Bullying in schools is not just a school issue; it can impact on anti-social behaviour and crime in local areas and therefore it concerns the whole of society.
A reminder, to start, that bullying is “behaviour that intentionally harms another person, typically with repetition and an imbalance of power” (Smith, 2014).
There is no legal definition of bullying in the UK but four aspects – intention, harm, repetition and power – have become central to our understanding of, and responses to, the issue.
In our first article (SecEd, 2022), we discussed how building emotional intelligence can reduce anti-social and bullying behaviour among young people.
In this follow-up article, we continue this discussion, focusing on how, by improving relationships among young people through harnessing emotional intelligence, we can improve behaviour inside school and anti-social behaviour and crime within local communities.
The second author spent 28 of his 35 years of police service in a variety of management positions at different ranks, delivering front-line policing. The last four years of his career were spent working for HM Inspectorate of Constabulary inspecting police forces on – among other things – approaches to problem-solving and reducing crime.
This article draws on that experience, as well as the results of a small-scale evaluation of a school-based anti-bullying intervention conducted by the first author.
Motorways, slip-roads, roundabouts – that’s life?
We start by asking you to imagine that you are a police officer sent to deal with an incident: traffic congestion has been reported at a roundabout at the bottom of a motorway slip-road. The exits from the roundabout are all blocked and traffic is crawling round looking for a way out.
More cars are coming down the slip-road. The traffic on the roundabout is going nowhere, but back on the motorway everything is fine and the traffic is flowing normally. What would you do?
The most obvious solution to this problem is to cone off the slip-road; prevent traffic leaving the motorway and entering this congested area and keep it flowing. Then address the congestion.
Now imagine that the motorway is a metaphor for life. It lasts around 80 miles for most people and this slip-road is at 14 miles along that journey. The roundabout is the start of the “cycle of re-offending”. There are no obvious exits. Many people who end up here spend their lives committing crime, being caught, being arrested, going to court and then prison before being released and starting the pattern again.
This is often referred to as the “revolving door” of offending. Back on the motorway, some young people are exiting onto this slip-road while the rest of us drive on, continuing our journeys.
You would think that as a society we would do more to block that route; cone it off and keep these young people on the motorway. There is a lot of good work underway to engage with young people at risk of offending. But more can be done – earlier – in schools and in partnership with the police to engage meaningfully with young people.
Meaningful engagement
There is a peak offending age of between 15 to 25-years-old, which means that every single young person who is about to enter that cohort within the next two years is currently in years 9 and 10 at school.
So why don’t schools and police work together on this? From a policing perspective one major barrier is the length of time involved in seeing results; the police have tended to be driven by annual targets and it may be difficult for officers to engage with longer term goals.
Austerity since 2010 has added to short-termism; resources aren’t available to meet current demand, let alone to add any additional value. Forces became increasingly inward-looking and middle-management pared to the bone. They became bogged down with managing day-to-day risk and workloads. The same may be true for school leaders.
Getting back to our metaphorical slip-road, what might “meaningful engagement” look like with year 9 and 10 pupils?
The second author encountered the education social enterprise humanutopia in 2011 when they were responsible for policing a quarter of a large county in England. A local town was experiencing some racial tensions and violence outside the school gate and in the community. They brought them into the four secondary schools across the area.
They addressed gang membership, drugs, crime, respect for parents, respect for teachers, respect for each other, and they taught them that their quality of life, that we all have, is heavily influenced by just two things. First, prior to the age of 14 it is influenced by circumstance such as: what country you were born in; what parents you were born to; whether you have a nurturing, caring upbringing; whether you have a positive role-model in your life and so on. These are all things which are out of our control and which are, for want of a better expression, an accident of birth. Second, from the age of 14 onwards, the quality of your life is dictated by something entirely different: the choices that you make as a human being.
An evaluation by the first author in 2014 of the intervention involved a multi-method approach, using both quantitative and qualitative research methods (a pre and post-intervention questionnaire with pupils two months after, observation of the initiative and telephone interviews with senior staff at three schools).
The results showed that the intervention was very positively received. Students almost universally enjoyed the intervention and staff viewed the day as a positive catalyst for the implementation of other measures to support students in school. Across many measures relating to student attitudes and aspirations and bullying (from name-calling to theft of property) there were improvements in the two months after the intervention.
One school leader said: “(It) was a big bang … shocked us – and gave us the impetus to put procedures in place.” In terms of violent incidents outside the school gate, the police area where the second author was commanding officer in 2011 saw reductions in violence between 13 and 16-year-olds of 66% for the 18 months after the intervention.
Bullying, victimisation and offending
Each year, victims of bullying are impacted heavily by their experiences, some affected so badly that they have taken their own lives. Ben Vodden is one such young person; he died in December 2006, aged 11, after being bullied on school bus journeys.
His father Paul Vodden founded of The Vodden Reports – research and activism to raise awareness of bullying on school buses. Where different characteristics of young people intersect, such as age and ethnicity, the likelihood of being bullied may increase.
We tend not to use the term “victimisation” but in any other context in society this is the term that would be used. Adult victims of hate crime, for example, are considered to be victims of crime, not victims of bullying.
Of course, the dilemma is always that we are dealing with children and young people, not adults. We do not want to criminalise young people who bully.
We know that by isolating young people who perpetrate bullying, for example by excluding them, the likelihood of their involvement in anti-social behaviour and crime increases.
Indeed, the Timpson Review of School Exclusion found that “13 to 23% of young offenders sentenced to less than 12 months in custody, in 2014, had been permanently excluded from school prior to their sentence date” (2019).
Exclusion increases vulnerability to involvement in county lines drug dealing, for example, which can mark the onset of a criminal career – the start of the journey down the “slip-road”.
If further evidence is needed, recent research in the US found that excluding increases the likelihood of gang membership, with successive exclusions incrementally heightening this risk (Widdowson et al, 2021).
There are strong reasons why we should be more pro-active; Espelage et al (2021) suggest that bullying perpetration may be a precursor to other kinds of violence, including sexual violence.
And problems might not be confined to perpetrators. Pontes et al (2021) suggest that victims of bullying may be more likely to be involved in drug use. In addition, it is also important to recognise that bullying perpetration may be an expression of trauma due to adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) needing supportive rather than punitive action.
We still don’t know what really works in addressing bullying. This is partly because there is a lack of data, particularly longitudinal data. There is also uncertainty about the mechanism; how can we prove that it is an anti-bullying intervention and not something else that causes an effect?
However, from our experience, anti-bullying interventions which seek to harness the emotional intelligence of young people and improve relationships between young people, along with whole-school behaviour policies and restorative justice procedures to facilitate the improvement of relationships between young people when they go wrong, seem to be the most effective.
Concluding thoughts
Going back to our motorway, meaningful interventions are the cones being put out at the top of the slip-road, the means by which young people are being prevented from exiting; the means by which we can keep them on the motorway.
The challenge for the future includes the fact that it is difficult to change human behaviour. There is a need to reduce both bullying perpetration and bullying victimisation (in policing terms, crime prevention). We need to work with children who are tempted to bully, giving alternative (more prosocial) pathways to influence and respect, and this is why embedding the “pupil voice” is so important in schools; encouraging young people to feel they belong and that they have a vested interest in their school community and beyond.
Effective equality, diversity and inclusion policies and procedures are also essential; this should be embedded within teaching and learning activities throughout the curriculum. In the second author’s 35 years as a police officer, harnessing emotional intelligence has the biggest potential of any approach they have seen to long-term problem-solving, both in terms of reducing crime and disorder and delivering better life outcomes for young people.
The problem is that it isn’t happening on a consistent basis, only through local, ad-hoc arrangements. As stated in our previous article, Thaler and Sunstein’s (2008) Nudge Theory highlights the importance of reminders to encourage pro-social behaviour; one-off interventions offer only short-term impacts and need to be reinforced. Why not involve your local police in this, invite them along to anti-bullying interventions in school or anything else which seeks to improve relationships in school and the local community?
- Dr Mandy Shaw is a senior lecturer in criminology at Leeds Beckett University. She has more than 25 years’ experience in research and teaching in higher education. Her most recent research, on the bullying of school teachers, was presented at the World Anti-Bullying Forum in Stockholm, Sweden in November 2021.
- Graham Moore is director of humanutopia and a former teacher whose work is the focus of this article. Read Graham’s previous articles for SecEd via https://bit.ly/seced-moore
- Vaughan Clarke is a retired police officer with 35 years of service. The last four years of his career were spent working for Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, inspecting police forces on – among other things – their approach to problem-solving and reducing crime.
Further information & resources
- Espelage et al: Bullying as a developmental precursor to sexual and dating violence across adolescence: Decade in review, Trauma, Violence and Abuse (1-3), 2021.
- Ministry of Justice: Costs per place and costs per prisoner by individual prison, HM Prison & Probation Service Annual Report and Accounts 2019/20, October 2020.
- Pontes, Strohacker, & Pontes: Bullying victimization is associated with a significantly greater risk of illicit substance use among US female adolescents: YRBS 2011 to 2017, Crime and Delinquency (1-4), 2021.
- SecEd: Anti-bullying and behaviour: The power of emotional intelligence, March 2022: https://bit.ly/3j3qXSs
- Smith: Understanding School Bullying: Its nature and prevention strategies, Sage, 2014.
- Thaler & Sunstein: Nudge. Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness. Yale University Press. 2008.
- Timpson: Review of School Exclusion, Department for Education, May 2019: https://bit.ly/3lQau32
- Widdowson, Garduno & Fisher: The school-to-gang pipeline: Examining the impact of school suspension on joining a gang for the first time, Crime & Delinquency (67), 2021: https://bit.ly/3nZNsux
- Vodden Report: https://voddenreport.com/