Chapter 6
Learning what helps
There was a time when bullying, particularly among boys in British public schools, could be treated as something a young man might be expected to endure. Rough treatment, standing up for yourself and learning to cope with stronger boys could become mixed up with ideas about toughness, independence and building character.
We glimpsed this attitude in Tom Brown's School Days. Even while Thomas Hughes condemned serious bullying, his characters could still suggest that younger boys would benefit from learning to stand it, take their own part and fight their way through difficulties. Bullying itself might be criticised while a certain amount of rough treatment was still regarded as part of growing up.
Those ideas did not disappear overnight. Versions of them survived much longer in familiar advice such as “stand up for yourself”, “toughen up”, “give as good as you get” or simply “ignore it.”
Later, as schools increasingly accepted that bullying was something they had a responsibility to address rather than something children should simply endure, the question changed.
It was no longer only:
How should a young person cope with bullying?
It became:
What should adults and schools do about it?
And once schools began intervening, another question followed:
What actually helps?
The answer has never been as simple as finding one programme and applying it everywhere. Different approaches have worked differently with different ages, groups, schools and situations. Some have focused on punishment, some on relationships, some on the wider peer group and some on changing the culture of the whole school.
That variety matters because bullying situations are not identical either.
From punishment to problem solving
One early alternative to straightforward punishment came from Swedish psychologist Anatol Pikas. His work during the 1970s later developed into what became known as the Method of Shared Concern. Rather than beginning with accusation and punishment, the approach involved speaking separately with those involved, expressing concern about what was happening and trying to create movement towards a solution.
In Britain, Barbara Maines and George Robinson developed another non punitive approach in the early 1990s, originally known as the No Blame Approach and later as the Support Group Method. A small group, including young people associated with the bullying and others who might be able to help, was encouraged to think about the distress being experienced and what they could do to improve the situation.
The method became popular with some practitioners and strongly criticised by others. Critics worried that avoiding blame could mean avoiding accountability, while supporters argued that the immediate aim should be to stop the bullying rather than satisfy a demand for punishment.
The disagreement exposes a question that remains relevant:
Is the purpose of an intervention to punish what happened, to stop it happening, or both?
For the person experiencing bullying, the most urgent wish may simply be that it stops.
The Sheffield lesson
The Sheffield Anti Bullying Project in the early 1990s became one of the most influential British attempts to discover what schools could actually do.
Twenty three schools tried combinations of whole school policies, classroom work, improvements to playgrounds and other environments, staff training, peer approaches and direct work with young people involved in bullying. The results were encouraging, but they were not uniform. Some schools achieved much greater change than others, and later analysis found that schools which put greater effort into implementing their work generally achieved stronger outcomes.
That may sound obvious, but it is an important lesson. Having an anti-bullying policy is not the same as using one, buying a resource is not the same as changing practice, and running an activity is not the same as changing a culture.
The Sheffield work helped establish the whole school approach as an important idea in British anti-bullying practice. The response could involve policy, pupils, staff, parents, the physical environment and everyday behaviour across the school rather than relying on a single intervention after something had already happened.
What works in one school may not work in another
The Sheffield experience also revealed something less convenient. The same intervention could produce different results in different schools because leadership, staff commitment, organisational culture and the quality of implementation all mattered.
This made the question “Does this programme work?” harder to answer than it first appeared.
Sometimes a better question is:
Under what conditions does it work, for whom, and how well?
The peer group becomes part of the intervention
As research increasingly understood bullying as a group process, interventions began paying greater attention to the people around it.
This thinking became central to KiVa, developed at the University of Turku in Finland by Christina Salmivalli and colleagues. Rather than concentrating only on the young person bullying and the person experiencing it, KiVa sought to change how the wider peer group responded.
The programme was evaluated in a large randomised study involving 117 intervention schools and 117 comparison schools in Finland. Research found reductions in reported bullying and victimisation and changes in how pupils responded to bullying situations. KiVa subsequently spread well beyond Finland.
Again, the underlying idea was significant:
If bullying gains power from an audience, changing the audience may change the bullying.
What about the person who is bullying?
Anti-bullying work has sometimes concentrated so heavily on protecting the person experiencing bullying that another question receives less attention:
What is happening with the person carrying out the behaviour?
Stopping harmful behaviour may require consequences and boundaries, but it can also require understanding why the behaviour is happening. Someone may be seeking status, following a group, repeating behaviour experienced elsewhere, trying to avoid becoming a target themselves, or responding to anger, fear or exclusion.
None of those possibilities excuses bullying.
But if the aim is to stop the behaviour and reduce the chance of it returning, understanding why it is happening may be useful. Working with the person experiencing bullying and working with the person who has bullied do not have to be competing choices.
Safety matters for everyone involved.
Evidence becomes bigger
As more anti-bullying programmes were evaluated, researchers began combining results across many different studies.
A major Campbell Collaboration review eventually brought together 100 evaluations of school based anti-bullying programmes. Across those studies, programmes reduced bullying perpetration by roughly 18 to 19 per cent and bullying victimisation by around 15 to 16 per cent on average.
That is important evidence that anti-bullying work can make a difference.
It is also a useful antidote to exaggerated claims.
The average effects were modest, and effectiveness varied according to the programme, research method and geographical setting.
In other words:
Anti-bullying work can work.
But there is no magic programme.
More than one tool
By the 2010s, schools had an expanding range of approaches available to them, including whole school programmes, peer support, restorative approaches, curriculum work, support groups, direct individual work and interventions focused on the wider peer group.
A 2011 Department for Education study examined the strategies being used in English schools and found considerable variation in both what schools chose and how they used it. The research reflected how far the field had moved from searching for one solution towards examining a range of possible responses.
Perhaps that is one of the most useful lessons from this part of the history.
What works for one person may not work for another.
What works in one school may not work in another, and what helped yesterday may not be the right response tomorrow. The challenge is to have more than one possible response, understand the situation well enough to choose among them, and then check whether what was done actually helped.
Did it stop?
A policy can be written, a programme purchased, a workshop delivered, a sanction given and a meeting held. All of those things may be useful.
But from the perspective of the young person experiencing bullying, there is a much simpler test:
Did it stop?
And after that:
Did it stay stopped?
Those questions bring us back to something that gradually became clearer throughout the history of anti-bullying work. Intervention does not finish because an adult has done something.
We have to find out what happened next.
Meanwhile, the environments in which bullying could happen were changing rapidly. A message could travel beyond the playground, an image could be copied repeatedly and the end of the school day no longer necessarily meant the end of contact.