Study: Bullying Affects One In Three Children

A nationwide study finds that bullying affects nearly one of every three children in sixth through 10th grades.

Young students and boys are most likely to be affected.

The authors say that their survey of almost 15,700 students is among the first to document the U.S. prevalence of bullying. It is to be published in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association.

The lead author says that there is too little research to tell whether bullying is increasing or decreasing.

Bullying has been implicated in recent school shootings. A growing number of districts have adopted intervention programs.

And an editorial accompanying the study encourages schools and public-safety officials to pay attention to bullying and the potential for worse violence that it may hold.

"Understanding how to respond to bullying in an effective manner provides the opportunity to learn more about how to address the consequences of experiences with violence," wrote Dr. Howard Spivak of the New England Medical Center and Dr. Deborah Prothrow-Stith of the Harvard School of Public Health. "The time is now for concerted efforts to integrate (a) response to bullying into the larger framework of violence prevention."

The study's main researcher, Tonja Nansel of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, says that bullying should not be seen as inevitable. But Nansel says that she can't tell whether programs that work in other countries will work here.

What Counts As 'Bullying'?

For the purposes of the study, bullying was defined as repeated aggression intended to harm or disturb in which there is an imbalance of power -- a more powerful person or group attacking a less powerful one. The aggressive behavior can be verbal, physical or psychological, such as shunning someone or spreading rumors about the person.

Among the specific findings of the study:

• Of the children surveyed, 29.9 percent reported moderate or frequent involvement in bullying.
• Of those, 13 percent said they were the one who did the bullying, while 10.6 percent said they were the victims of bullying. A little more than 6 percent said they both bullied and got bullied.
• Males were more likely than females to be both perpetrators and targets of bullying.
• Bullying was more common among sixth- through eighth-grade students than among ninth- and 10th-graders.

Looking for causes of bullying, the reseachers concluded that:

• Youths who had a poor perception of their school climate were more likely to bully other youths.
• Youths who smoked, got bad grades or had poor relationships with classmates were more likely to bully, and more likely to be the victim of bullying.
• Children whose parents had a permmissive attitude toward teen drinking were more likely to be bullied.

The study's authors recommended that parents and school officials should recognize the patterns that surround bullying, and intervene.

"Effective prevention will require a solid understanding of the social and environmental factors that facilitate and inhibit bullying and peer aggression," Nansel and her colleagues wrote. "This knowledge could then be used to create school and social environments that promote healthy peer interactions and intolerance of bullying."