Can School Empathy Programs Help Stop Bullying?
21 Jan
Bullying in schools has been a topic of great interest recently, especially since incidents of bullying have been captured on cell phones and posted on YouTube. A 15-year-old girl committed suicide after being repeatedly bullied at school. Two Rutgers students posted a video of a young man having sex in his dorm room with another male student. He jumped off the George Washington bridge a few days later. In the last year, there have been more than 10 separate incidents reported in the media of bullying resulting in suicide. And of course, there are the hundreds of thousands of children who have been bullied every day and never make the news.
We’ve discussed bullying in schools here on Rethinking Education over the past couple of months in our posts How to Combat Bullying and Bullying From Frustration. As a result of the prevalence of bullying in the media late last year, U.S. Senator Frank Lautenberg proposed that colleges should adopt a code of conduct that prohibits bullying and harassment, and last November, New Jersey passed a law that requires anti-bullying programs in public schools and requires college codes of conduct to address bullying.
Many innovative anti-bullying programs are now being tried in schools across the country, as Newsweek covered in their article, Can Schools Teach Empathy?. Unfortunately, there is little agreement yet on whether these programs work and, if they do, what should be included in the educational programs. A program out of Canada called “Roots of Empathy” has been instated in 47 schools in Seattle. This program hopes to teach empathy to children as young as 2nd grade. A 2007 study of 17 different anti-bullying educational programs found that:
“Only 4 of the 10 curriculum studies showed decreased bullying, but 3 of those 4 also showed no improvement in some populations. Of the 10 studies evaluating the whole-school approach, 7 revealed decreased bullying, with younger children having fewer positive effects. Three of the social skills training studies showed no clear bullying reduction.”
This study was conducted by researchers at the Indiana University School of Medicine, and the results are published in the National Institutes of Health archives, as A Systematic Review of School-Based Interventions to Prevent Bullying.
While the results of the study are only mildly encouraging, continued attempts to teach empathy and appropriate social behavior must persist in our schools. We are sure to see more reports of bullying and more programs within schools to prevent these behaviors in the years to come.
Related Articles
- Roots of Empathy: How babies can combat bullying in school (cnn.com)
- Randy Taran: Cyberbullying: Strategies to Take Back Your Power (huffingtonpost.com)
Mott Childrens Hospital National Poll on Childrens Health only 26 percent of parents would give their childs high school an A for preventing bullying and school violence and 38 percent of parents would give their childs elementary or junior high an A. . Children who are victims of bullying can have serious health effects including physical injuries and emotional problems such as depression low self-esteem anxiety and suicidal thoughts and actions says Matthew Davis M.D. director of the poll and associate professor of pediatrics and internal medicine at the U-M Medical School. Since 1992 there have been 250 violent deaths in schools and bullying has been a factor in many school shootings.. What this poll shows is that parents are still very concerned about bullying in their schools.