International Journal of Bullying Prevention

We examined how bullying victimization across childhood and adolescence was associated with BPD symptoms in emerging adulthood. Participants were drawn from the McMaster Teen Study, representing a community sample. A three-class solution of bullying victimization trajectories was selected from a semi-parametric group-based trajectory analysis (ages 10 to 18, n = 701). Most individuals followed a low decreasing trajectory (71.3%), followed by a moderate stable trajectory (25.2%) and a high stable trajectory (3.5%), which predicted BPD symptoms in emerging adulthood (ages 19 to 22; n = 338). Results indicated that the high stable and moderate stable groups differed from the low decreasing group on BPD symptoms; individuals who were bullied by peers in childhood and adolescence were more likely to have elevated symptoms of BPD in adulthood. When controlling for gender and childhood maltreatment, this differentiation only held true for the high stable group. Results suggest that peer relations are powerful enough to influence subsequent personality pathology. Implications are examined through a developmental trauma framework.

Cross-age tutoring and co-operative group work have been shown to help student tutors and tutees acquire academic and non-academic skills and knowledge. A novel intervention (Cross-Age Teaching Zone, CATZ) that combined them was tested for its effects on student tutors’ thinking skills associated with (i) dealing pro-socially with peer provocations and (ii) avoiding hostile attribution bias. Small co-operative groups of 11- and 15-year-old students (N = 228) designed a CATZ lesson on these themes and delivered it to younger students. The CATZ tutors, but not matched controls (N = 189), showed significant improvements on both outcome measures. Participants aged 9 to 15 years (N = 469) were also asked about: (1) their willingness to act as CATZ tutors/tutees, (2) how effective they think such CATZ activities would be, (3) how much they valued autonomy in how they might deliver CATZ, and (4) their relative preference for being taught by older students versus teachers. Overall, participants expressed positive views of CATZ, which also helped students learn patterns of thinking that can help them avoid aggressive and conflict behavior. This initial evidence on the effectiveness of CATZ calls for further research to use CATZ across a range of social, emotional, and behavioral domains to support its wider uptake in schools.

Bạo lực học đường là một mối đe dọa sức khỏe cộng đồng có tầm quan trọng toàn cầu. Các đặc điểm nhân cách đã được chứng minh có khả năng dự đoán vai trò bạo lực. Nghiên cứu này nhằm đánh giá tỷ lệ bạo lực và mối quan hệ của nó với các đặc điểm nhân cách Big-Five trong số thanh thiếu niên Nigeria đang học trong trường. Bốn trăm ba mươi hai thanh thiếu niên trong độ tuổi từ 12 đến 18 (M = 15,32, SD = ± 1,58) đã được chọn ngẫu nhiên từ sáu trường trung học ở Ilesa, Nigeria. Các đặc điểm nhân cách được đánh giá bằng Bộ công cụ nhân cách Big-Five, trong khi hành vi bạo lực được đánh giá bằng bảng hỏi về mối quan hệ bạn bè. Tỷ lệ hành vi bạo lực trong số những người tham gia là cao, đạt 85,4%. Có sự khác biệt có ý nghĩa thống kê (p = .001) giữa những kẻ bạo lực và những người không bạo lực về đặc điểm tâm lý thần kinh. Trong phân tích hồi quy, đặc điểm dễ chịu dự đoán hành vi bạo lực khi là kẻ bạo lực (B = −.090, SE = .023, β = −.231, t = −3.943, 95% C.I. [−.135, −.045], p < .001) và khi là nạn nhân (B = −.138, SE = .026, β = −.310, t = −5.384, 95% C.I. [−.188, −.088], p < .001). Có một tỷ lệ cao về bạo lực học đường trong số thanh thiếu niên ở Nigeria. Đặc điểm dễ chịu dự đoán hành vi bạo lực, cho dù với tư cách là kẻ bạo lực hay nạn nhân. Các phát hiện của chúng tôi nhấn mạnh sự cần thiết của các can thiệp nhằm vào các đặc điểm nhân cách để ngăn chặn và chống lại bạo lực học đường.

This paper examines the relationship between parental monitoring and control, parents’ perceived knowledge of their adolescent’s online activities, and parents’ perceived knowledge of their adolescent’s involvement in cyberbullying, among Israeli Jewish and Arab parents of adolescents. The 407 participants consisted of two groups: Jewish (n = 194) and Arab (n = 213) parents of adolescents in Israel, who were recruited via online social networks and completed an online survey. The self-report questionnaire included the Stattin and Kerr Parental Control and Parental Monitoring Questionnaire (Stattin & Kerr in Developmental Psychology 36:366, 2000), as well as parental knowledge of child online activities and witnessing and experiencing cyberbullying. Parental monitoring and control were perceived as higher by Jewish than Arab parents, while no group differences were found for perceived child disclosure or parental knowledge of adolescent online activity. Parental knowledge of the adolescent witnessing cyberbullying was higher among Arab than Jewish parents, while the opposite was found for parental knowledge of the adolescent experiencing cyberbullying. Parental knowledge of the adolescent both witnessing and experiencing cyberbullying was related to group affiliation, lower parental education, and higher parental perceived knowledge of the adolescent’s online activities. Parents’ perceived knowledge of the adolescent witnessing cyberbullying was further related to higher perceived adolescent disclosure. The study increases our understanding of perceived parental involvement and its relationship with parents’ perceived knowledge of the adolescent’s involvement in cyberbullying in a diverse and multicultural society.

This article presents an analysis of qualitative data collected from general and special education teachers (n = 36) participating in a four-module professional development training focused on preventing bullying among students with disabilities. Analysis was driven by Braun and Clarke (Qualitative Research in Psychology 3:77–101, 2006) six step process for thematic analysis. We report on four major themes: (1) the effect of teachers’ identities, including race, gender, age, and cultural and social backgrounds; (2) teacher perspectives of the role of parents in bullying prevention; (3) teacher views concerning bullying between students and best practices for responding to reports of bullying in schools; (4) the influence of sociocultural factors on bullying in classrooms. Taken together, these themes suggest that teachers reflect on their role as the “kind of teacher” that prevents bullying, which has implications for the students within their classroom. Results inform best practices for the design and delivery of instructional programs and workshops that consider teacher identity and create environments that better support teachers in preventing and responding to bullying in their classrooms.

A negative consequence of the proliferation of social media is the increase in online abuse. Bullying, once restricted to the playground, has found a new home on social media. Online social networks on their part have intensified efforts to tackle online abuse, but unfortunately, such is the scale of the problem that many young people are still regularly subjected to a wide range of abuse online. Research in automated detection of online abuse has increased considerably in recent times. However, existing studies on online abuse detection typically focus on developing newer algorithms to improve predictions, and little research is done on developing impactful tools that leverage these algorithms to tackle online abuse. In this paper, we present BullStop, a mobile application that can use different machine learning models to detect cyberbullying. A new cyberbullying dataset containing 62,587 tweets annotated using a taxonomy of different cyberbullying types was created to facilitate the classifier’s training. BullStop was developed using a participatory and user-centred design approach involving young people, parents, educators, law enforcement and mental health professionals. Additionally, the application incorporates online training for the ML models using ground truth supplied by the user as additional training data, and in this way, it can create a personalised classifier for each user. Furthermore, on detecting online abuse, the application automatically initiates punitive actions such as deleting offensive messages and blocking cyberbullies on behalf of the user. BullStop is freely available on the Google Play Store and has been downloaded by hundreds of users.

In this study, we wished to examine the potential relationships between the skills measured by an individually administered standardized measure of cognitive ability and a self-report measure of indirect bullying, overt aggression, and prosocial skills. Therefore, a sample of 106 female students were recruited from a private, faith-based university located in an urban setting in the mid-Atlantic region of the USA (US; M = 19.34 years; 84.9% White) to investigate the relationships between cognitive variables and interpersonal behavior. Multiple regression analyses revealed that participants’ performance on a Verbal Comprehension subtest significantly predicted their self-reported prosocial skills, with their Visual-Auditory Learning–Delayed skills enhancing this prediction. Additionally, in this sample, females’ Visual Matching skills were significantly predictive of overt aggression. However, despite the researchers’ hypotheses to the contrary, no cognitive skills were found to significantly predict forms of relational and social bullying. Implications of these findings for research and practice are discussed.

The Wisconsin School Violence and Bullying Prevention Study, funded by the National Institutes of Justice (NIJ), was a two-year case-control study in 24 Wisconsin middle schools (11 experimental; 13 control) seeking to understand the impact of a comprehensive bullying prevention program on bullying victimization rates. Participating schools’ bullying prevention programs were assessed at baseline and project-end using the Wisconsin Bullying Prevention Program Assessment Tool (BPPAT). This self-assessment tool, developed prior to the start of the research project, was developed by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) and partners throughout Wisconsin. The BPPAT is an open-source 42-item assessment tool across 9 topic areas focused on policies and procedures with minimal financial and logistical burdens towards implementation. By design, it acknowledges wide variance across schools and districts for current practices and provides guidance, going forward, for program improvement. In the accompanying study, experimental schools were instructed to, with technical assistance, enhance their program by filling gaps identified through their completion of the BPPAT over two school years. A significant enhancement resulted among all schools, experimental and control, between 2015 and 2017 with a spill-over effect due to data collection requirements reducing programmatic differences between groups. Experimental schools reported significant declines in verified incidents of bullying with a non-significant decline among control schools. From this project, researchers determined that (1) schools are able to make program improvements in a short time period and (2) this concerted, and largely non-prescriptive, effort can have a positive and measurable impact on bullying victimization at this age group. Broader implications for the BPPAT and its use are preliminary and next steps are discussed and recommendations made.