Tag: bullied

Half Of Teens Report Being Bullied In New Study [mtv.com, by Gil Kaufman, 26/10/2010]

Photo: Getty Images
Photo: Getty Images

If you’ve ever been taunted, teased, bullied or roughed up, these statistics will not surprise you. According to the largest study of its kind ever conducted, half of all high school students admit to bullying their peers and nearly as many say they were bullied during the past year.

The study from the Josephson Institute of Ethics comes amid a flurry of stories about the sometimes-fatal consequences of bullying, spurred by the recent suicides of a number of gay teens who took their lives after harassment about their sexuality.

“If the saying ‘sticks and stones will break my bones but names will never harm me’ was ever true, it certainly is not so today,” said Michael Josephson, founder and president of the institute, in a press release announcing the results. Josephson also pointed out the especially harsh nature of cyberbullying: “Insults, name calling, relentless teasing and malicious gossip often inflict deep and enduring pain. … It’s not only the prevalence of bullying behavior and victimization that’s troublesome. The Internet has intensified the injury. What’s posted on the Internet is permanent, and it spreads like a virus — there is no refuge. The difference between the impact of bullying today versus 20 years ago is the difference between getting into a fistfight and using a gun.”

Previous surveys by the institute did not take cyberbullying into account, but according to the report, which interviewed more than 43,000 high-schoolers ages 15 to 18, 50 percent admit they bullied someone in the past year, while 47 percent said they had been bullied, teased or taunted in a way that seriously upset them in that same time period.

The survey respondents, from 78 public and 22 private schools, revealed other troubling trends. Almost one-third (33 percent) said violence is a big problem at their school, and one in four (24 percent) said they don’t feel very safe at their school. What’s worse is that the violence does not appear to be constrained to just verbal taunts, as more than half (52 percent) said they’ve hit a person because they were angry in the past year, 10 percent said they took a weapon to school at least once in the past year. And 16 percent admitted to having been intoxicated at school.

“The combination of bullying, a penchant toward violence when one is angry, the availability of weapons and the possibility of intoxication at school increases significantly the likelihood of retaliatory violence,” Josephson said, referring parents to the Character Counts survey for information on what they can do to prevent bullying and for signs to recognize if bullying is taking place.

As stars and political figures from President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Adam Lambert and Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington speak out in the It Gets Better video series to encourage bullied teens to keep their heads up, and Brittany Snow continues to spread the word in conjunction with MTV’s Love Is Louder campaign, the Josephson survey revealed troubling details about stubbornly consistent violent teen tendencies.

In one question, 21 percent of respondents admitted to mistreating someone because he or she belonged to a different group. An even higher number (23 percent) said they are prejudiced against certain groups, and 42 percent said they have used racial insults. These figures were almost identical to numbers from a 2008 survey.

To spread a message of hope to victims of bullying and harassment, join MTV, Brittany Snow and the Jed Foundation in telling the world that Love Is Louder than hate. Visit the project’s Facebook page, upload videos to Your.MTV.com and use the hashtag #loveislouder on Twitter.

New data on bullying: 17% report regular abuse [The Washington Post, by Valerie Strauss, 20/10/2010]

New data on bullying released today show that 17 percent of American students report being bullied two to three times a month or more within a school semester, with girls and boys having similar rates.

The information was gleaned from an anonymous survey of 524,054 U.S. students in grades 3 through 12, and it comes when bullying is in the news because of a series of suicides by young gays who had been bullied.

The survey was conducted by Dan Olweus (pronounced Ol-VEY-us), who is considered the founding father of research on bully/victim issues. It is being released by the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program.

The program for elementary, junior high and middle schools that he created is aimed at preventing and/or reducing bullying and is designed to improve peer relations and make schools safer places. (You can find reports analyzing different bullying programs here.)

Researchers say that the approach, which involves every adult and student in the class and helps teach students how to safely not be bystanders when bullying occurs, has been shown to have the strongest and most long-lasting improvements.

The co-author of the analysis is Susan P. Limber. Here is some of the information released today:

Being bullied

  • 17 percent of students indicated that they had been bullied with some frequency (two to three times per month or more within the school semester).
  • There were similar rates for girls (16 percent) and boys (17 percent).
  • Bullying is most prevelant in third grade, when almost 25 percent of students reported being bullied two, three or more times a month. The rate slowly declines each year through 12th grade, when about 12 percent of boys and less than 10 percent of girls reported being bullied.Bullying others
  • 10 percent of students indicated they had bullied others with some frequency (two to three times per month or more within the semester).
  • Boys (12 percent) were more likely than girls (7 percent) to indicate they had bullied others.How long has the bullying lasted?
  • For students who have been bullied, significant numbers reported being bullied for long periods:
  • 16 percent of girls boys reported having been bullied for about a year.
  • 23 percent of girls and 30 percent of boys said they had been bullied for several years.
  • Bystander behavior
  • When asked what they feel when they see a student their age being bullied, the vast majority of students (83 percent) indicated that they feel sorry for the bullied student (90 percent of girls, 75 percent of boys).
  • Students were asked, “How do you usually react if you see or learn that a student your age is being bullied?” and had the following responses:

    I have never noticed that students my age have been bullied.
    Girls: 24 percent. Boys: 30 percent.

    I take part in the bullying.
    Girls: 1 percent. Boys: 3 percent.

    I don’t do anything but think it is OK.
    Girls: 1 percent. Boys: 2 percent.

    I just watch what goes on.
    Girls: 9 percent. Boys: 14 percent.

    I don’t do anything, but I think I ought to help the bullied students.
    Girls: 30 percent. Boys: 22 percent.

    I try to help the bullied student.
    Girls: 35 percent. Boys: 29 percent.

    More than 40 states have some sort of law that makes bullying illegal, yet, as the statistics show, the harassment of young kids by their classmates remains common.

    Clearly laws alone can’t get the job done. Parents have to be involved, and so do schools.

    A school-wide assembly to discuss bullying won’t work. Schools that are serious about reducing bullying implement programs that involve every adult in the school, from the principal to the janitors, and spend time once a week engaging students in discussion and activities to understand the problem and learn how to deal with it.

    This is not a topic that we hear our education leaders talk about very much, except when someone dies.

    If we want kids to feel safe enough in schools to do well academically, bullying is a topic that should no longer be ignored.