World Anti-Bullying Forum

One of the SELS working areas is studying of the socio-psychological climate at schools. In particular, teenage aggression and bullying is one of the areas that receive our attention. Attacks, bullying, insulting pranks, and exclusion from communication can be found among children and teenagers of different ages. Relatively recently, so-called cyber-bullying that takes place in social networks has been also added to more traditional forms of bullying.

In May 2017, several SESL staff members (D.Aleksandrov, V.Ivanushin, V.Titkov, E.Taratuta, A.Budaev) took part in the World Anti-Bullying Forum, which is the largest event that unites researchers of bullying, experts who develop programs to combat school aggression, teachers, and school administrators.

The international forum dedicated to the problems of bullying among children and teenagers took place in Stockholm in May 7-9, 2017. The forum program included about 60 presentation, seminars and round tables from 150 speakers and many participants from various countries. The forum was organized by several centers and universities that aim to create safe school space for children's development: Friends International Center against Bullying, International Bulletin Prevention Association, Stockholm University, Linköping University, and Örebro University. On one of the days the participants were greeted by members of the Swedish royal family, Prince Carl Philipp and Princess Sophia, and on the next day by the Minister of Education of Sweden. Presentations and panel discussions from leading researchers were the highlights of this forum. They discussed problems, such as what constitutes bullying, how it can be measured, whether cyber bullying is a part of a traditional bullying, etc. There was a number of eminent researchers, including Dan Olweus, whose pioneer studies of bullying sparkled other research projects of this issue; Christina Salmivalli, the founder of the most famous anti-bullying program KiWa; Dorothy Espelage, the author of more than 100 research papers on bullying; Sameer Hinduja, an expert in cyber bullying expert and author of several books on this topic. In their presentations, they examined the connections between cyber bullying and psychological characteristics, the emotional regulation of children and teenagers, the specific features of cyber bullying and cyber victimization in various countries. For example, Masa Popovac and Philip Fine compared cyber bullying in the UK and South Africa. Even though the children from Africa have a lower access to the Internet, the level of cyber bullying there is quite high. Gerald J. White was studying cyber bullying in two provinces of Canada, Newfoundland and Labrador. According to their results, victims of teenage aggression (that is, the “standard” bullying), are more likely to become a target for cyber bullying. However, Kyriakos Charalampous has shown that if children at first become targets for cyber bullying, they are less likely to become targets for traditional forms of peer attacks.  

There were interesting presentations on programs aimed at preventing and reducing aggression among teenagers (KiVa, PREVNet), and at instruments to measure bullying (APRI). During a roundtable on the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program (OBPP), Prof. Olweus gave a talk on the effectiveness of the OBPP program, in which he compared the level of victimization of students in the schools that continue using this program and in the schools that stopped using it. In accordance to the researchers’ expectations, the longer the schools keep using this program, the lower the level of students victimization is.   Another interesting presentation was made by researchers Garandeau and Tessa Lansu, who studied the relationship between popularity (everyone knows you), social attractiveness (everyone likes you), and the likelihood of becoming a bully. Their results have shown that there is a positive correlation between bullying and popularity, and a negative correlation between bullying and social attractiveness. We also found this effect in our studies of bullying in vocational lyceums and colleges: aggressive teenagers are popular among their peers. Many research projects were also examining the role of “bystanders”, i.e. the students who are neither bullies nor victims. Usually such children are in the majority, and this group is quite diverse. Researchers have identified several roles for these “bystanders”. Some of them may silently or even actively encourage aggressors, but other may speak out to defend victims. It was interesting to see that researchers use vastly different qualitative and quantitative methods, like researching social networks, modeling structural equations, multi-level regressions, in-depth interviews and embedded observations, analysis of communication in social networks, but they still listen and understand each other, because they all of them are involved into research of the same problem. For the SELS staff, it was an excellent opportunity to get to establish good contacts with researchers and experts from different countries.