Search results

Anti-bullying legislation has been adopted in every state to prevent the victimization of youth, but the focus on deterring and criminalizing individual behavior can obscure the contextual factors that contribute to aggression. This theoretical paper engages sociological literature to understand the impact of recent anti-bullying legislation on students’ experiences.

We discuss stigma and account-making theory to theorize the ways students become particularly vulnerable to victimization and may or may not be sufficiently protected under the law. We also engage criminological theories to understand how punishment may not be sufficient for preventing aggressive behavior but may instead lead students to employ strategies to avoid being caught or punished for their behaviors.

We argue that the majority of current anti-bullying definitions and protocols in use are ambiguous and insufficient in protecting vulnerable groups of students, particularly students with disabilities, overweight students, and LGBT +  students.

Our findings suggest that schools should seek to understand and alter the school-wide cultures and norms that permit aggressive behavior in the first place, in turn creating more inclusive school environments.

Purpose – This chapter explores the problem of school shootings as a source of anxiety and fear in schools. Such fear has generated calls for security in schools and has been a catalyst for the development and deployment of antiviolence policies in schools.

Methodology/approach – The chapter begins by examining the development of the Columbine Effect, which is a set of emotions surrounding youth social problems, particularly violence in schools. This Columbine Effect is then explored in relation to its role in the development of policies to mitigate the problem of school violence. These purposes are linked using a multilevel typology of school violence and their sources, created by Henry (2009).

Findings – The chapter explores the levels of violence addressed by six antiviolence policies: crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED), zero tolerance, anti-bullying programming, emergency management planning, peer mediation, and school climate programming. The analysis indicates the level(s) of violence each type of policy is designed to address and identifies research evidence regarding the efficacy of each policy. The analysis also focuses on the unintended consequences of school antiviolence policies, especially those which reduce violence on one or more levels, while exacerbating the problem on other levels.

Research limitations/implications – The analytical approach was selective, rather than exhaustive. Nonetheless, the analysis has suggested a number of ironies concerning the unintended consequences of antiviolence programming in schools. This suggests the need for broader analysis in this area.

Practical implications – The analysis identifies a number of detrimental effects that have resulted from school violence policy initiatives ranging from the socialization of youth toward a society of control and authority. In addition, the chapter helps to clarify the (often negative) effects of hype about violence in schools.

Originality/value of chapter – Although not often connected, this chapter explores the intersection between the discourse of school violence (typically, a social problems framing concern) and the development of school antiviolence policies (typically, an applied social scientific concern).

The chapter elaborates how organizational governance can optimally address workplace bullying, a synergy possible because organizational governance seeks to promote ethical functioning while workplace bullying is considered an unethical behavior. Through its suggestions, the chapter aims at furthering employee dignity and well-being, cohering with international calls for human rights at work.

A review of two literatures was conducted: (a) workplace bullying differentiated on the basis of its situatedness and level into internal bullying – of an interpersonal and depersonalized nature – and external bullying; and (b) organizational governance including its theoretical perspectives, especially the societal lens, and international, national, and firm codes.

Several organizational governance measures at institutional level – both international and national in scope – and at firm level are proposed to deal with varieties of workplace bullying encompassing primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention. Accordingly, a shift in organizational effectiveness from goal-based models to process-oriented frameworks so that economic and non-economic objectives are balanced, following the stakeholder approach, is advocated. The political dynamics involved in such an initiative are alluded to.

Application, drawing on secondary rather than primary data, is the essential thrust of the chapter, with recommendations anchored in organizational governance, particularly its societal perspective, conceptualized to address workplace bullying in a holistic manner.

First, despite the clear relevance of organizational governance to workplace bullying, the prospect of interventions from this standpoint has never been previously explored. Second, the term “varieties of workplace bullying” is propounded to capture the different types of emotional abuse at work known so far.

Purpose: Sexual minority youth are more likely than their heterosexual peers to consider and attempt suicide, in part due to victimization experienced within schools. While existing research suggests that rates of school victimization and suicidality among sexual minority students vary by school and community context, less is known about variation in these experiences at the state level.

Methodology: Using data from a large, representative sample of sexual minority and heterosexual youth (2017 Youth Risk Behavior States Data, n = 64,746 high school students in 22 states), multilevel models examine whether differences between sexual minority and heterosexual students in victimization and suicide risk vary by state-level policies.

Findings: Results suggest that disparities between sexual minority and heterosexual boys in bullying, suicide ideation, and suicide attempt are consistently smaller in states with high levels of overall policy support for LGBTQ equality and nondiscrimination in education laws. Sexual minority girls are more likely than heterosexual girls to be electronically bullied, particularly in states with lower levels of LGBTQ equality. Disparities between sexual minority and heterosexual girls in suicide ideation are lowest in high equality states, but state policies are not significantly associated with disparities in suicide attempt among girls.

Value: Overall, findings suggest that state-level policies supporting LGBTQ equality are associated with a reduced risk of suicide among sexual minority youth. This study speaks to the role of structural stigma in shaping exposure to minority stress and its consequences for sexual minority youth's well-being.

Workplace bullying is an emerging topic for researchers considering the impact of abusive behavior on employees (Björkqvist, Österman, & Hjelt-Bäck, 1994; Branch, Ramsay, & Barker, 2007; Cowan, 2012; Duffy & Sperry, 2007; Fritz, 2014; Harvey, Heames, Richey, & Leonard, 2006; Liefooghe & Mackenzie, 2010; Matthiesen & Einarsen, 2007; Yamada, 2000; Zabrodska & Kveton, 2013). European trends, corporate cultures, and the target’s wellness have also been the focus of other studies on workplace bullying (Constanti & Gibbs, 2004; Djurkovic, McCormack, & Casimir, 2008; Query & Hanely, 2010; Thomas, 2005); yet as was stated in the initial chapter, few studies considered the impact of workplace bullying on American higher education. More specifically, no empirical studies considered the impact of workplace bullying in America’s community colleges or the people of color who work at community colleges. Consequently, Hollis has replicated her study of four-year colleges and universities (2015) and applied the procedures to the community college sector. This analysis specifically reflecting on people of color at community colleges utilizes the data set, which was the subject of analysis in Chapter 1. Within the community college sample, 26% were people of color. Further, 73% of the respondents of color reported being affected by workplace bullying. Therefore, this study may be of interest to diversity officers or any personnel interested in creating and maintaining a healthy work environment for all community college staff, regardless of color.

Purpose – In this chapter, we examine an extended gossip dispute event, in which a peer group of 11-year-old girls take action against a girl who has reported about school bullying to the teacher by examining how the accused girls construct their own sociopolitical order away from the adults.

Approach – The analysis draws on ethnographic fieldwork within a Swedish multiethnic school setting combined with detailed analysis (conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis) of children's language practices.

Findings – It is found that the school's bullying intervention practice sets the stage for a trajectory of a gossip dispute event in which the accused girls work out their own version of the telling as snitching, reallocate blame, and project the future consequences for the girl being accountable for the telling. A moral order emerges via the organization of social actions, alignments, occasion-specific identities, and pejorative person descriptors, rendering the event of telling the teacher a disastrous move for the targeted girl. The micro-politics of the extended gossip dispute is pervasive in terms of how the accused girls strengthen social alignments of power, depict the transgressor by categorizing her as insane, and remedy the norm breaches through justifying their own actions.

Social implications – The success with which the girls here manage to turn the school's bullying intervention practice into a system of retaliation emphasizes the need for highlighting the micro-politics, of children's everyday practices away from adults.

This chapter undertakes a comparative analysis of discourses on equity found in OECD and Norwegian policy documents. This is an interesting area to study as the OECD is found to be an important agenda setter for many countries' educational policies. A comparative analysis of OECD and Norwegian educational policies is especially interesting because the OECD is often found to be pressing for a neo-liberal agenda, while Norway has a socialist-alliance government. Combining Basil Bernstein's theoretical framework with key principles from Critical Discourse Analysis, the author investigates power relations within OECD and Norwegian educational policy documents. Two equity models serve as analytical tools: equity through equality and equity through diversity, which can be described along the three dimensions: de-/centralization, de-/standardization and de-/specialization. Using the analysis of two key documents on equity in education from the OECD and Norway, the author points out the similarities and differences in two documents. Both the OECD and Norwegian approaches to equity in education can be related to a centralized decentralization or a conservative modernization of education. However, there are also important differences between the two documents. For example, the Norwegian ministry has more emphasis on equity through equality and is less influenced by neo-liberalism and authoritarian populism than the OECD. In conclusion, the author argues that neither of the two described approaches appears to improve the inequities in education. A different way of targeting these inequities could be based on critical theory and research.

Canada is a country with ten provinces and three territories, each of which boasts its own set of unique characteristics. Education is constitutionally defined as a provincial responsibility. Although several federal government departments have some responsibilities in the area of education, there is no federal department of education. Thus, it is difficult to examine educational policy at a national level.

To inform policy, curricula, and future research on cyberbullying through an exploration of the moral reasoning of digitally active 10–14-year olds (tweens) when witnesses to digital abuse.

Conducted interviews with 41 tweens, asking participants to react as witnesses to two hypothetical scenarios of digital abuse. Through thematic analysis of the interviews, I developed and applied a new typology for classifying “upstanders” and “bystanders” to cyberbullying.

Identified three types of upstander and five types of bystander, along with five thinking processes that led participants to react in those different ways. Upstanders were more likely than bystanders to think through a scenario using high-order moral reasoning processes like disinterested perspective-taking. Moral reasoning, emotions, and contextual factors, as well as participant gender and home school district, all appeared to play a role in determining how participants responded to cyberbullying scenarios.

Hypothetical scenarios posed in interviews cannot substitute for case studies of real events, but this qualitative analysis has produced a framework for classifying upstanding and bystanding behavior that can inform future studies and approaches to digital ethics education.

This study contributes to the literature on cyberbullying and moral reasoning through in-depth interviews with tweens that record the complexity and context-dependency of thinking processes like perspective-taking among an understudied but critical age group.

This chapter examines the definitions of bullying used by students and adults in elementary schools and the effects that these definitions had within the broader school culture.

I combine interviews with 53 students and 10 adults and over 430 hours of participant observation with fifth grade students at two rural elementary schools.

Definitions of bullying held by those in these schools typically differed from those used by researchers. Even when individuals held definitions that were in line with those used by researchers, however, a focus on identifying bullies rather than on behaviors that fit definitions of bullying contributed to a school culture in which negative interactions were normalized and student reports of these behaviors were discouraged.

This study is limited to two elementary schools in the rural Midwest and cannot be seen as representative of all schools. Support for my findings from other research combined with similar definitions and school cultures in both schools, however, suggest that these definitions and practices are part of a broader cultural context of bullying in the United States.

These findings suggest that schools might be better served by focusing less on labels like “bully” and more on particular behaviors that are to be taken seriously by students, teachers, staff members, and principals.

Although other researchers have studied definitions of bullying, none have combined these definitions with observational data on the broader school contexts in which those definitions are created and used.