Bullying has long been tolerated as a rite of passage among children and adolescents. There is an implication that individuals who are bullied must have "asked for" this type of treatment, or deserved it. Sometimes, even the child who is bullied begins to internalize this idea. For many years, there has been a general acceptance and collective shrug when it comes to a child or adolescent with greater social capital or power pushing around a child perceived as subordinate. But bullying is not developmentally appropriate; it should not be considered a normal part of the typical social grouping that occurs throughout a child's life.

Although bullying behavior endures through generations, the milieu is changing. Historically, bulling has occurred at school, the physical setting in which most of childhood is centered and the primary source for peer group formation. In recent years, however, the physical setting is not the only place bullying is occurring. Technology allows for an entirely new type of digital electronic aggression, cyberbullying, which takes place through chat rooms, instant messaging, social media, and other forms of digital electronic communication.

Composition of peer groups, shifting demographics, changing societal norms, and modern technology are contextual factors that must be considered to understand and effectively react to bullying in the United States. Youth are embedded in multiple contexts and each of these contexts interacts with individual characteristics of youth in ways that either exacerbate or attenuate the association between these individual characteristics and bullying perpetration or victimization. Recognizing that bullying behavior is a major public health problem that demands the concerted and coordinated time and attention of parents, educators and school administrators, health care providers, policy makers, families, and others concerned with the care of children, this report evaluates the state of the science on biological and psychosocial consequences of peer victimization and the risk and protective factors that either increase or decrease peer victimization behavior and consequences.

PLEASE DOWNLOAD FREE PDF AT THIS LINK: https://www.nap.edu/catalog/23482/preventing-bullying-through-science-policy-and-practice#rights Links to an external site.

Sharing NAP PDF Files

All of the National Academies Press books (electronic and printed versions) on this website are copyrighted by the National Academy of Sciences with all rights reserved. You may not distribute, post, or copy our work without written permission from the National Academies Press. Posting or distributing our PDFs not only violates our copyright, but it also could proliferate the sharing of non-authoritative versions of our reports.

We encourage sharing our books via approved means to help maximize the impact of our work. Please use the following methods to ensure that everyone receives up-to-date, authoritative files directly from the National Academies Press servers.

• Point your colleagues to the book's unique URL, which you can copy from your browser's address bar.
• Embed a widget for the book on your website using the "Embed this book" tool on the right of each book's catalog page.
  
• Share the book with your colleagues via social media. Each book's catalog page has numerous share options available so that you can use the social media site of your choice.

Contents

1. Summary
2. Introduction
3. The Scope of the Problem
4. Individuals with Social Context
5. Consequences
6. Preventative
7. Law and Policy
8. Future Directions
9. Appendices A-B
10. Appendices C
11. Appendices D
12. Now What