Bullying at school is not to be taken lightly

Children being intimidated by their peers at school is widespread and worrying.

Persistent problem

Christina Salmivalli chose school bullying for her master’s thesis three decades ago. Now, she’s a renowned expert on the subject helping European countries tackle it as leader of an EU-funded research project. She is also a professor of Psychology at the University of Turku in Finland. Sofia Manzanaro, writing for Horizon: The EU Research & Innovation Magazine, reports on her experience.

“The main question is why this happens—why we fail so often in putting an end to bullying,” said Salmivalli.

In 1918, UNICEF reported that half of the world’s students aged 13 to 15—around 150 million in total—have their education disrupted by bullying and physical fights. It said that 3 in 10 students in 39 industrialized countries admitted to bullying peers.

Bullying takes various forms including verbal, physical and indirect (such as exclusion from social groups).

While bullying cases in Europe have dropped over the past decade, they remain widespread, according to Salmivalli. She said that methods for collecting data on bullying vary significantly from country to country and that, as a “very rough” estimate, 10% of school-aged children in Europe may endure such behaviour.

The project that Salmivalli leads is investigating cases of bullying that persist even after school authorities have intervened to address it. Called CHALLENGE, the initiative started in October 2020 and is due to run until the end of September 2025.

Excellent credentials

A highlight of Salmivalli’s career is the development of a programme to address and prevent bullying in schools.

Named KiVa, it not only serves as Finland’s bullying-prevention program but also is used in schools elsewhere in Europe and beyond including Belgium, Chile, France, Italy, Mexico, New Zealand, South Africa and the U.K.

The program is based on the idea that the behaviour of peers who witness bullying incidents plays a crucial role in perpetuating or ending them.

Teachers encourage students to stand up for targeted classmates. Through in-class discussions, video games and films, educators raise awareness of various forms of bullying in a bid to foster empathy and respect among students.

To help determine why anti-bullying measures are sometimes ineffective, Salmivalli and her team have gathered data on more than 300 bullying cases in Finland from 31 primary and middle schools.

Participating teachers have registered the anti-bullying steps taken in each case. These include individual and group discussions with children involved in bullying and follow-up meetings on a phone application developed by the researchers.

The team has also gathered information on the “victims” and “perpetrators” through questionnaires that include details about classmates, friends and parents.

Initial findings indicate that around 20% of anti-bullying measures failed to put a stop to such behaviour, according to Salmivalli.

The researchers will now use all the information gathered to evaluate why the bullying persisted in these cases.

“We are just in the process of combining it all in order to understand what happened and what went wrong,” said Salmivalli.

Saliva samples

CHALLENGE is also venturing into molecular genetics to understand the reasons behind unsuccessful efforts to stop bullying.

The project is extracting DNA from saliva samples of students previously involved in KiVa. The aim is to assess whether certain genetic characteristics—such as ones linked to depression or anti-social behaviour—might shed light on failed efforts to stop bullying.

“We expect to find children who were and were not affected by the KiVa intervention and examine which genetically influenced traits are associated with their response, be it either unsuccessful or successful,” said Salmivalli.

Not so natural

Other EU-funded researchers are challenging the long-held view that bullying is merely a natural part of growing up, arguing that peer acceptance is crucial to teenagers as they gain independence from their parents.

In a project called Outside-In, the researchers are evaluating the physical and mental health far beyond the schoolyard of people who endured bullying.

Expected to reach completion by August 2025, the project combines genomics and psychology to assess how adolescents who faced bullying biologically respond to it.

The suspected consequences can last through adulthood and include depression, anxiety, psychosis and sleep disturbances.

“We’re trying to see whether those kinds of victimization experiences can also get under the skin—an impact at the biological level that is potentially much more pervasive than we initially thought,” said Matteo Giletta, who leads Outside-In and is an associate professor of psychology at Ghent University in Belgium.

Inflammatory response

The researchers are examining links between social exclusion faced by teenagers and their susceptibility to increased inflammation, a reaction by the immune system to injury or infection.

The Outside-In team has collected blood samples from 350 participating students. The goal is to extract information from their genomic activity and observe whether these students had a heightened inflammatory response.

Persistent inflammation has been linked to several chronic health conditions including cardiovascular diseases, certain cancers, depression and anxiety.

Unlike CHALLENGE, the main goal of Outside-In isn’t to curb bullying by bolstering intervention measures but rather to highlight its long-term effects.

“Those types of experiences can impact every level, going much deeper than what we think,” said Giletta.

Unique period

Salmivalli echoed the point by saying that bullying amounts to a breach of basic human rights.

“There are many children who are really afraid, who feel threatened and unsafe,” she said.

Bullying should also be considered a public-health matter given the lasting effects on the mental and physical well-being of people who endured such behavior, according to Salmivalli.

She cautioned against any complacency in tackling bullying in Europe, saying cases on the continent have increased—albeit only slightly—since the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and the widespread lockdowns it triggered over two years.

Giletta said the pandemic caused a major disruption for teenagers by isolating them for a lengthy time during very formative years.

“You don’t get back these couple of years,” he said. “And these are unique periods.”

Image supplied by Freepik.

← Previous Next →

Martin Doherty, writing for The Conversation, says that at the age of about four, children reach important milestones in brain development.

One of these is a huge improvement in understanding others’ thoughts and feelings. This is the start of empathy. Another is in spatial thinking—understanding how objects are positioned and related. This is the beginning of the ability to read maps.

Martin and his colleague, Catherine Sayer, conducted a study with 175 two to five-year-olds to explore how children are able to use scale models to figure out where something is in the real world. At about four, children are able to use a scale model of a room to work out where something is. We thought that this might result from children’s understanding of how one thing can represent something else. But we actually found that four-year-olds’ ability to use scale models came from their spatial abilities.

At the same age, children start to understand that someone’s behaviour is due to what that person believes, not necessarily what is really the case. This has interesting consequences.

If you’ve played hide-and-seek with young children, you may have noticed that they aren’t always very good at it. They love the ritual of looking in all the wrong places first, but beforehand they may tell you where they are going to hide, hide in the same place every time, or not be especially hidden.

After their fourth birthday, they get much better at hide and seek. They understand that the seeker looks in the wrong places because they don’t know where the hider is.

At about three to four children also start to tell lies. They realize they can make someone believe something that isn’t true.

Understanding symbols

Martin’s earlier research with fellow psychologist Josef Perner suggests that four-year-olds don’t just start to understand how others’ minds work. Figuring this out is part of the development of an understanding of “representation”—that symbols, like thoughts, words, or pictures, can be used to stand for something else.

Children start to think about how words relate to objects. This means, for instance, knowing that “animal” can refer to something you already have a name for, such as “rabbit”. This might help children learn the new word.

Their ability to use a understand the components of pictures also improves around this age. Very young children use a lot of trial and error to complete a jigsaw, picking up random pieces to see if they fit. By the time they are about four years old, they start to use the picture as a guide, trying to connect lines and match bits of colour, while checking the guide picture on the box lid.

Developmental experiments

Another ability children develop at around four is using scale models. A classic set of developmental experiments involved a model of a regular household room. The real room had typical furniture—sofa, table, cupboard and so on—and the model had miniature versions laid out in the same way.

Children were shown where something was hidden in the model and told to find an object hidden in “the same place” in the room. Children of around four can find the object using the identical layouts. If shown a sticker under a particular chair in the model room, for example, they can go straight to the “same” chair in the other room. This is the fundamental understanding required to read maps.

Adults see scale models and maps as representations. Maps represent a town or a country. A scale model of, say, the Eiffel Tower represents the real thing. At first, Martin suspected children’s ability to use scale models is more evidence of understanding representation at this age.

He was wrong. Instead, the researchers found that this ability is based on a development in children’s spatial abilities that also occurs at about four. This is the ability to think about spaces and where objects are within them. Spatial abilities help with maths skills, and good spatial ability is linked to an interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Their experiment was simple. They compared the model room task with a test of understanding how representation works. The two abilities develop around the same age, but they found they were not related. Children who could do one task couldn’t necessarily do the other.

They also had a test of purely spatial ability. Children who passed the model room task also passed the spatial task. So it looks like the model room task relied on children‘s spatial thinking.

They don’t yet know why two important but apparently unrelated abilities arise at the same time. Perhaps it’s related to changes in the growing brain at this interesting age.

Provided by The Conversation.

Image supplied by Freepik.