New Policies That Punish School Bullies With Lifelong Consequences Won’t Work — Here’s Why.
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I didn’t know my 13-year-old was being bullied until I read a poem she’d written for English class.
In “Dear My Bullies,” she said their words “burned in my memories. Like a cattle is branded.” A group of boys had cruelly dubbed her “Carl,” after the short, round character in the Jimmy Neutron franchise. One line of her poem, that she was eager for me to share, recalls, “Carl has to diet!” Then there’s: “Hey Carl, how was all that ice cream?” One day someone said, “You know, reading doesn’t burn fat!” On another, they asked, “Does anyone have food?” then turned to her: “I wasn’t talking to you, I know you already have plenty of that.”
So when I heard about a South Korean plan to quash bullying by adding the offense to students’ official educational records, I was primed to approve of the idea. The designation would follow people like my daughter’s tormentors through the college application process and into the job market.
Writing for the Washington Post, Adela Suliman and Grace Moon reported that the lawmakers behind the idea were eager to be seen as prioritizing school bullying after two phenomena called attention to it: a 2021 #MeToo-esque movement in South Korea calling out celebrities for bullying in their youth and the 2022 debut of the K-drama The Glory, a Netflix show in which a bullied woman seeks revenge on her former tormentors. (These South Korean lawmakers are far from the only ones in the world contemplating a zero-tolerance approach to bullying — similar programs have been tried in schools in the United States — but we’ll get back to that.)
Severe, long-term consequences should make potential aggressors think twice, right? And there’s something appealing about this Old Testament-style response, to have mean kids branded for branding. But reaching out to experts is my job these days, and one of them summed up her research-based take in two words: “Horrible policy!”
Jaana Juvonen is a professor of developmental psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles who studies peer relationships in school settings. For starters, she tells me, bullying is episodic for most kids, meaning there’s a very large number who engage in bullying temporarily and a very small number who do so regularly.
We also know that different paths and circumstances can lead to what most of us think of as bullying behavior. The acts can be proactively aggressive, in a Machiavellian way, either as the result of something diagnosable, like antisocial personality disorder, or because a kid is mimicking domineering behavior they’ve witnessed or experienced. More often though, bullying is a strategic response to social conditions, with, for example, kids acting out of fear that they will otherwise fall to the bottom of the pecking order.
Then there are children who bully to feel powerful because they lack a sense of control due to, say, a transition to a new school. Sometimes, a person who is bullying is reacting to a perceived threat or mismanaging frustration. And some kids, usually those who are very young or have a disability, cause harm with little to no understanding of the effect their behavior is likely to have on others.
“Bullies are not inherently bad kids,” Juvonen says, and research shows that the culture of a school, club, team or community matters. Social dynamics can encourage or dissuade bullying behavior, as the 2011 documentary Bully makes excruciatingly clear. That’s one reason rates of it are different in different parts of the world. A 2019 report from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization found that about 25% of students in Europe are bullied. In the U.S., the number jumps to 32%, and in other parts of the world, it’s closer to 50%.
Writing articles hasn’t always been my job; I used to practice law, and as I listened to Juvonen, I couldn’t help but think about the four most commonly cited goals of the criminal justice system that I learned in law school: retribution, rehabilitation, incapacitation and deterrence.
Retribution is very “eye for an eye”; it’s about punishing bad actors because they deserve suffering commensurate with the suffering they’ve caused. But if the vast majority of kids who bully aren’t to blame — because they’re responding to forces, incentives and experiences they had no control over — a punitive response seems morally misguided. That’s why most school-wide anti-bullying programs focus instead on “taking the rewards associated with it away” and “teaching empathy,” Juvonen says.
One of those programs is called KiVa, and it was developed in Finland. The effectiveness of KiVa is one of the things researched by René Veenstra, a professor of sociology at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. He says a child who goes to School A may not engage in bullying behavior, but pick them up and plop them into School B, where social norms associate popularity with aggression, and they can easily start. In that sort of school culture, other kids act as “assistants” and “reinforcers,” he said. And they may not even know it! Juvonen says that’s why programs like KiVa try to help students “understand that by smiling or laughing, they encourage bullying.”
Veenstra’s research has shown that while there will never be zero bullying behavior, “we can come quite far” with this sort of approach. At their essence, these programs teach children how to manage their emotions and communicate — and try to shift the school culture to one of mutual respect and support. Another bullying prevention strategy teaches children and adolescents that status isn’t the only form of popularity; being likable is another way to be popular. And Veenstra sees a lot of promise in transforming negative leaders into positive ones, since his research suggests that the two don’t differ much in their individual characteristics.
But Juvonen tells me the success of interventions like these depends on high-quality implementation. Schools that are short on staff or teachers who are strapped for time might skip lessons. “They may not really get it the way they need to make sure that the lessons hit home,” she says. “If their behavior is inconsistent with what they teach, it doesn't go anywhere.”
Parents reinforcing a “kindness is cool” ethos at home can also make a big difference. To understand this ecosystem effect, Veenstra draws a parallel to test scores. A school that sits in a neighborhood with highly-educated, high-income families will have a much easier job posting high numbers on standardized exams than a school that enrolls children from a historically underserved community. Similarly, if a school is in a locale where adults worry about being “soft” and believe in retaliation, it will have a “harder job” when it comes to bullying.
It’s also harder to create a culture of universal dignity and worth than it is to keep one going. After pandemic-era school closures, “You had to start all over again,” Veenstra says, which helps explain the heightened behavioral issues since. It’s not just that some individuals returned without the social skills customary for their age. It’s that, because so many did, there weren’t classrooms filled with kids steeped in prosocial behavior — a socialization infrastructure of sorts — waiting to get each one back up to speed.
Returning to the three remaining justifications for imposing consequences — rehabilitation, incapacitation and deterrence — there is nothing rehabilitative about a zero-tolerance bullying policy. In fact, the messaging is the opposite: You behaved poorly so now we’re writing you off as a lost cause. “What you communicate is that people do not have the capacity to change or grow,” says Dena N. Simmons, founder of LiberatED and the former assistant director of Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. “They are a labeled person.” How can rehabilitation from authoritarian behavior begin if our response to it models authoritarianism?
Incapacitation would mean separating out some kids to protect others, which might theoretically make sense by keeping former bullies off university campuses and out of workplaces, but we’ve already seen how time-limited and widespread bullying behavior is. And Simmons pointed out that not all “being mean” qualifies as bullying under the definition most academics use. It requires 1) behavior that’s repeated over time, 2) a power dynamic and 3) a level of intention.
She knows from her years teaching and working with teachers that it’s difficult for educators to know “whether it’s the fifth time that kid did that thing to that student or whether it’s the first time.” She says teachers also have a hard time assessing intentionality and knowing about hidden power imbalances, such as an aggressor having a massive social media following. It’s possible that a kid who ends up “incapacitated” by a policy like this wasn’t actually bullying in the first place; they just weren’t being nice.
Veenstra too raised the concern of labeling policies being under- and over-inclusive. Effective anti-bullying programs are instead forward-looking. “If you look backward, you become like the police detective that wants to find out who is to blame,” he says. But bullying is complicated.
For example, the most strategic kids with the most nefarious intentions often don’t strike themselves; they get someone else to do it, he notes. Veenstra thinks bully-victims, the ones who are on hyper-alert because of past victimization and lash out after little provocation, would be most likely to end up wearing this scarlet B. And the whole discussion would get mired in debate over what happened rather than what should happen.
Just as Veenstra worries that bully-victims would be inappropriately labeled, Simmons is sure the accused would disproportionately be Black children, Indigenous children, those who identify as LGBTQ+ and kids with special needs — “any student who is in the margins” — because that’s what research has revealed happens in American schools. Simmons said, “If you’re a Black boy, your teachers are going to already assume that you’re trouble. You’re a Black girl? You’re sassy. You’ve got an attitude.” Labels are applied in schools, and then, for many, the school-to-prison pipeline, in which school discipline like suspension or expulsion contributes to the likelihood of incarceration, takes over. “We have to talk about the criminal justice system if we’re gonna talk about schools,” she said.
A more just country is what that last goal, deterrence, is supposed to be after. Even if kids don’t deserve punishment, even if we can’t be sure we’re only capturing real bullying, and even if we can’t eradicate bias, there could still be a benefit in broadcasting the message that bullying will not be tolerated, right? Wrong.
Research on juveniles and deterrence suggests that increasing the severity of a consequence doesn’t meaningfully reduce how much they offend. Right here in the U.S., a panel of experts convened by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine looked specifically at zero-tolerance bullying policies in our nation’s schools — policies that, for example, feature automatic suspension or expulsion. They concluded that zero tolerance just doesn’t work. It doesn’t curb bullying and doesn’t make schools safer.
Juvonen says that’s in part because adolescent brains weigh immediate rewards much more heavily than far-off costs. She shares a lesson from health communications: “In the old days, they were showing the lungs of those over 60 who had lung cancer, and the kids would just sort of laugh,” but when they were told “your breath actually smells bad and you get yellow teeth,” teens were more likely to reject cigarettes. A similar intervention here might tell kids no one wants to hangout with (or date) a bully. Real deterrence, Veenstra agreed, means shifting the social scene so that bullying doesn’t make friends or fans.
It’s important to keep that school-wide framing front of mind, these experts told me. Juvonen says some parents tell their child to stick up for and befriend victimized classmates, but “I would never put it on any single kid.”
Instead, she said, ask a friend group to welcome someone into their fold or together start a campaign to keep anyone from sitting alone at lunch. When I mentioned research on how social-emotional learning programs can give kids the emotion-management tools needed to control an impulse to act violently or to respond to aggression by diffusing rather than escalating, Simmons said that’s true but, “I just want to be very mindful of where we put the responsibility and the onus…. It needs to be a community culture shift,” not a bootstrapping message to kids. And, importantly, “not something that is top down,” she said, emphasizing the importance of community buy-in and participation in developing any new policy.
Until each school makes that happen, there will continue to be words that “bounce in your head like Steph Curry dribbles the ball,” as my daughter’s poem said, words that “curl my shoulders like a dying leaf.” She doesn’t know about this research on bullying prevention, but her poem indicates that on some deep level, she understands the environmental forces in play. It ends, “Despite your biting acid rain, your poisoned soil, I WILL BLOOM.” I hope those who bullied her will, too.
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