By Greg Toppo
USA Today
SAN FRANCISCO – Schools that want to do a better job fighting bullying ought to start with one key step, a group of researchers said Tuesday: Stop using the term "bullying."
Because it's "being used for everything from rolling eyes to 'not wanting to be your friend' to sexual assault, the word 'bullying' has really obscured our ability to focus on what's happening" to children, said Dorothy Espelage of the University of Illinois.
Educators have been "spinning our wheels for decades" in a bid to treat bullying, but they're often hampered by policies that require mistreatment to be repetitive, for example, part of the classic definition of bullying. That focus also obscures whether specific acts are happening more or less, she said.
Espelage co-led a group of researchers that worked for a year to produce a new primer on bullying, released here on Tuesday at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, the USA's largest education research organization. The association commissioned the research last year in the wake of several high-profile bullying cases and school shootings.
Espelage has served as an expert witness in legal cases in which a child committed suicide after being bullied. In several cases, she said, school staff members said in depositions that they were waiting for the alleged bullying behaviors to be repeated so they could treat them as bullying, in accordance with school policies. "In some ways, our obsession with 'What is it?' has stalled us in creating safe schools," she said. "The bottom line is, kids are being victimized – let's move on from that."
A helpful way to look at the problem, she said, is to consider how colleges treat behavior such as hazing or sexual harassment. "To call what's happening with 18-to-22-year-olds 'bullying,' when in fact some of it is criminal behavior … it's a disaster," she said.
Espelage and a colleague, Ron Astor of the University of Southern California, are pushing for schools to use the more simple term "victimization."
Astor acknowledged the irony of the idea: Speaking to a small group of reporters, he said of the booklet they produced, "If this was titled 'Victimization,' you wouldn't be here."
USA Today
SAN FRANCISCO – Schools that want to do a better job fighting bullying ought to start with one key step, a group of researchers said Tuesday: Stop using the term "bullying."
Because it's "being used for everything from rolling eyes to 'not wanting to be your friend' to sexual assault, the word 'bullying' has really obscured our ability to focus on what's happening" to children, said Dorothy Espelage of the University of Illinois.
Educators have been "spinning our wheels for decades" in a bid to treat bullying, but they're often hampered by policies that require mistreatment to be repetitive, for example, part of the classic definition of bullying. That focus also obscures whether specific acts are happening more or less, she said.
Espelage co-led a group of researchers that worked for a year to produce a new primer on bullying, released here on Tuesday at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, the USA's largest education research organization. The association commissioned the research last year in the wake of several high-profile bullying cases and school shootings.
Espelage has served as an expert witness in legal cases in which a child committed suicide after being bullied. In several cases, she said, school staff members said in depositions that they were waiting for the alleged bullying behaviors to be repeated so they could treat them as bullying, in accordance with school policies. "In some ways, our obsession with 'What is it?' has stalled us in creating safe schools," she said. "The bottom line is, kids are being victimized – let's move on from that."
A helpful way to look at the problem, she said, is to consider how colleges treat behavior such as hazing or sexual harassment. "To call what's happening with 18-to-22-year-olds 'bullying,' when in fact some of it is criminal behavior … it's a disaster," she said.
Espelage and a colleague, Ron Astor of the University of Southern California, are pushing for schools to use the more simple term "victimization."
Astor acknowledged the irony of the idea: Speaking to a small group of reporters, he said of the booklet they produced, "If this was titled 'Victimization,' you wouldn't be here."
