Bystanders Play Crucial Role in Preventing Bullying

The National Center for Mental Health Promotion and Youth Violence Prevention brought together more than 900 school and community leaders to connect and reflect at its national conference Strengthening Our Future: Developing Healthy Children and Youth, Strong Families, and Safe Communities, held April 26 to 30 in Kansas City, Mo.

The National Center is a training and technical assistance center for more than 160 federally funded projects which bring together school districts, mental health centers and community agencies to promote mental health and prevent youth violence. This year’s national conference brought together for the first time three distinct groups of SAMSHA grantees from Safe Schools/Healthy Students, Targeted Capacity Expansion, and the Youth Violence Prevention Program.

The national conference had three goals to share experiences and ideas with each other; to offer opportunities to work with peers, attend skill building sessions, and participate in one-on-one meetings for intensive technical assistance; and to allow attendees to customize the confere nce to meet specific project needs.

Grantees selected from more than 200 workshops and general sessions on topics that ranged from cultural competence and gender issues to school-community collaboration and mentoring. Other sessions offered opportunities for grantees to network with peers and to meet with policy makers. Time and again, participants said that they were especially pleased to hear from and network with other practitioners from across the country. Given the importance of school and community v iolence prevention efforts, the four bullying sessions were particularly well attended.

One session that was especially popular was a three-hour seminar on bullying, held on the first day of the conference. There, attendees learned that between 15% and 20% of all students will experience bullying at some point between kindergarten and high school graduation, according to Dr. Renée Wilson-Simmons, associate director of HHD's Center for Research on High Risk Behaviors and team leader for the Youth Violence Prevention Program. No geographic region is immune to bullying behavior, she said, adding that students in urban, suburban, and rural areas had an equal chance of being bullied.

The interactive workshop reviewed evidence-based programs, implementation strategies, skills development, and relevant data on bullying. It also included longitudinal studies showing that bullying behavior may be foreshadowed –beginning early in a child's life and often continuing into adulthood, said Dr. Ron Slaby, a senior sc ientist at HHD. "Violence is about as predictable as IQ," he said. "Unless it stops, you can expect bullying to increase because it provides its own rewards," he said.

The first step in crafting a plan to prevent bullying is to define what bullying is, said Dr. Wilson-Simmons, adding that bullying can be psychological as well as physical. "When communities put together a bullying program, they have to create a definition that makes the most sense to them," she said. Bullying is different from other forms of violence in that there is a power differential between the aggressors and the victims and that the violence is repeated over a long period of time, said Dr. Wilson-Simmons.

The next step is to recognize that bystanders have a critical role in bullying as victims and aggressors. "The message here is that there is something that supports bullying behavior, said Dr. Slaby. "Typically, that continuity of support comes from bystanders."

Some of those who attended the seminar have worked on bullying prevention plans before but said that the bystander angle provided a new twist on old practices. “The emphasis on bystanders as an important element in bullying prevention is really valuable,” said Kathy Benedetto, mental health consultant for the Johnson Count y Schools and conference attendee. “This seminar offered some practical suggestions that connect research findings to schools settings to get results,” she said.

The problem is, though, that being a passive bystander is the acceptable norm, said Dr. Wils on-Simmons. She described a research project that she and Dr. Slaby conducted in which they asked students to circle only the names from a list of classmates who they considered to be bystanders in bullying situations. “Kids ended up circling the entire page,” she said.

The essential ingredients in bullying prevention programs are to show children what bullying behavior is and to teach them what options they have as bystanders to stop it. "Bystanders can be your best ally to prevent bullying -- or your worst enemy in promoting it," said Dr. Slaby.

CONFERENCE: Strengthening Our Future: Developing Healthy Children and Youth, Strong Families, and Safe Communities ,

http://www.promoteprevent.org/national_conference/index.html