they come home that first day, that first week and you’re asking ‘how was your day?’ They’re going to say ‘oh fine’ and dart off to play video games,” says cyber bullying expert Akilah Willery.

“So be a little more specific: ‘tell me about your English class. Tell me what your routine is going to be’.”

Willery says that opens the door for kids to be more specific about their day.

Liquindella Clark , an 8th grade math teacher at Dundee Ridge Middle School leads the class in an anti bullying rap in her classroom in Dundee , Fl. , Wednesday August 25, 2010.

DUNDEE | Liquindella Clark stayed up late Tuesday night, thinking of ways to make an impression on her eighth-grade math class.

Her focus was not about numbers – it is about bullying.

So Wednesday, Clark arrived at Dundee Ridge Middle School wearing a ripped t-shirt, a sign on her back that read “bullying hurts” and big bandages on her face.

She got her students’ attention.

“Sometimes when you hand paper to kids, they don’t get it,” Clark said. “But if you can show them a real world example of how it looks, it will impact them more.”

Clark joined other teachers Wednesday for the school district’s first simultaneous one-day attack on bullying, said Nancy Woolcock, assistant superintendent of learning support.

“As a part of the Jeffrey Johnston law, students are required to report and receive prevention instruction,” Woolcock said. “So we decided to do one day at the beginning of the year to inform students about anti-bullying.”

In 2005, Jeffrey Johnston, of Cape Coral, committed suicide at age 15 after being harassed, sometimes via the Internet, for about two years. His death prompted his mother to launch a campaign for the statewide anti-bullying law.

Students at Dundee Ridge Middle learned how to use a hot spot map to make the school safer from bullying, the types of behaviors that characterize targets for bullying, how bystanders can respond and what can be done to decrease bullying schoolwide. Students also received an anti-bullying pledge to sign.

Sixth-graders in one of the reading classes designed posters showing physical and social bullying.
Luis Benabe, 13, said he now knows how to walk away from a bully and to tell an administrator. He also said Clark’s approach to the subject made the discussion fun.

As a requirement from the state’s Department of Education, the school district began tracking bullying statistics last year, Woolcock said. The figures won’t be available until the end of September when they have to be submitted to DOE.

Sherrie Nickell, associate superintendent of learning and incoming district superintendent, said the daylong sessions will show students the district is serious about eliminating bully behavior.

Dundee Ridge Principal Stacy Gideons said her staff talks to students about how they should conduct themselves and because of it, bullying isn’t a major problem at her school.

Psychologists find that students who are bullied regularly do substantially worse in school.

By Stuart Wolpert, University of California, Los Angeles

Students who are bullied regularly do substantially worse in school, UCLA psychologists report in a special issue of the Journal of Early Adolescence devoted to academic performance and peer relationships.

The UCLA study was conducted with 2,300 students in 11 Los Angeles–area public middle schools and their teachers. Researchers asked the students to rate whether or not they get bullied on a four-point scale and to list which of their fellow students were bullied the most—physically, verbally and as the subject of nasty rumors.

A high level of bullying was consistently associated with lower grades across the three years of middle school. The students who were rated the most-bullied performed substantially worse academically than their peers. Projecting the findings on grade-point average across all three years of middle school, a one-point increase on the four-point bullying scale was associated with a 1.5-point decrease in GPA for one academic subject (e.g., math)—a very large drop.

Teachers provided ratings on how engaged the students were academically, including whether they were participating in class discussions, showing interest in class and completing their homework. The researchers collected data on the students twice a year throughout the three years of middle school and examined the students’ grades.

The study is published Aug. 19 in the journal’s online edition; the print edition will be published at a later date.

“We cannot address low achievement in school while ignoring bullying, because the two are frequently linked,” said Jaana Juvonen, a UCLA professor of psychology and lead author of the study. “Students who are repeatedly bullied receive poorer grades and participate less in class discussions. Some students may get mislabeled as low achievers because they do not want to speak up in class for fear of getting bullied. Teachers can misinterpret their silence, thinking that these students are not motivated to learn.

“Students who get bullied run the risk of not coming to school, not liking school, perceiving school more negatively and now — based on this study—doing less well academically,” said Juvonen, who is also a professor in UCLA’s developmental psychology program. “But the link between bullying and achievement can work both ways. The students who are doing poorly are at higher risk for getting bullied, and any student who gets bullied may become a low achiever. Whether bullying happens on school grounds or after school hours on the Internet, it can paralyze students from concentrating on academics.”

The research is part of a long-term UCLA bullying project led by UCLA education professor Sandra Graham (who is not a co-author on this study) and Juvonen, which is funded federally by the National Science Foundation and privately by the William T. Grant Foundation.

“Instruction cannot be effective unless the students are ready to learn, and that includes not being fearful of raising your hand in class and speaking up,” said Juvonen, who has been studying bullying for more than a decade. “Once students get labeled as ‘dumb,’ they get picked on and perform even worse; there’s a downward cycle that we need to stop.

“If the academically low-performing students are at higher risk for getting bullied, that suggests one way to reduce bullying is to help those students academically,” she added. “Once they get into the cycle of being bullied because of their poor academic performance, their chances of doing better academically are worse.”

Reducing bullying is a “collective challenge,” she said, and not just a matter of dealing with a few aggressive students. The UCLA team’s prior findings show that in middle school, bullies are considered “cool’ by their classmates. The high social status of bullies promotes a “norm of meanness that needs to be addressed.” Bullying affects millions of students, Juvonen said.

Of the students in the study, approximately 44 percent were Latino, 26 percent were African American, 10 percent were Asian American, 10 percent were white and 10 percent were multi-racial. Fifty-four percent were female and 46 percent were male.

By Riva Richmond

TODAY’S bullies are not restricted to cafeterias, gym class and schoolyards. With technology, they can appear in every digital corner of a modern child’s life. But parents and children can take heart. Technology can also be harnessed to combat online bullies.

“It’s being used to spread the pain, but the positive thing is it can be used to stop the pain,” said Hemanshu Nigam, founder of SSP Blue, a security and privacy advisory firm, and former chief security officer for the News Corporation’s online properties, including MySpace. Many tools can help you find and remove hurtful content, stop abusive contact and, increasingly, tackle wayward conduct, he said.

Here are tips on how to find those tools and learn how to use them.

MONITOR SOCIAL NETWORKS The most damaging bullying happens on social networks, because the attacks are public.

Bullies can leave cruel comments on profiles in Facebook, MySpace or Formspring, a nine-month-old question-and-answer service embraced by teenagers and used to level anonymous attacks. Bullies can post unflattering photos or videos and create fake profiles or online groups dedicated to bashing people they dislike. There have even been instances of bullies obtaining passwords to the accounts of their targets, hijacking profiles and posting scurrilous comments.

In 2008, a Florida eighth-grader who shared her MySpace password with a onetime friend discovered, after a falling out, that it was being used to post offensive sexual content. Three 14-year-old boys in Newburyport, Mass., were arrested this year after they created a fake Facebook page to harass a classmate. A Seattle middle school suspended 28 students for online bullying of a classmate this year.

The most popular social networking sites are prepared to handle trouble. All the sites let users remove comments from their own profiles, sever friend connections and block and report abuse. You can also restrict access to a profile using privacy settings.

“It’s a constant battle to make sure teens are safe,” said Joe Sullivan, Facebook’s chief security officer. When harassment appears, “we want to get it down quickly,” he said, and typically do it in less than 24 hours.

To report or take a bully off your friends list on Facebook, go to his or her profile and click “Report/Block this Person” or “Remove from Friends.” Blow the whistle on hateful content on group and fan pages by clicking “Report Page” and specifying the offense, which helps Facebook prioritize serious incidents. People in photos can dissociate themselves by clicking on the photo and on “remove tag” beside their name. If nudity or other Facebook violations are involved, report it and Facebook may take it down. Otherwise, you’ll have to ask whoever posted it to remove it.

On MySpace, you can block an abuser from the abused person’s profile page and report him or her by clicking “Contact MySpace” at the bottom of any page. MySpace also allows people to preapprove all comments made on their profiles. Go to settings, select “Spam” and then “Require approval before comments are posted.”

If you are staring down a mean comment or question on Formspring, don’t answer it, and it won’t be seen by anyone else. You can also block the author from contacting you again. To report harassment, click “Help” on any page and submit a complaint. Consider adjusting the privacy settings so only people you approve can follow you, and to block anonymous questions.

BLOCK MEAN MESSAGES Bullies also use e-mail and other message services to spread torment. Nasty messages can be forwarded many times to many people, and are nearly impossible to stop.

But like social sites, Web-based e-mail services popular with teenagers generally have codes of conduct that forbid harassment and intimidation, and mechanisms for reporting bad behavior.

In Hotmail, click “Options” at the top right of any page, navigate to “Blocked Senders” and add the e-mail addresses of bullies. In Gmail, set up a filter for offending addresses from the “More actions” drop-down menu and choose to automatically delete future messages (and perhaps also forward them to a parent).

Instant messages typically come from people only after a user has added them to a chat list, and abusers are usually easy to remove, block and report.

Blocking unwanted cellphone calls and text messages, however, requires visiting your carrier’s Web site, gaining access to the family account with a password and then supplying problem phone numbers. It cannot be done from the device itself. Verizon’s Usage Controls and AT&T’s Smart Limits for Wireless both cost $5 a month.

BECOME A HALL MONITOR There are several software programs and online services that can help parents detect and address bullying.

Parental-control software, which is installed on PCs your children use, comes in free and paid versions from a variety of companies and involves various levels of intrusiveness. Norton Online Family, a free service from the security software maker Symantec, for example, can monitor social network usage and oversee certain chat lists and I.M. conversations.

SafetyWeb and SocialShield are newer services that can also help monitor social network use. Both charge $10 a month. SafetyWeb finds online accounts tied to children’s e-mail addresses and monitors public online activity for signs of trouble — and semipublic activity if, for example, a child is friends with a parent on Facebook. The company is opposed to “spying,” said its co-founder, Geoffrey Arone, so it focuses on alerting parents to potential problems by watching for profanity and red-flag keywords.

SocialShield delves deeper into private social network content by having children add its Facebook, MySpace and Twitter applications. With this access, SocialShield monitors and distills what is happening for parents and alerts them to suspect content.

Several new services monitor text messages on smartphones, including Kid Phone Advocate from Parents Are Listening Services and CellSafety from WebSafety (both $10 a month). Both products watch for words and phrases that may be trouble.

CALL THE AUTHORITIES In serious situations, you may need help from your school or the police, especially if there are threats of violence. This means you will need evidence.

Demonstrate the problem with screenshots or saved copies of Web pages (choose “save as” in your Web browser) and copies of e-mail messages, instant messages and texts. Preserve it yourself, or use software like CyberBully Alert ($14.95 a year) to help you.

For court, it is best to have digital evidence directly from online services and the bully’s own computer, said Mark D. Rasch, who formerly prosecuted computer crimes in the United States Justice Department and is now a principal with the consulting firm Secure IT Experts.

Online services do not keep data forever and hard drives get wiped. The easiest and best way to preserve evidence is to enlist law enforcement. Otherwise, you will need a lawyer, a civil suit and subpoenas — and deep pockets.

“Don’t wait,” Mr. Rasch said. “If there’s any credible threat of injury or damage, you want to take this seriously and have it investigated.”

Eight to twelve year-olds across the country revealed, in a recently-released survey, that bullying, conflict, and meanness weighed heavy on their hearts and minds. 2171 kids throughout the US were asked to share their personal stories of bullying and conflict in a survey conducted by Naomi Drew in conjunction with Free Spirit Publishing. Across the board, what the children shared was surprisingly frank, sometimes heartbreakingly so. “I try to ignore conflicts, but if I can’t I just hurt,” said a 5th grade girl. A 6th grade boy who was cornered by a gang of kids in his school hallway wrote: “They ripped up my science book, took my hat, and laughed at me. I was so mad I went to my locker and sobbed.”

An overwhelming number of the students surveyed expressed their desire for positive change. 80% said they wanted to learn ways to end bullying, avoid fights, get along better with peers, and work out conflicts. Many felt overwhelmed by the meanness of their peers. An 11 year-old boy who was being bullied daily said, “It just makes me want to die.” With the spate of recent youth suicides that have been in the headlines, words like these can’t be ignored.

73% of the kids surveyed said other kids are somewhat to very mean. “I’ve been through a lot,” wrote a 4th grade boy. “Kids don’t like the way I look. They call me names and kick me. I am so sick of being picked on.”

Conflict is another major issue for kids. Almost 50% see conflicts happening often, every day, or all the time. 68% said being teased or made fun of is the number one source of their conflicts in their lives, and 64% listed name-calling as the cause of their conflicts. A 10 year old girl wrote, “Kids called me names every day. It got uncomfortable to be at school.” How about these break-your-heart words from a 9 year-old, “People call me names and make fun of me because I don’t have a mom.”

It’s clear from the survey that kids want and need change. Teachers want change too. A fourth grade teacher from New Jersey who responded to the survey wrote, “Anger and bullying are among the major issues I see as a teacher.” With character education programs being cut left and right, and No Child Left Behind turning our schools into testing machines, it’s time for priorities to shift. We need to stop focusing so much on test results, and do a lot more to help kids learn in an atmosphere of peace and emotional safety. In the words of a 10 year-old survey participant, “I wish there was a way to clean up this mess and find a way to make peace.”

School Bullying Addressed At Dept. Of Education Summit

The Department of Education holds a two-day summit to formulate a national plan to end bullying in schools.

School starts for the majority of the country this month, and while students are getting ready to head back to class, the Department of Education is focused on stopping a classic problem — bullying.

Over the last two days, the DOE convened the first-ever summit on school bullying.

Leaders attending the conference tasked themselves with developing and implementing a national strategy that reduces and eventually ends bullying.

“Our department has a renewed commitment to enforcing the law, including civil rights law that applies to racial, sexual or disability harassment,” said Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

Duncan also says bullying distracts from the fundamental purpose of school — learning — and feels that most people don’t realize that bullying violates civil rights laws.

“I’m not sure that many educators and parents realize bullying can constitute racial, sexual and disability harassment that is prohibited by civil rights laws enforced by our department’s Office of Civil Rights,” said Duncan.

In a National Center for Education statistics study, just less than a third of students, ages 12 to 18, reported they have been bullied in school.

By Melanie Jones
Times Staff Writer

Educators and experts agree: Bullying has always existed and probably always will. However, new school policies look to provide better protection against such incidents.

A spate of suicides across the country has spawned anti-bullying laws in several states, including Alabama.

Attalla, Etowah County and Gadsden school systems have passed new bullying policies ahead of the new school year. Rep. Betty Carol Graham, D-Alexander City, sponsored the law in the House during the last legislative session. She said Alabama was one of the few states without a statewide bullying policy.

“I talked to students and parents who said there was no one to talk to without fear of retaliation,” Graham said.

The law establishes “a dedicated person in each school a student can go to and say, ‘Can you help me?’.”

That’s exactly what’s needed, according to Edward F. Dragan, school safety consultant and author of “The Bully Action Guide.”

“One of the best ways of (protecting children) is to create a climate within a school that allows kids to go to someone without fear of retaliation,” Dragan said.

He takes it a step further to say schools should identify “safe teachers” and have one on each hall “trained how to get information, cause the kids to open up and know when to follow up.”

Local school systems designate the principal or “principal’s designee” as the person with whom to file a complaint.

Complaints must be filed on board-approved complaint forms and signed by the student or the student’s parent or guardian and delivered by mail or in person. The forms will be available in the principal’s office and/or counselor’s office.

Bruce Brown

Why would a class president, successful athlete and solid student take his own life?

It may be no more rare than one branded an outcast.
Chances are, when a person commits suicide, there were risk factors and signs that could have shown the way to treatment to avoid the tragedy. From outcast to leader, depression and mental issues can add up to disaster.
“Suicide knows no boundaries,” said Michelle Izzo-Voss of the Jacob Crouch Foundation, which shared the stage at Lafayette Middle School with Faith House on Wednesday in a program designed to inform educators of risk factors for suicide, mental illness and bullying.
“It varies, depending upon age, sex and ethnicity,” Izzo-Voss said. “Teachers are in a unique position to recognize signs and to help. We’re not expecting you to counsel the students. We want to make you more aware, and better able to identify factors, and then refer the student to the appropriate resources.
“Without help, the program will continue to compound.”
Izzo-Voss stressed that teachers should be aware of protocol and proper steps to take at their individual schools.
There are an estimated 750,000 teens in America who are depressed, with 60 percent to 80 percent of those going undiagnosed, according to Izzo-Voss, who added that 63 percent of suicides display symptoms for a year before taking their life.
Some forms of mental illness prompt more boys than girls to act, while in others girls are more prone to action. Signs of risk, then, become crucial for educators, many of whom spend more hours of the day with a student than does a parent.
Faith House’s Angelle Bellard focused on its Bullies2Buddies
program, which combats the problem of bullying in schools.
“We want to empower students to react more effectively to bullying,” Bellard said. “We help the students cope with bullies, to maintain their composure and control. If they refuse to get angry, they let go of that ‘victim’ mentality.”
Tragedy can result if the victims of bullying can’t cope, as in April 1999 when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold murdered classmates and staff at Columbine High School in Colorado.
The Faith House effort helps difuse such actions before they begin.

By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 1:38 PM on 2nd August 2010

More than half of young women are bullied at school because of how they look, according to a report published today.
Some youngsters miss months of education to avoid their tormentors, according to the survey.
Researchers spoke to girls in England and Wales, between the ages of 15 and 22. They found 56 per cent were abused verbally, physically or online because of their weight, height or hair colour.
Only one in five of the girls surveyed was happy with her appearance. More than half were bullied at school (posed)
Only one in five said they were personally happy with their appearance, and 53 per cent said they had since gone on a diet, according to the research by youth charity Rathbone.
Charity spokesman Peter Gibson said: ‘All bullies are cowards, but persecuting the weakest takes a special kind of nastiness.
‘It was heartbreaking to learn that young women had been punched and kicked simply because they couldn’t afford the best clothes, or humiliated on the internet due to their size.’
Just over half of young women who were bullied said they played truant from school, with one girl missing six months of education and her SAT exams.
The main reason for bullying was weight, followed by hair colour – almost entirely girls with red hair. Other reasons included height, clothing and racism.
About 40 per cent said they missed meals to get thinner, and 17 per cent said they had been on a diet since the age of 12 or younger.
More than 60 young women were surveyed. Of these six said they had either taken laxative pills or made themselves sick to keep their weight down.
Bullied girls refused to believe nice things said about them. Although 91 per cent said their families and friends called them beautiful, one 17-year-old girl from Greater Manchester said: ‘Even if Peter Andre walked into the room and told me I was gorgeous, I still wouldn’t believe it.’
Encouragingly, the Rathbone report found 60 per cent of those who were abused because of their appearance thought they could turn to a friend, relative or teacher for help.
Mr Gibson said: ‘The demonisation of young people is rife and there is also far too much pressure on women in particular to look a certain way.
‘It is up to all of us, from teachers to parents, and magazine editors to programme makers, to celebrate women for who they are. As our survey shows, the putting-down and name-calling is simply ruining young lives.’
Many of the young women questioned came from poor backgrounds, and either lived alone or with a single parent. The majority were on the Entry to Employment programme, which gives unemployed young people skills to gain work.