24 Kinds Of Aggression

October 14, 2011, 3:25 pm

What Works to End Bullying?

By K J Dellantonia

We grown-ups really want to find some good news on bullying, but it’s pretty hard to come by.

CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 teamed up with Robert Faris, a sociologist from the University of California, Davis, for some detailed research on who bullied whom and how during last year’s spring quarter at the Wheatley School on Long Island. What they found replicated an earlier, much-written-about study Mr. Faris conducted at less affluent schools in rural North Carolina: bullying isn’t about the kids on the fringes. It’s the kids in the middle of a school’s social life who are “caught up in patterns of cruelty and aggression that have to do with jockeying for status” (a phrase that makes homeschooling sound suddenly more appealing).

The result is an interactive graphic (which you can see here) in which some 700 small dots, each representing a student, appear to begin firing at each other. “Acts of aggression,” represented by lines, shoot from red dots (bullies) to blue dots (victims) with purple dots firing both ways. The researchers found that aggression was contagious within groups, that it was mostly verbal, that it was rarely reported to adults, and that peers only occasionally intervened. Forty-three percent of students appeared blissfully uninvolved, but for the others, back and forth went the pings. The students describe them:

Student C made mean jokes about student D because she [has a disability]; I didn’t interfere because these girls are popular and I didn’t want to get on their bad side.

Student A made all of his friends hate me; all the time he would talk badly about me & cursed at me. In the end he told me he hated me because of my ___ ethnicity and because “I’m ugly.” … I did not respect him, but it still hurt. People threw spit balls at me, verbally called me names … and then threatened me. They told everyone I was gay, excluded me from social groups.

There’s a chilling table listing 24 kinds of aggression in four categories (verbal, rumors and ostracism, cyberbullying, physical) ranging from “called ugly for weeks” to “posting that a kid is gay” to “tripping/kicking” and “swirlies.” And then there’s the fact that most kids don’t talk to their parents about bullying, and don’t think adults can help.

In its written reporting, CNN seized on one of the few positives: “there is no evidence that overall aggression increases social status” (as measured by the number of kids reporting links or social ties to an individual). Bullying, they suggest, doesn’t make you more popular.

But what a thin straw that is. Status itself increased aggression up to a point (kids in the top 11 percent, link-wise, were less aggressive), and “the effectiveness of aggression (for social climbing) really depended on who was targeted: when kids were mean to high status kids, kids who were socially close to them (within 1-3 links in the friendship network), or kids who were themselves aggressive, they receive substantial boosts in status.”

The most disturbing thing about this study (a bleak read, but one that at least you can read: unlike the other academic research I’ve cited here, this study is available in full from CNN) isn’t that victims, or even remorseful aggressors, aren’t turning to adults. It’s the déjà vu. These results could have been from a high school five years ago, or, without the addition of Facebook et al., 10 or 20. I can still name the kids I went to high school with who were rumored to be pregnant or gay, or the kids who spread those rumors, the kids who made mean jokes, the one or two who might give or get a “swirlie.”

Has all the attention and effort that’s been lavished on bullying in the last few years had any effect at all? If it has, it’s on the victims, and while that’s nothing to dismiss, it’s disappointing. Research suggests that school bullying programs (which many students in this study liked and suggested) do more to influence the perceptions of the bullied than to change the bullying behaviors. Some specific programs (like Steps to Respect) have had a stronger influence on elementary school students, but high school bullying seems stubbornly entrenched.

Some of the students in this study downplayed any help adults could offer. “Kids make their own decisions,” one wrote, “and no one is going to make them change.” Mr. Faris and his colleagues suggest that “because aggression is part of jockeying for social position,” kids may simply view it as intrinsic to school life. Instead of trying to change the bullies, they support trying to change the bystanders by encouraging intervention. If bullying itself can be peer-pressured into social unacceptability, we might see real change.

Has bullying changed at all over the course of the past few years at your child’s school? Do the victims really feel the impact of the bullying less when bullying itself is villainized? Have those of you with kids in these cruel and aggressive-sounding trenches found anything parents can do to help?