Bullying and Victimization Across the Lifespan: Playground Politics and Power

By Paul R. Smokowski and Caroline B. R. Evans

This book examines bullying and victimization at different points across the lifespan, from childhood through old age. It examines bullying at disparate ecological levels, such as within the family, in school, on the internet, at the work place, and between countries. This volume explores the connections between variations of bullying that manifests in multiple forms of violence and victimization. It also describes how bullying dynamics can affect individuals, families, and communities. Using a universal definition of bullying dynamics, chapters discuss bullying roles during different developmental periods across the lifespan. In addition, chapters review each role in the bullying dynamic and discuss behavioral health consequences, prevention strategies, and ways to promote restorative justice to decrease the impact of toxic bullying behaviors on society. The book concludes with recommendations for possible solutions and prevention suggestions.

Topics featured in thisbook include:

• Mental health and the neurobiological impacts of bullying.
• The prevalence of bystanders and their behavior in bullying dynamics.
• The relationship between traditional bullying and cyberbullying.
• How bullying causes trauma.
• Sibling violence and bullying.
• Bullying in intimate partner relationships.
• Elder abuse as a form of bullying.
• Why bullying is a global public health concern.

Bullying and Victimization Across the Lifespan is a must-have resource for researchers, professors, clinicians, and related professionals as well as graduate students in clinical child, school, and developmental psychology, social work, public health, and family studies as well as anthropology, social psychology, sociology, and criminology.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Springer
• Release date: Jun 29, 2019
• ISBN: 9783030202934

Book preview

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019

Paul R. Smokowski and Caroline B. R. EvansBullying and Victimization Across the Lifespanhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20293-4_1

1. Playground Politics: How the Bullying Framework Can Be Applied to Multiple Forms of Violence

Paul R. Smokowski¹  and Caroline B. R. Evans²

(1)

School of Social Welfare, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, USA

(2)

Rhode Island College, Providence, RI, USA

Keywords

BullyingVictimizationBystanderBullying prevalenceBullying definition

1.1 Introduction

Bullying. A single word that conjures up many strong images. What comes to your mind? The traditional image of the biggest kid in the classroom stealing lunch money? Or the geeky looking boy in glasses getting stuffed into a locker? Perhaps a group of popular girls whispering and snickering around an exclusive lunch table while a left-out onlooker sits alone? Or maybe a string of mean and hurtful text messages sent day after day? Bullying comes in many shapes and sizes, and for the last two decades or so, the national spotlight on bullying has intensified. Increased media attention to bullying, frantic parents, worried school personnel, and the multiple suicides of bullied youth have spurred bullying researchers to investigate the devastating consequences of bullying and to create and test bullying intervention programs. As a result, bullying research now has a unique niche under the umbrella of violence research.

Despite the publicity and integration into our cultural consciousness, bullying often remains a know it when you see it phenomenon for many people. What is bullying? How is it different from aggression and violence? Where and when does it happen? Who gets victimized? Bullying is all around us and always has been. The vignettes below provide some examples of bullying at different life stages and across multiple venues.

Jose and Ernie were at the top of the slide during playtime at preschool. Jose was a big, sturdy boy who had trouble waiting his turn. Ernie fidgeted anxiously at the top of the slide as he looked down, taking his time. Jose pushed him so that he would go faster. Ernie flew off the slide and broke his arm when he hit the ground.

Drink bleach and die. Why don’t you go kill yourself? You’re ugly. You should die. These are a few of the phrases 12-year-old Rebecca Sedwick heard every day for a year from at least 15 of her classmates. When the harassment moved from in person to online, there was no escape and Sedwick could not take the abuse any longer. In 2014, she jumped from a silo tower to her death.

At age 10, Daniel W. Smith was routinely beaten up by his older brother. Put in a headlock or stranglehold, Smith’s brother would punch him repeatedly. Fighting back made it worse, so Smith just took the beatings and waited for them to end.

Fifteen-year-old Audrie Pott hung herself in 2012 one week after being sexually assaulted by three teenage boys at a party. Instead of receiving support after the trauma of sexual assault, pictures of the assault were posted online and spread like wild fire throughout the school.

The five Ferguson siblings endured years of child abuse. Hit with baseball bats, burned with irons, starved, and forced to drink urine, the children never told the family secret and it took years for them to be rescued. Now, both of their parents are serving 65-year prison terms.

Eighth grader Marcus McTear started out as a loving and sweet boyfriend. But as time went on, he began to control Rae Anne Spence’s every move. He dictated what she wore, forbid her to wear makeup, and punched or slapped her if she disrespected him. Spence attempted to end the relationship on multiple occasions, but McTear threatened suicide and would write loving apology notes. Almost two years later, Spence finally changed schools in order to extricate herself from this harmful relationship and McTear set his sights on 16-year-old Ortralla Mosely. In 2003, McTear stabbed Mosely to death in the hallway of their high school when Mosely tried to end their relationship.

In July 2014, 17-year-old Michelle Carter convinced her boyfriend Conrad Roy III to commit suicide via carbon monoxide poisoning. As Roy sat in his truck breathing in carbon monoxide texting Carter that he was having doubts, Carter texted, When are you going to do it? Stop ignoring the question.

In 2011, drum major Robert Champion died after participating in a ritual called Crossing Bus C. As Champion made his way to the back of the bus, his bandmates from the Florida A&M University marching band punched him and beat him with mallets and drumsticks. Minutes later, Champion lost his eyesight, went into cardiac arrest, and died.

Football player Tim Piazza just wanted to be accepted by the Beta Theta Pi brothers and earn a spot in the Pennsylvania State University fraternity. Surely his future brothers would look out for him and keep him safe. After drinking copious amounts of alcohol while engaging in an obstacle course called The Gauntlet, Piazza fell down the basement stairs and lost consciousness. After being hauled to a couch, the fraternity brothers poured beer on Piazza and slapped him in the face to help him regain consciousness. No one called for help until 12 hours after the fall. Piazza died the next day with an estimated blood alcohol content of 0.40.

Katie fell in love with her husband quickly; they were engaged and married within 3 months. He gradually cut her off from her family and friends, and took over all of their finances, leaving Katie with little access to money and forcing her to put all big purchases on her credit card. Katie’s husband had guns in the house and would constantly clean them in front of her as if to remind her of their presence and that he could use one any time he pleased. Sometimes he would slap Katie in the face or shove her around. Then one night, he beat her so badly she ended up in the ICU and he was sent to prison for 7 years.

Forty-seven-year-old Eric Donovan died of a heart attack deemed to be directly related to harassment by his supervisor, Nadine Hendricken. Hendricken constantly made hostile personal comments and was rude and demeaning towards Donovan in the presence of coworkers. Dealing with this day after day caused Donovan extreme stress, anxiety, and panic attacks that ultimately led to his death.

At 83, Barbara Jean had no children of her own and her nieces and nephews lived a few hours away, which meant she had no one to take care of her. When the caretaker of her home and lawn, Mike, offered to move in to help take care of her, Barbara Jean was elated. However, Mike gradually took over Barbara Jean’s finances and stopped sending the checks she wrote to pay for her home’s utility bills. When overdue notices arrived, Mike berated Barbara Jean for forgetting to send in the money. He started stealing money from her and had her rewrite her will and became her power of attorney.

An African American girl walking in an all-white neighborhood was chased by a white man wielding a stick shouting, Go back home! A black man out for a run in the early morning was stopped by a policeman and held at gun point because he looked suspicious. A group of Latino teenagers were followed closely by a store clerk as they perused the merchandise at a store, while their white counterparts browsed the aisles unencumbered. These types of events happen to people of color all the time.

In 2017, US President Donald Trump was strolling with other world leaders at the NATO conference when he shoved Dusko Markovic, the president of Montenegro, out of his way. Trump was apparently trying to reach the front row for a photograph. However, as Trump pushed Markovic aside, he uttered no apology or a polite excuse-me, Trump did not even acknowledge Markovic’s existence, it was almost as if Markovic was invisible. The leader of the most powerful country in the world rode roughshod over the president of a small country of 600,000. Trump then straightened his tie and was in the center of the picture.

What themes do you see across these examples—aggression, violence, domination, harassment, callous disrespect? Traditionally, different forms of violence have been studied in isolation. Researchers studying bullying, sibling violence, child maltreatment, teen dating violence, domestic violence, college hazing, workplace bullying, elder maltreatment, discrimination, and violence within and between larger social units (e.g., communities, countries) work in isolated silos with minimal communication (Hamby & Grych, 2013; Wilkins, Tsao, Hertz, Davis, & Klevens, 2014). These researchers all study forms of violence, however, each form of violence is viewed as a distinct entity, when in fact they are all related and interconnected (Wilkins et al., 2014). In an attempt to unite violence researches and break down the barriers between research on various forms of violence, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Division of Violence Prevention (DVP; 2016) has recently embarked on a 5-year mission to understand the interconnections between these multiple forms of violence.

The CDC’s mission is rooted in the fact that different forms of violence often co-occur, indicating that all forms of violence must be understood and studied together. Violent victimization can be cumulative and youth who are victimized by one form of violence are likely to experience other forms of violence (Finkelhor, Turner, Hamby, & Ormrod, 2011; Hamby & Grych, 2013). For example, the National Survey of Children’s Exposure to Violence found that 64.5% of surveyed youth reported more than one type of direct victimization and 10.9% reported five or more types of direct victimization (Finkelhor et al., 2011). Further, youth who were physically assaulted in the past year were five times as likely to have also been sexually victimized and more than four times as likely to have also been maltreated compared to non-victimized youth (Finkelhor, Turner, Ormrod, Hamby, & Kracke, 2009). The same is true of violent perpetration; individuals who have behaved violently in one context are more likely to behave violently in other contexts (Foshee et al., 2015; Herrenkohl, Sousa, Tajima, Herrnkohl, & Moylan, 2008; Klevens, Simon, & Chen, 2012); indeed, engaging in one type of aggression increases the odds of engaging in additional types of aggression from 1.5 to 4 times (Klevens et al., 2012). For example, youth who engaged in peer violence were more likely to also be violent towards their dating partners (Foshee et al., 2015) and adults who domestically abused their partners were more likely to abuse their children (See Herrenkohl et al., 2008 for a review). This means that youth who are bullied at school could be victims of other forms of violence such as child maltreatment, dating violence, or sibling violence. Likewise, youth who bully others might also be engaging in violence against their siblings or dating partners. Clearly, there are groups of perpetrators who manipulate, harass, and abuse others across multiple social contexts. There are also victims who are often abused at different times over the human life span. And even more people witness this perpetration and victimization from different distances, reacting or withdrawing—we all play a role in the bullying dynamic.

Further connecting the various forms of violence is the fact that different forms of violence have similar risk factors for perpetrators and similar consequences for victims. Perpetrator risk factors for violence span the entire ecology and include individual, family, peer, school, community, and cultural factors. For example, individual temperament (e.g., anger, poor impulse control, substance use, viewing the world as hostile), family relationships (e.g., high levels of conflict, poor parent-child relationships, economic stress), deviant peer behavior, community characteristics (e.g., disadvantaged neighborhood, neighborhood violence, low neighborhood cohesion), and societal stressors (e.g., income inequality, high rates of poverty; Foshee et al., 2015; Sumner et al., 2015) are all risk factors for violence. In terms of consequences, violent victimization, regardless of the form, can result in multiple negative outcomes including injury, sexually transmitted diseases and infections, mental health disorders (e.g., depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, conduct disorder), eating disorders, substance use, suicidality, and death (Division of violence Prevention, 2016; See Sumner et al., 2015 for a review).

Given the multiple connections between various forms of violence, it is vital that researchers begin collaborating. Collaboration will increase researchers’ ability to create wide ranging and functional intervention programs. One possible means to increase collaboration is to create a common framework through which researchers, practitioners, policy makers, and all concerned citizens can view and understand violence. We will use the bullying dynamic as a framework through which to view and understand multiple forms of violence at different ages and stages and within diverse contexts. Applying the bullying dynamic to multiple forms of violence provides a nuanced understanding of the power relationships inherent in violent behavior, providing a new and innovative way of viewing violence across the life span.

1.2 The Definition of Bullying

I know it when I see it. These words were uttered by Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart in 1964 in the case Jacobellis v. Ohio. This phrase has become somewhat of a colloquial expression that attempts to define something subjective that lacks a clear definition. Many school personnel, parents, and youth take this approach when it comes to identifying bullying and as a result, behaviors are often mislabeled as bullying. A certain amount of aggression and conflict is normative. This is not to say that such behavior should be tolerated or condoned, but children and adolescents have conflicts and arguments and are sometimes mean to one another. Being left out or pushed on the playground once or twice, while not pleasant, does not constitute bullying. However, these isolated behaviors are often erroneously labeled as bullying, especially by adults (e.g., parents, school personnel) who themselves were bullied as children. The example of Jose and Ernie on the preschool slide ended very badly, with Ernie’s arm broken and Jose expelled from preschool. The event, and the intense arguments among the adults involved, would define much of their childhood experiences. But it was not bullying. It was a poor decision made by a preschooler paired with physical force that was not adequately controlled.

Being bullied often leaves permanent scars and results in a hypersensitivity or a bullying radar of sorts. Adults who were bullied as children might be overly sensitive to bullying and therefore overreact to any form of interpersonal conflict they witness. This inclination to label minor aggressive interactions as bullying might be especially strong for parents who witness or hear about their own child being hassled at school, especially if the parent was bullied. Thus, when a child comes home saying he/she was pushed on the playground or excluded from a particular lunch table, parents often storm into school, demand a meeting with the principal, and report that their child is being bullied. In reality, their child has experienced one of the painful and unpleasant realities of growing up. If, however, the pushing or exclusion continues day after day, labeling the behavior as bullying and demanding school intervention are certainly warranted.

Conversely, depending upon how parents and school personnel envision and define bullying, they might neglect to intervene in behaviors that actually are bullying, especially with more covert forms of bullying such as rumor spreading or cyberbullying. If adults are desensitized to bullying or believe that bullying is a rite of passage or a normal part of growing up, they can easily fail to recognize when bullying is right in front of them or they could recognize it but not intervene. Perhaps some adults who were bullied as children, rather than becoming hypersensitive to bullying, believe that bullying is a normal part of life and helps toughen kids up. Adults might also believe that kids should work through conflicts on their own and therefore refrain from intervening. Covert forms of bullying like nasty looks, whispered rumors, or mean text messages are easy to slip past adults and a lack of adult response could simply be due to ignorance that the bullying is even occurring. Further, bullying can be difficult to define and identify because it depends upon the victim’s reactions and interpretations. Bottom line: relying on I know it when I see to define bullying situations is much too subjective and leads to people incorrectly identifying or ignoring bullying situations or failing to intervene when intervention is necessary and warranted. It follows that there is a need for a standardized and widely accepted definition of bullying.

However, difficulty arises because researchers, practitioners, and policy makers often define bullying differently. In fact, the three national surveys on bullying all provide slightly different definitions of bullying (see below in Sect. 1.4 on prevalence rates). Because researchers use inconsistent definitions of bullying, prevalence rates of bullying differ across studies, making comparisons difficult (Gladden, Vivolo-Kantor, Hamburger, & Lumpkin, 2014). While there is no standardized definition of bullying, bullying researchers generally rely on three, distinct, defining features of bullying established by international bullying researcher Dan Olweus (1993):

1.

repetition—bullying occurs repeatedly over time;

2.

power imbalance—the perpetrator has more social and/or physical power than the victim; and

3.

intent to harm—the perpetrator engages in aggression that is intended to physically and/or emotionally harm the victim (Olweus, 1993).

These definitional criteria were recently expanded by the CDC to include three additional key elements: bullying is unwanted, occurs between youth who are not siblings or dating partners, and likely causes the victim distress or harm (Gladden et al., 2014).

Although the above definition is helpful in terms of identifying bullying, it is important to discuss the ambiguity imbedded within the definition. First, the criteria of repetition should be addressed. In general, bullying is repeated over time, however, certain one-time aggressive acts are so egregious they could and should be defined as bullying; however, under the current definition a singular event would not be defined as bullying (Evans & Smokowski, 2016; Finkelhor, Turner, & Hamby, 2012). For example, during the 2012 US presidential race, it came to light that when Republican candidate Mitt Romney was a senior in high school, he incited a group of five friends to forcibly hold down underclassman John Lauber. While Lauber struggled and yelled for help, Romney cut off his ponytail. Lauber reported being haunted by this traumatic incident decades later (Horowitz, 2012), while Romney claimed to have no memory of the event (Bazelon, 2012). Although this was a seemingly single event, the intensity and cruelty surpassed an act of aggression and should be labeled as bullying (Evans & Smokowski, 2016). The term bullying denotes severe and intense aggression and to avoid labeling horrendous one-time events as bullying fails to impart to the perpetrator, victim, and bystanders the seriousness of the event. In the proceeding chapters, we will include intense one-time events that are intended to cause physical or psychological harm to the victim, such as the hazing that killed Robert Champion in the example at the beginning of this chapter, as bullying.

However, the difficulty with expanding the definition of bullying to include single events, is that identifying what single events are horrendous enough to be labeled as bullying is subjective. Given the above discussion about the difficulty adults have in correctly identifying and labeling bullying, disagreement could also arise about whether a specific one-time act of interpersonal aggression constitutes bullying. There is no easy way to solve this conundrum except to say that certain single acts of aggression, like forcibly cutting off someone’s ponytail, cross a line from routine aggression to bullying. Being shoved on the playground once should not be considered bullying, but being tied up to a tree with a jump rope at recess and left is a different story. Below, we have amended the definition of bullying to say that it usually occurs repeatedly over time; this subtle change in wording gives youth, parents, school personnel, practitioners, and researchers the leeway to identify particularly horrible one-time events as bullying.

Power imbalance is the second part of the definition of bullying that requires additional explanation as this concept is quite complex and difficult to define. For example, sources of power might not align: If a stronger but less popular girl repeatedly intimidates a weaker but popular boy, is the controlling dimension popularity, gender, or physical strength? (Finkelhor et al., 2012, p. 272). To further complicate issues, if the girl is from a high socioeconomic status (SES) family and is dressed in trendy and desirable clothing and the boy comes from a low SES family and is wearing worn out hand-me-down clothing, income becomes another dimension of power. The difficulty with the concept of power imbalance is that the significance depends upon the victim’s perceptions (Evans & Smokowski, 2016). If the girl’s physical strength and high SES status cause the boy to feel powerless and afraid, then he might perceive the girl to have more power and could view her repeated harassment as bullying. However, if the boy is sufficiently popular among his classmates and is supported by a group of friends and/or feels more powerful than the girl due to being a male, than he might not be intimidated by the girl’s physical strength and flashy clothing; in this case, the boy would perceive his social power and gender to be more salient than the girl’s physical strength and SES and he might view her taunting as harmless and not define it as bullying. Further, once an act of aggression has begun, the act itself can create a power differential where the perpetrator has more power than the victim. However, the aggressive act could have created this power differential or exacerbated an existing power differential (Finkelhor et al., 2012). There is not an easy solution for the complexities inherent in defining and recognizing a power differential. We highlight these intricacies because it is important for adults witnessing bullying to be aware of and attend to dynamics of power. School personnel should try to understand how students involved in bullying dynamics view the distribution of power; talking with students about power imbalance is a vital step that adults should take to help better understand the bullying dynamic. Power differentials are central to the other forms of violence that we will discuss throughout this book and are actually often more clear cut than the power differential in a bullying dynamic (e.g., the power differential between a parent and child is very clear cut).

In terms of the three additional definitional components added by the CDC, we argue that violence between siblings and dating partners can and should be defined as bullying (to be discussed later). The CDC also added in the definitional component that bullying likely causes harm to the victim. The only foreseeable way bullying would not harm the victim is if the victim had a developmental disability that prevented him/her from understanding the content of the bullying. However, even if this was the case, the presence of the bullying would harm bystanders by potentially making them feel scared and unsafe and would also contribute to a negative school culture and climate. Therefore, it is more accurate to define bullying by saying that bullying causes harm to one or all of the following: victim; bystanders; and the culture and climate of the environment in which the bullying takes place. However, we agree with the CDC that bullying is always unwanted and that this should become part of the formal definition of bullying.

For the purpose of this book, we will rely on a combination of Olweus’s and the CDC’s definition of bullying. Bullying is: Unwanted behavior that occurs between a more powerful perpetrator(s) and weaker victim and usually occurs repeatedly over time; the behavior is intended to harm the victim and does cause harm to the victim, bystanders, and/or culture and climate within the environment where the bullying occurs. We will often refer to the bullying dynamic because of the public nature of bullying events that often include witnesses and bystanders. Bullying is not usually a discreet phenomenon between a perpetrator and victim; it has large group effects on the social networks within the environment where it occurs.

Throughout this book, we will apply this definition of bullying to various forms of interpersonal violence across the life span including violence at home (i.e., sibling violence, child maltreatment), violence in intimate partner relationships (i.e., teen dating violence, domestic violence), college hazing, work place bullying, elder maltreatment, discrimination (i.e., minority-majority group level bullying), and higher level bullying (e.g., conflict between communities and countries). Each of these forms of violence display the majority of the above defining characteristics of bullying (i.e., unwanted, power differential, repeated over time, intended to harm, causes harm), however, they are not generally understood or examined in light of the bullying dynamic.

Before addressing each of these forms of violence, it is important to fully understand the bullying dynamic. In the remainder of this chapter, we will discuss forms of bullying and the scope of the problem in the USA and worldwide; explain the economic cost of bullying; and provide some recommendations for practitioners and school personnel. Chapter 2 discusses the roles in the bullying dynamic and provides a theoretical explanation for why bullying occurs. Chapter 3 addresses the short- and long-term consequences of bullying victimization with special attention to mental and behavioral health, neuroscience, peer relationships, cumulative victimization, longitudinal studies, and trauma. Chapter 4 focuses on bystanders in the bullying dynamic with a discussion of prosocial and antisocial bystanders, and Chap. 5 discusses cyberbullying. Each of the remaining chapters of the book focuses on a specific form of violence and applies the aforementioned bullying definition in order to understand the violent dynamics in a new and innovative way. Chapter 6 discusses bullying in childhood at home and includes an overview of child maltreatment as well as sibling violence; Chap. 7 looks at hazing in college and applies the bullying framework to this form of interpersonal violence; Chap. 8 delves into violence in intimate partner relationships and discusses teen dating violence as well as intimate partner violence; Chap. 9 reviews bullying in adulthood and discusses workplace harassment and bullying; Chap. 10 focuses on elder maltreatment and defines this problem as one of bullying; Chap. 11 examines bullying at a higher level between groups, corporations, communities, and countries with attention on how racial discrimination and hatred can actually be considered a form of bullying; and Chap. 12 provides an overarching concluding summary, focusing on bullying prevention and intervention strategies.

1.3 Forms of Bullying

Bullying includes direct aggressive behaviors that occur in the presence of the victim and indirect aggressive behaviors that occur when the victim is not present but are still intended to cause harm. Direct and indirect bullying behaviors are classified into four types:

1.

Physical bullying is physical force intended to harm the victim such as hitting, kicking, or pushing.

2.

Verbal bullying is oral or written communication like name calling, teasing, or threatening.

3.

Relational bullying is any action intended to harm the victim’s reputation and social relationships such as spreading rumors, excluding, or making embarrassing images of the victim public through the internet, cellphones, or other means.

4.

Bullying by property damage includes stealing and/or destroying the victim’s property (Gladden et al., 2014).

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC; Gladden et al., 2014) consider electronic bullying to be a form of verbal and relational bullying executed using electronic means (e.g., e-mail, instant messaging, chat rooms, websites [e.g., Facebook, Twitter], gaming sites, cell phones [e.g., applications such as Instagram, Snapchat, text messages]) to harass, insult, exclude, and/or ostracize victims. Electronic bullying includes behaviors ranging from harassing text messages or pictures sent via cellphone to creating defamatory websites intended to embarrass or humiliate the victim (Kowalski, Limber, & Agatston, 2012; Raskaukas & Stoltz, 2007).

These forms of bullying behavior occur everywhere, regardless of social class, geography, age, or gender. National assessments throughout the USA, and some across the globe, unfortunately reveal that over one fifth of middle and high school-aged youth are victims of bullying. The prevalence climbs dramatically when perpetrators, bully/victims, and bystanders are added up to capture the full bullying dynamic. Consequently, we use the phrase playground politics to describe the bullying dynamic because this behavior often has its roots in jockeying for social status in early to middle childhood. Yet the aggressive, hierarchical politics we often learn on the school playground commonly extend to adverse interactions across the life span.

1.4 Prevalence of Bullying Nationally and Internationally

National prevalence rates of bullying in the USA come from three major sources: the Health Behavior of School-Aged Children Survey (HBSC ), the School Crime Supplement (SCS ), and the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS ). Each source provides a different definition of bullying, measures bullying differently (i.e., yes/no response versus multiple response options), and assesses bullying across different age ranges (i.e., middle school only, middle and high school, high school only) resulting in slightly different prevalence rates. Further, only one study (HBSC) assesses bullying perpetration as well as victimization (See Table 1.1 for a summary of the three survey results).

Table 1.1

Rates of victimization across national studies

The HBSC is a cross-national survey that began in 1983/1984 with five participating countries. The next year (1985/1986), participation increased to 13 countries. Following 1986, the HBSC was administered every 3 years and in the ensuing decades participation gradually increased until the most recent HBSC (2013/2014), which included 42 countries. The USA began participating and providing national data in 1997/1998 and provided data in 2001/2002, 2005/2006, and 2009/2010, but did not participate in the most recent HBSC survey (2013/2014; WHO, 2016). However, the USA did participate in the 2009/2010 HBSC survey which defined bullying as,

We say a student is being bullied when another student, or a group of students, say or do nasty and unpleasant things to him or her. It is also bullying when a student is teased repeatedly in a way he or she does not like or when he or she is deliberately left out of things. But it is not bullying when two students of about the same strength or power argue or fight. It is also not bullying when a student is teased in a friendly and playful way (World Health Organization, 2012).

This definition touches on repetition, power imbalance, and negative behaviors but in a very cursory manner. First, this definition states that teasing is done repeatedly but does not state that other negative behaviors (e.g., hitting, rumor spreading) must be repeated for a behavior to be defined as bullying. Second, power is not defined and power imbalance is not mentioned; it is not clear that the perpetrator has more power than the victim. Third, very limited examples of bullying behaviors are provided and no examples of cyberbullying or physical bullying are provided. In addition, harm to the victim is not mentioned. Further, who determines if the teasing is being done in a friendly and playful way? If the perpetrator intends the teasing to be a joke, but the victim takes offense, would the HBSC definition consider the behavior to be bullying? The limitations of this definition could impact how youth answer the survey questions and could account for the relatively low rates of bullying victimization that the HBSC found.

HBSC respondents were limited to youth ages 11, 13, and 15. Participants were asked if they had been bullied at least twice in the past couple of months and response options ranged from zero to several times per week. In addition, the HBSC asked if youth had bullied others. In the USA, 13% of 11-year-old girls and 15% of 11-year-old boys reported being bullied; these rates dropped to 12% of 13-year-old girls and 13% of 13-year-old boys and 7% of 15-year-old girls and 6% of 15-year-old boys. In terms of bullying others 3% of 11-year old girls and 8% of boys reported bullying others at least twice in the past couple of months. These rates increased to 8% of 13-year-old girls and 10% of 13-year-old boys and 6% of 15-year-old girls and 9% of 15-year-old boys (World Health Organization, 2012).

The 2015 SCS provided a slightly more comprehensive definition of bullying that more accurately highlights the three definitional components established by Olweus (1993):

Bullying happens when one or more students tease, threaten, spread rumors about, hit, shove or hurt another student. It is not bullying when students of about the same strength or power argue or fight or tease each other in a friendly way. Bullies are usually stronger, or have more friends or more money, or some other power over the student being bullied. Usually, bullying happens over and over, or the student being bullied thinks it might happen over and over (National Center for Education Statistics, 2015).

This definition provides examples of power imbalance and explains that power imbalance is present in a bullying dynamic. A diverse array of bullying behaviors are presented, which gives respondents a comprehensive template of how to define bullying in their own lives. However, this definition does not mention intent to harm and does not state that the victim is harmed.

Participants were asked a series of yes or no questions about whether they were bullied in the current school year and if it was verbal, physical, or social bullying. Youth were then asked how often they were bullied and where the bullying occurred, if they told an adult, how much the bullying impacted various aspects of their life (e.g., work, health), and why they were bullied (e.g., race, religion; National Center for Education Statistics, 2015). The SCS survey was administered to 2317 students in grades 6 through 12 and findings indicated that 20.8% of the sample reported being bullied in the 2014–2015 school year. A slightly higher percentage of females (22.8%) reported being bullied compared to males (18.8%) and in general, rates decreased from sixth grade through middle school and high school. In terms of race, 21.6% of White youth reported being bullied, compared to 24.7% of black youth, 17.2% of Hispanic/Latino youth, and 15.6% of Asian youth (U.S. Department of Education, 2016).

Finally, the most recent YRBSS (CDC, 2015a, 2015b) provided a more cursory definition of bullying:

Bullying is when 1 or more students tease, threaten, spread rumors about, hit, shove, or hurt another student over and over again. It is not bullying when 2 students of about the same strength or power argue or fight or tease each other in a friendly way.

This definition does provide a comprehensive array of examples of bullying behavior but, similar to the HBSC definition, fails to fully explain the concept of power imbalance and does not discuss the harm caused to the victim. Two questions asked youth if they had been bullied or electronically bullied on school property in the year preceding the survey with a yes/no response option. About 15,448 US high school students were surveyed and 20.2% reported being bullied in the year before the survey; a significantly higher percentage of females (24.8%) endorsed being bullied compared to males (15.8%). Bullying decreased across high school from 23.4% in ninth grade to 15.9% in 12th grade (CDC, 2015a).

The YRBSS also collected data from 67,825 middle school youth from 11 states; due to the small state response rate, no national middle school prevalence rate is available. State rates of bullying victimization ranged from 52.4% in West Virginia to 38.0% in Rhode Island. Across all 11 states females were significantly more likely to report being bullied compared to males. Nine states collected data from all three middle school grades and in one (Vermont) a significantly higher percentage of seventh graders reported being bullied compared to sixth graders (sixth grade 45.8% versus seventh grade 48.1%) and eighth graders (seventh grade 48.1% versus eighth grade 44.8%), but in the other eight states there were no significant differences between sixth and seventh graders, between sixth and eighth grade, or seventh and eighth graders in terms of victimization rates (CDC, 2015b. See Table 1.1 for states with the highest and lowest percentages).

In summary, the USA national prevalence rates for bullying vary slightly across the three aforementioned studies. According to the SCS and YRBSS rates of bullying victimization for high school alone and middle and high school combined are about 20%. Rates for middle school youth from the HBSC survey are slightly lower and range from 6% to 15%. However, these rates might be conservative and, as discussed above, could also be impacted by the limitations in the definitions of bullying that were provided. Other studies, including meta-analyses, have found higher rates of bullying. For example, a meta-analysis of 80 studies of traditional and cyberbullying in middle and high school found a prevalence rate of 35% for traditional bullying and 15% for cyberbullying (Modecki, Minchin, Harbaugh, Guerra, & Runions, 2014). Further, when specific forms of bullying are assessed, prevalence rates are higher. For example, the 2005/2006 version of the HBSC assessed specific forms of bullying and found that in a sample of 7182 youth in Grades 6 through 10, 41% reported being the victim of relational bullying, 37% were verbal victims, 13% were physical victims, and 10% were electronic victims (overall prevalence adds to 70%, but some victims experience multiple forms of bullying; Wang, Iannotti, & Nansel, 2009). In a study of 1874 youth across 14 middle- and high-schools in North Carolina, 50% reported being verbally bullied, 29% were physically bullied, and 13% reported cyberbullying (Turner, Exum, Brame, & Holt, 2013). It is possible that assessing specific forms of bullying is more straightforward for youth because they are being asked about a specific behavior as opposed to bullying in general, which is very broad. Taken together, findings indicate that at least one fifth of US middle and high school students have been bullied and as many as two fifths to half have been relational and/or verbal victims, but rates could be higher in certain geographic regions (e.g., study conducted in North Carolina; Turner et al., 2013). The middle school YRBSS rates shown in Table 1.1 underscore bullying victimization as nothing less than a public health epidemic, with a low of 38% of youth in Rhode Island and 54% of middle schoolers in West Virginia reporting victimization. Figure 1.1 displays rates of high school bullying victimization by state. These high school rates are lower than the middle school rates. Further, these rates are only reports from victims, adding bullies and bystanders would substantially increase these