initiatives have become standard at schools across the country, but a new UT
Arlington study finds that students attending those schools may be more likely
to be a victim of bullying than children at schools without such programs.
findings run counter to the common perception that bullying prevention programs
can help protect kids from repeated harassment or physical and emotional
possible reason for this is that the students who are victimizing their peers
have learned the language from these anti-bullying campaigns and programs,” said
Seokjin Jeong, an assistant professor of criminology and criminal justice at UT
Arlington and lead author of the study, which was published in the Journal of Criminology.
schools with interventions say, ‘You shouldn’t do this,’ or ‘you shouldn’t do
that.’ But through the programs, the students become highly exposed to what a
bully is and they know what to do or say when questioned by parents or teachers,”
study suggested that future direction should focus on more sophisticated
strategies rather than just implementation of bullying prevention programs along
with school security measures such as guards, bag and locker searches or metal
detectors. Furthermore, given that bullying is a relationship problem,
researchers need to better identify the bully-victim dynamics in order to
develop prevention policies accordingly, Jeong said.
across various race, ethnicity, religion and socio-economic classes can benefit
from such important, relevant Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice
research, said Beth Wright, dean of the UT Arlington College of Liberal Arts.
important discovery will result in improvements in health, in learning, and in relationships,
with unlimited positive impact,” Wright said.
growing body of research shows that students who are exposed to physical or
emotional bullying experience a significantly increased risk of anxiety,
depression, confusion, lowered self-esteem and suicide. In addition to school
environmental factors, researchers wanted to know what individual-level factors
played a key role in students who are bullied by peers in school.
their study, Jeong and his co-author, Byung Hyun Lee, a doctoral student in
criminology at Michigan State University, analyzed data from the Health
Behavior in School-Aged Children 2005-2006 U.S. study. The HBSC study has been
conducted every four years since 1985 and is sponsored by the World Health
Organization. The sample consisted of 7,001 students, ages 12 to 18, from 195
data preceded the highly publicized, 2010 “It Gets Better” campaign founded by
syndicated columnist and author Dan Savage and popularized by YouTube videos
featuring anti-bullying testimonials from prominent advocates.
UT Arlington team found that older students were less likely to be victims of
bullying than younger students, with serious problems of bullying occurring
among sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders. The most pervasive bullying occurred
at the high school level.
were more likely than girls to be victims of physical bullying, but girls were
more likely to be victims of emotional bullying. A lack of involvement and
support from parents and teachers was likely to increase the risk of bullying
victimization. These findings are all consistent with prior studies.
researchers found that race or ethnicity was not a factor in whether students
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