Hi, I'm Dorothy Epelage from the University of Illinois, Urbana- Champagne, and for 22 years, I've been studying bullying, sexual violence, teen dating violence, school based interventions and prevention programs. And today, I want to share just a little bit of information about what we've learned over the last 22 years. So, hopefully, this will be informative. Certainly, we have a short period of time to talk about his two decades of research and clearly it's only going to be the tip of the iceberg. But hopefully, that you'll take away some lessons learned, some things that you might be doing that really is not evidence based and may not prevent bullying in your classroom or in your schools, but maybe also you'll take away some things that would reduce bullying in your schools. So, we've been at this for two decades and certainly, you see me presenting on this but there's 35 Ph.D. students, thousands of undergrads that help us do this work and some really brave superintendents and teachers that have let us come into their classrooms to understand bullying and all the other things it's associated with. So, we've got a host of studies. So, we've done studies where we just do basic research and identify what are the risk and protective factors associated with bullying and sexual violence and teen dating violence all of those things, that unfortunately happens in our schools, but we've also then took those findings, whether they're identifying risk and protective factors, those things that really make kids resilient, and have developed and evaluated actual prevention programs that we would ask teachers to implement. And so we'll talk about that today. But one thing that's very important because in 2011, when Obama had the first White House Conference on bullying is 2011. So, we're a little bit behind there. What happened was there was this raising of awareness of bullying. And everybody was talking about bullying as if we understood things. And what happens when the media covers it, is that you're left with mistaken perceptions, right? So, some myths if you will. So, we're all on the same page so that you understand that the media has told you some things that are not grounded in science and is not supported by the research. I thought I'd just put this all out there for you. First, there's a sense because of the raising of awareness that bullying is an epidemic and it's everywhere that somehow it just emerged. The reality here is that bullying rates have varied. They have gone down and some affluent high resource schools. The rates have gone up in other places where violence is just the norm. But certainly, we do know that there are some kids that go to schools where there's not bullying, it doesn't happen in their schools. Is it a public health concern? Certainly it is. I think the association was some adverse outcomes for kids that are chronically victimized, but it is a public health concern but I don't think as an epidemic it's really going to be useful. Also there's this notion that when parents hear that their kids are being bullied, they instantly think of suicide. So, the media has done a really good job of putting that in our head. There's a connection that's almost automatic unfortunately when parents hear that. What we do know is the media covers bullying prevention; 80 percent of the time it's a suicide story, 10 percent of the time it's legislation, and 10 percent it's prevention. So, clearly the media needs to be more positive and not highlight and create this panic. There's also this notion that boys are budding criminals. In reality, in the developmental psychology literature that we know that there's two types of kids that engage in high rates of bullying. We do have that Hollywood depiction thug bully, that's what we call the ineffective aggressor. This ineffective aggressor doesn't have high social capital and actually kids will turn this ineffective aggressor bully in, if you will. The other 50 percent is what we call a Machiavellian bully. This is the kids that have high social capital, they might have heightened theory of mind, they know when to turn this behavior on and off, and they're are actually very popular overrepresented in athletic groups. For many of the principals in the room, you will never see this kid turned in and come into your office. So, you need to recognize that the kids that you are seeing are those that are of the ineffective aggressor and you're only getting to about 50 percent of them. There's also this notion that somehow, three strikes you're out, you engage in bullying that we need to punish you. And this is unfortunate because the developmental literature shows that one, we have the Machiavellian bully. We also know that a lot of this behavior comes from a social context. So, if you have teachers that bully one another and you are modeling behavior, kids will display that behavior as well. We can't take a punitive approach. One, we already have disparities and expulsions and suspensions for some group especially within the United States, but we certainly do know if we take a punitive approach, it's not going to be a fair approach. Then another one is this idea that bullies come from dysfunctional families. So, I've already explained to you that Machiavellian bully. So, those kids can come from intact families, in fact where it's a very prosocial. So, kids, if it works for them, if they're popular and that's how they maintain their social capital, then certainly they can come from very functional families. And the last one just emerged last year was in the media. And this is idea that bullying is hardwired. So, there was a social scientist from Canada that surveyed 123 kids in Canada, and didn't really assess any biological markers or genetic predisposition, and argue that bullying is hardwired. Certainly, we do know that we can reduce bullying, especially if we focus on the social context and certainly it's not hardwired. If you spend some time as many of you are in schools and you're thinking to yourself, they call everything bullying so much so that bullying doesn't really have a meaning anymore, I think that that is a problem. I think that some parents even when kids are not nice to one another, they don't want to be one another's friends anymore, we call it bullying. Certainly, we do need to assess that but at the same time, we do have an understanding from social science. We believe how bullying differs from other peer aggression and peer conflict. And so, what happened to the United States is a number of years ago, the Centers for Disease Control and Department of Education got together and convened a panel of experts to say what is bullying, and we started with the definition that we adopted many decades ago from Norway and Dan Ovis's pioneering work, and then we looked to the social science literature. And essentially bullying is unwanted aggressive behavior among school age children, that has a high likelihood of causing physical or psychological harm. So, this is not normal pure conflict. But there are some components that are important, in that there has to be an imbalance of real or perceived power. And power can be social status, size, the amount of money that you have, the clothes that you wear, whether or not you're in an athletic group versus a nonathletic group, so there has to be a power differential. And also, you'll hear that it has to be repeated, or a high likelihood that it would be repeated. Many of you know that when kids are victimized, they change their behavior. They stop riding the bus, they drop out of sport, they may not go to lunch, they may eat their lunch in a bathroom stall. And so if you're waiting for it to happen again, unfortunately you're not recognizing the social science literature that kids do something different when this happens. But we do know that kids that are chronically victimized, that there are really long term negative consequences. Recent longitudinal developmental literature has shown that kids that are chronically victimized 30 years later will have a major depressive disorder or generalized anxiety disorder as adults. Now, when we think about the kids that engage in high rates of bullying, what are their long term effects? We really don't know. What we do know is that they're not likely to have a psychiatric disorder, but they're likely to have what we call antisocial traits in that they just rule breakers if you will. Okay. So, that's the definition. Now what we tried to do in an experimental study is to show, is in fact are these components really important. And here you'll see the slide. This is an article that was published in The Journal of Adolescent Health, and I have more text on here just mostly so that when you go back to this PowerPoint, that you can actually see what we found. Essentially what we found, is the more of those components that are present, the more adverse outcomes you have, more daily interference. So, if in fact there is a power differential, it's repeated and I feel that I cannot defend myself and I feel helpless, you have the highest rates of daily interference. So, what does this mean for you? So, when kids come to you and say, I'm being bullied, now, remember they have to tell us what it is because bullying doesn't really mean anything. The kid's not thinking repeated power imbalance. They're thinking, "They won't let me sit at that lunch table," or "They're taking my money," because extortion still happens in schools. So, you ask as a teacher or as a practitioner you say, what's happening? And then you ask how long has it been happening? And do they feel that they can defend themselves? And do they feel that they have someone to turn to? If they tell you that it feels like there is a power imbalance, they can't defend themselves, it's been going on for a long time, which by the way, most the time of their time they come to you, it has been going on for a really long time. And if they feel that they don't have any external support, no one to turn to, then you must do a screening, a psychiatric screening, ASAP. If you have all those components because we've shown that as you have the increase in those components in the definition, the more interference you will have over time. Okay. So, when we think about this, okay, so, people still say, is it a big deal? Well, it is. So, when we look at our national data, when we look at international data, consistently we find in third through eighth graders, 15 percent of the kids are chronically victimized. And I'm talking about like 60 times in a month. So, I'm not talking about once in a lifetime, that in fact over the months 60 incidents-15 percent. We have 17 percent of those kids that are what we call the ringleader bullies. So, they're the ones that are leading the social groups and driving this behavior. Eight percent of your bully victims, these kids that are victimized that become aggressive themselves. And what we find for this particular group, they have the worst mental health profiles. So, if you have a kid that you're working with, and you notice like one year they're victimized and then you see that they're aggressive, you should be very concerned. Social workers, school psychologists, we all recognize that this is the most at risk group. So, you add those numbers up and it's clearly that 40 percent of our student population is involved as a bully perpetrator victim or a bully victim. But the reality is is the remaining 60 percent are standing around either contributing to it or hoping that the bully group doesn't turn on them, and so it is this notion that we have to think about our interventions. Not as pulling out the kid that engages in bullying, or just taking care of the victim, we have to take care of all of these different roles that kids play. What we do know though and there's a big notion now by standard empowerment, by standard revolution, and we'll talk a little bit more about this. There is a science that's developing around who intervenes and who doesn't intervene. But it's very clear that interventions need to focus on the 60 percent, because we know that when you ask kids if they intervene,only 13 percent actually would intervene to help a victim.
