Everyone knows a bully. Whether a classmate, a family member, a coworker, or some angry person in the comments section of an article, we have all dealt with bullies at some point or another. We might not understand why bullies exist—pop culture examples paint pictures of kids with troubled personal lives, while other instances present bullies with no rhyme or reason other than a desire to hurt others—but we understand it is harmful, and many of us have accepted that bullying is a part of life.
But just how harmful is bullying? And why should we have to live with bullies, particularly our children, who have enough on their plates between schoolwork, friend groups, extracurricular activities, and simply growing up? These are the questions on the minds of two faculty members in the College of Education, Health, and Human Sciences: associate professor in the department of Human Development and Family Science, Heidi Gazelle, and the Michael and Jean Shahnasarian Endowed Associate Professor in the department of Educational Psychology and Learning Systems, Lyndsay Jenkins.
To these researchers, it is not enough to simply accept the status quo. Gazelle has spent much of her career looking into the long-term effects of victimization on children and their development. Through her research, she has contributed to the body of work explaining just how destructive bullying can be. Jenkins, on the other hand, has devoted her studies to creating interventions for peer victimization. Her latest project seeks to create a new type of intervention that can be used by professionals to help children.
Deeper Issues
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently estimated that between 1 in 5 and 1 in 4 children will experience bullying, or what Gazelle and Jenkins refer to as peer victimization. Peer victimization refers to a variety of actions that can harm the recipient, such as physical aggression, verbal aggression or teasing, attempts to hurt someone’s relationships or exclude them from relationships or groups, and spreading rumors, and does not have to include a power imbalance or involve repeated acts of aggression. Peer victimization can cause emotional and sometimes physical harm, and this harm can lead to long-term challenges to healthy development.
Gazelle is interested in children who are at high risk for experiencing peer victimization—socially withdrawn children. Socially withdrawn children engage in interaction at lower rates than their peers. While social withdrawal is not a clinical diagnosis, it predicts clinical levels of social anxiety for some children, Gazelle explains. “It doesn’t mean that they never engage, but often, when they engage in social interaction, they’re shy,” says Gazelle. “They may be awkward. They may appear immature relative to other children the same age.”
Gazelle is interested in the relation between social withdrawal and peer victimization. “We see differences in withdrawn children—some are more victimized than others. We would expect especially those children who get excluded and have limited peer interactions to fare worse.
“We know, based on a large body of research about how children develop under normal circumstances, that children learn a lot from interacting with other children,” Gazelle continues. “And those interactions—and especially interactions with friends—are very important in teaching children to understand other people’s perspectives.”
Children who are socially withdrawn and seldom interact with other children typically fall behind in their ability to understand others’ perspectives. “Understanding others’ perspectives is key to social skill, so they will not be as socially skillful as their agemates,” says Gazelle. This pattern of development can escalate over time. “The more they’re excluded, the more that exclusion will interfere with their development, so it’s a vicious cycle.”
Influences on Social Withdrawal
Peer victimization is not the only influence on whether a child will be socially withdrawn. Another major influence is a child’s relationship with their parents. “Children who are insecurely attached with their parents, which means that they aren’t confident that their parents will be there when they need them, are more likely to be anxious withdrawn.” If a child feels like they cannot trust their parents, they may also feel like they cannot rely on others, such as their friends.
A child’s classroom can also impact their social skills. “We have some evidence that, when a classroom climate is positive and supportive, that especially vulnerable children may fare better with their peer relationships.” This influence is difficult to research, as children move from classroom to classroom over the years, but the evidence also points to this as a protective factor.
Currently, Gazelle directs a longitudinal study funded by a National Institutes of Health grant that has followed a cohort of children from third through seventh grade who are now in young adulthood. Studies like these will help researchers understand the impact of childhood social withdrawal and its long-term effects on everything from mental health to forming romantic relationships.
A New Kind of Intervention
As Gazelle seeks to understand more about peer victimization and social withdrawal, Lyndsay Jenkins has embarked on a new project to provide schools with the tools to help reduce bullying and peer victimization. She and her team have started the Interventions for Victimized Youth (IVY). Just like the plant, IVY seeks to take hold wherever it is planted, even in the toughest environments, with the end goal to help targets of peer victimization thrive.
IVY aims to provide research-based interventions. While interventions and research have gone into great lengths to curtail bullying, Jenkins says that IVY grew to fill a void for a comprehensive, prepackaged intervention plan. “There’s really nothing that is readily available for counselors of psychologists to pick up and just use as a program that they could offer to kids who’ve been victimized,” Jenkins says.
Jenkins believes that the value of such an intervention could help schools and networks that are strained for resources make a difference in the lives of children who have been victimized. IVY plans to package all the services and materials needed to provide support, all of which are based on extensive research.
The first version of IVY has already undergone a pilot study with students. This initial program included five middle school students, and their feedback helped revise the project. At the same time, a generous donation from alumnus Peter Scanlan (M.S. ’71, Ph.D. ’79) allowed Jenkins to hire two graduate assistants and a postdoc to continue refining the program. Thanks to this increase in personnel, Jenkins plans to increase the pilot testing from five children to 50.
Schools have long sought to reduce overall levels of bullying, with the hope that this reduction would improve the lives of students. School counselors and school psychologists are more important than ever and are making great strides; however, where Jenkins believes IVY can help is when students get referred to a counselor after being victimized. “Schools have gotten pretty good at reducing bullying or understanding how bad it is, but there was still a gap in what they do for the kids who are victimized.” Jenkins says that schools now refer students who are victimized to counseling, but “there are not many resources available for school counselors and psychologists about how to help them.”
Supporting counselors and psychologists is essential. “I think there’s always going to be some level of bullying out there, so providing resources for the folks that would be directly supporting students I think is really important.”
Bullying Evolved
Jenkins believes that bullying has changed over the last 10 years, and schools and counselors have to adapt accordingly. For instance, Jenkins says that research indicates that cyber bullying can be even more detrimental than face-to-face bullying due to the prevalence of smartphones and social media among adolescents. Cyber bullying can take place anywhere, anytime, and victims cannot get away from it the way they could from physical or face-toface bullying.
While Jenkins and her team included cyberbullying as part of the intervention material, student feedback from the IVY pilot study recommended increasing the focus even more on this kind of peer victimization. “They made the point that no one just goes around and shoves kids into the lockers anymore because adults are smart enough to know that if they stand in the hallway, they’ll catch those kids,” Jenkins says.
Cyberbullying can be much harder to monitor, especially since school districts typically advise school personnel not to follow or friend students on social media, and parents may not be able to monitor all of a child’s activity on their smartphone. The other challenge with cyberbullying is that it can be anonymous and shared widely.
As IVY evolves, Jenkins hopes it takes root locally to provide care for victimized students in Leon County; however, she also hopes it could spread to school districts, counselors, and psychologists around the country. She and her team will continue to refine and document how IVY works so that it can be adapted to a variety of environments.
The FSU Difference
In recent years, schools have placed an increased focus on the mental health of students. Despite this, schools often struggle to get the resources their students need. Projects like IVY can help address this shortfall, but Jenkins also points out that partnerships with local universities can make a difference. Graduate students from the FSU Counseling Psychology and School Psychology doctoral program often work at Florida State University Schools and in Leon County schools, gaining experience necessary to start their professional careers. At the same time, researchers like Gazelle continue to look at how peer victimization affects development, which can help faculty like Jenkins devise new interventions.
While bullying might not ever go away, collaborations and partnerships—both within FSU departments and between the university and its surrounding school districts—can make a real difference in the lives of students.
To learn more about Dr. Gazelle’s long-term study of children, visit cehhs.fsu.edu/youth-wellness.
If you have a child in middle school that has experienced bullying, they are invited to join an ongoing study about IVY that is funded by the National Institute of Health. Your child can participate in an 8 week group focused on developing coping skills and dealing with bullying. All participants receive a $75 gift card. For more information about IVY visit https://cehhs.fsu.edu/ivy. To sign up your child for the IVY study, visit this link.
