Kids who are aggressive early on in life are more likely to be victimized by bullies than non-aggressive kids. That’s one of the key findings of a new study this week in the Archives of General Psychiatry. Newsweek notes experts have previously documented a link between being aggressive and being tormented.
When volatile and angry children act out on their frustrations—smashing a toy after someone takes their ball away—they aren’t exactly beloved by their peers….Kids who take their wrath out on other kids, as the children did in the study, are also at risk. Their classmates don’t like them—and some will eventually make their displeasure known. Prior research has focused largely on school-age kids, around age 4 or 5, and the studies have been relatively small. The new study, which followed 1,970 children in Canada, traces behavior all the way back to toddlerhood.
The researchers found two other risk factors for “peer victimization” as well, Newsweek reports: harsh or reactive parenting—anger, shouting and spanking when the kids were fussy—and lower income families.
Three out of four teenagers report they were bullied online at least once in the last year, according to a new study by UCLA psychologists. Not yours? Only one in 10 reported cyberbullying to parents or other adults.
At Ars Technica, blogger John Timmer has a smart take on this. Parents and teachers are concerned that the anonymity of online bullying exacerbates the problem. But the study suggests it’s less of a new phenomenon than the playground gone digital.
The authors feel strongly that the fact that real-world bullying strongly predicts cyberbullying and the parallels in behavior both suggest that cyberbullying may not actually be a distinct phenomenon. “These findings further underscore the continuity between adolescents’ social worlds in school and online,” they conclude.
Florida’s Broward County has become the first school district in the state to put an “anti-bullying policy” in place, per newly required state law. The Miami Herald reports Broward schools are rolling out a new computerized system for reporting and tracking bullying. “The Florida Department of Education will use Broward’s policy as a model for the state’s 66 other school districts,” the paper notes. The Broward school district now defines bullying as “systematically and chronically inflicting physical hurt or psychological distress….The policy includes more than traditional schoolyard name-calling, teasing and shoving. Now, even behavior over the Internet — or social networking — can count if it affects students in school.
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