Legislators Try to Outlaw School Bullies

Andrew Baroch, Voice of America
March 28, 2001

Legislators in a number of U.S. states are trying to outlaw school bullying because of evidence it provokes gun violence. In recent years, seven states have introduced so-called "bully-prevention" programs in schools, and three more states are considering them.

The dictionary defines a bully as an "overbearing person who habitually badgers and intimidates smaller and weaker people." Eleven year old Patrick Davis knows what a bully is. He runs into them in gym class at Warren County Middle School outside Nashville, Tennessee. "There are some kids there who like to pick on you and stuff," he says. "They'll call you names sometimes and shove you into walls. Sometimes you'll push them back and sometimes you'll leave them alone, maybe."

A member of the Warren County education commission, Bill Zackman, says bullying is inevitable in school. "Of course, there are always bullies in school," he says. "That's the way it's been and will always be."

Maybe not. Ted Feinberg is the associate director of the National Association of School Psychologists in Bethesda, Maryland. He says bullying has become too dangerous to tolerate. "Years ago, when kids had disagreements, they might go out on the playground, or behind the school and throw a few punches," he says. "There might be a bloody nose or a scraped wrist and that'd be the end of it. Now because of the accessibility of weapons to kids, the lethality of response is much more serious. So if a kid has been tormented, then has access to weapons, the outcome can be much, much more tragic than it might have been 15 or 20 years ago."

The National Association of School Psychologists represents about 23,000 mental health professionals in schools all over the country. It's one of a number of organizations that see bullying as a precursor to school violence.

Last October, the U.S. Secret Service and the Department of Education released a joint study that found "bullying played a major role" in two-thirds of school shootings in the last 25 years.

One recent incident [early March] seems to fit the pattern. A high school student in California shot and killed two students and injured a number of others. Friends of the shooter say he had been teased mercilessly about looking weak and thin.

Psychologist Ted Feinberg recalls visiting Colorado's Columbine High School in 1999, several days after two students went on a 16-minute shooting rampage, killing 12 students and a teacher before committing suicide. "Throughout our time there, there was the allegation that the two shooters were boys who were tormented and bullied by some of the athletes in that school district," he says. "Clearly, since that time, and maybe even before, there is some belief on the part of a number of observers that a lot of kids who have become school shooters were kids who have a history of being bullied or tormented by others. Clearly, bullying is a behavior that school districts throughout the country are looking at with different lenses than they might have years ago."

Colorado, Oregon, and Washington State are considering legislation that would require schools to adopt and enforce a bullying ban. Lawmakers in Georgia and New Hampshire have already passed similar measures. Five other states have pilot programs in selected schools.

At one Massachusetts school, paper cut-outs on the classroom walls remind first graders, as one sign says "Don't bully. Be soft and wooly." Students in the upper grades meet weekly to report any bullying incidents. A first time offender gets a warning. The second time leads to a timeout. A third offense and there's a three-day suspension.

Julie Thomerson is a policy analyst for the research group, the National Conference on State Legislatures, which is based in Denver, Colorado. She says lawmakers in some states feel uncomfortable about regulating bullying. "That is one of the problems," she says. "I think it is difficult to put limits around what kind of behaviors to respond to and how we respond to them. Bullying is something that's been around a long time and can be defined in a number of different ways. That's one thing that legislatures have had to deal with in terms of looking at preventing bullying at schools."

J. Brien O'Callaghan is a clinical psychologist in Bethel, Connecticut and author of the book, "School-based Collaboration with Families." He doesn't agree that bullying is the main cause of school violence. "About 15 percent of kids get picked on. With those statistics, we should have millions of school shootings," he says.

Mr. O'Callaghan says that as he sees it, bad parenting has led to school violence. "You can trace the school shootings in my reading of all the stories to the under-control of the kids," he says. "They have too much freedom. They're not supervised. They're manufacturing explosives and concepts of violence right in their own home and the parents are not paying attention. But the children continue to be blamed as if they're growing up in some kind of a vacuum or in a tree somewhere."

The nation's schools have been implementing various violence prevention programs for more than a decade, things like a uniform dress code to instill discipline, metal detectors to keep out weapons, security officers to patrol the halls even courses for students on how to mediate and resolve conflict.

There's no reliable data to show what's worked and what hasn't, but a recent Justice Department study found something's working: the study found the percentage of students victimized by violence fell from ten to eight percent from 1995 to 1999.

Advocates of bullying prevention anticipate a further decline if their programs go into effect nationwide.

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