To many adults, teasing and taunting among children and teenagers are natural and inevitable parts of growing up. But, as a new school year begins, experts say such behavior is anything but normal.
"Bullying is a public-health problem [tied to] the larger issue of youth violence in this country," said Joseph Wright, medical director of advocacy and community affairs at Children's National Medical Center. Allowing it to go unstopped, he said, fosters crime and mental-health problems that can last into adulthood.
Wright and other child-health experts urged parents, teachers and community leaders to give the problem greater attention following the publication of a study done in rural Germany of 22 adolescent boys who had bullying behavior, and who were treated with six months of family therapy sessions. The report, which appears in the August issue of the journal Pediatrics, is a reminder that the United States lags behind other countries in dealing with bullying, Wright said.
"We are really just at the recognition phase [in the United States].... We have defined the problem and are recognizing the problem and trying to adapt," Wright said. "This [study] just points out how far behind we are in even accepting bullying as something that's not a normative behavior."
At least 22 states have passed anti-bullying laws since 1999, some motivated by a 2002 U.S. Secret Service report that found that bullying had played a major role in several school shootings, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
The intent of such laws is to prohibit intimidation, bullying and harassment in schools, reports the conference. Defining these unacceptable behaviors has been challenging, but guidelines generally consider the length of time that threatening behavior has persisted and whether a perceived imbalance of power lets a student or group of students victimize others.
The German study described measurable reductions in anger and improvement in quality of life and interpersonal relationships after family therapy. But several U.S. child-health experts said that, because the study included only families who lived in rural areas, the findings are not likely to be applicable to large, urban school systems in this country. They also doubted that family therapy by itself could offer a solution, and disagreed with the measures used in the study to identify bullies.
