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Peer-led intervention campaign against school bullying: who considered it useful, who benefited? (Updated)

Introduction

Authors

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How effective was a peer-led anti-bullying campaign in changing attitudes and actions?

Students at an upper-level comprehensive school (ages 13-15) in Southern Finland set out to try and reduce bullying in their school. This study examined the effectiveness of this peer-led intervention program which targeted the whole peer group in an effort to involve all students in creating and fostering anti-bullying attitudes and behaviours. The study found that the intervention was most effective amongst girls. It made them feel more confident so that they were able to influence bullies and increased their willingness to influence bullying problems in class.  The attitudes of boys were somewhat more negative, though the study suggested that this may be because all the peer counsellors were girls, and boys were reluctant to get involved. The study indicated that bullies and those with pro-bullying attitudes were the most difficult to influence. It investigated whether bystanders could exert peer pressure to counter bullying.

Keywords
Finland; Bullying; Inclusion; Gender; Girls; Boys; Attitudes; Behaviour; Self-esteem; Peer counselling; Secondary schools; Pupil voice; Pupil participation

Why was the study carried out?

A peer counsellor system operates in Finland and is organised by the Mannerheim League for Child Welfare (click to http://www.mll.fi/in_english/ ).  Established in 1972, there are now about 10,000 peer counsellors in most upper level comprehensive schools, senior secondary schools and vocational training institutes.   This study involved eight peer counsellors who were all members of an upper-level comprehensive school in a small town. The age range of students was 13 to 15 years.  The counsellors, who were all girls, were chosen by their fellow students.  They attended training sessions aimed at helping them to establish good relations between students by promoting social responsibility and fostering a safe and encouraging school atmosphere. 

The eight peer counsellors contacted the author asking for advice on how to plan and implement an anti-bullying campaign. Together, the peer counsellors, a teacher from the school who acted as co-ordinator and the author planned and implemented the project.

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What do we know about previous attempts to stop bullying?

The vast majority of strategies to counter bullying have consisted of actions undertaken by adults, such as school staff or parents. Although there is some evidence that these programmes have had positive effects, the effects vary considerably from school to school and in some cases matters have been made worse. The author suggested that the relative success of these interventions is related to the effort and resources that have been allocated to the problem.

Findings from previous research indicated that:

• primary school students were more likely to respond positively to anti-bullying campaigns than their secondary school counterparts; 
• girls tended to show more positive attitudes than boys to anti-bullying campaigns; and 
• pro-bullying students had reacted with amusement to an anti-bullying video.

The author noted that some students were more resistant than others to anti-bullying campaigns and speculated that some anti-bullying work might reinforce and strengthen negative attitudes. 

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Targeting the bystanders?

This study attempted to influence 'bystanders' -  those students who were not directly involved in the bullying but were present in the vicinity.  The author suggested that bystanders who were present but ignored the bullying were, in effect, helping to maintain and reinforce the bullying.  The study labelled students who tried to help the victims ‘defenders’.  The intervention attempted to influence the behaviour of passive bystanders so that they no longer encouraged the bullies by their inaction.  Previous work on bullying presented a model approach to involving peer-group bystanders, including:

• raising awareness so that students were informed about the seriousness of bullying;
• promoting self-reflection in order to make students more aware of how their attitudes and behaviour could constitute a participant role in the bullying process; and
• encouraging students to adopt new behaviours and to take responsibility for their own actions.

The present study suggested that peer-led interventions could encourage adolescents to take responsibility for their own behaviour.  The process was initiated by assigning formal helper or peer counsellor roles to students who were then trained to carry out anti-bullying activities aimed at increasing awareness and showing what students could do in bullying situations. 

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What were the main anti-bullying activities?

The core activities of the intervention campaign were carried out during the school's 'Happy Face Week' - although it is not clear if this was a specific anti-bullying week or not - and continued for the following month. They included the following:

• a whole school meeting during 'Happy Face Week' which included a presentation by the counsellors. They described the campaign and its objectives and told students about types of bullying, group mechanisms and participant roles and other relevant issues;
• peer-led discussions in which teams of three counsellors visited each class and facilitated small group discussion about the central issues presented in the lecture. A particular focus of the activity was what each student could do to stop bullying;
• information about bullying became part of school news broadcasts to each class;
• seventh-grade students designed posters about bullying which were hung around the school; and
• a contest was run in which students were asked to complete an open-ended comic-strip describing a bullying situation.

During the campaign students were encouraged to mix with others outside their usual cliques, during the activity sessions. The peer counsellors played a major role in the campaign, using overhead transparencies developed by the author and other supplementary materials in their work in the classrooms. They focused other pupils' attention on key issues presented in the whole-school lecture such as the group mechanism in bullying situations and how bystanders became participants. Core features of the messages sent out by the peer counsellors were not only that all students had a responsibility to do something but also that they could be effective in combating bullying.

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What effects did the intervention have?

Questionnaire responses showed that before the intervention:

• verbal bullying was most frequently observed, followed by indirect bullying (indirect bullying refers to actions designed to humiliate or exclude other pupils, such as talking behind somebody’s back, passing notes about another pupil, excluding another child from the group, referring to a particular child in a denigrator or scornful way, etc), attacks on property and physical bullying; 
• girls had observed significantly more indirect bullying than boys; boys had observed significantly more attacks on property than girls;
• most students had healthy attitudes to bullying initially, regarding it as an anti-social activity; and
• 43% of students believed that bullying was not their business; nevertheless, 70% of students believed that they could have an effect on bullying.  (These apparently contradictory findings might mean that some students believed they could have an effect if they chose to intervene.)

After the intervention it was found that that:

• girls evaluated the campaign more positively than boys;
• self-reported bullying declined after the intervention – this decline was strong amongst the group of seventh-grade girls who had responded most to the campaign, but weaker amongst boys;
• students who were not themselves victims reported more bullying of others, which may have reflected either a greater awareness of bullying or a greater inclination to get involved as a result of the campaign;
• the proportions of boys and girls who believed that they could influence bullying in their class increased but the effect was only significant among girls; and
• there was an increase in pro-bullying attitudes among some boys - boys’ mean scores on the pro-bullying component of the five point attitude scale (0 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree) rose from 0.90 to 1.14.

Whilst the campaign seemed to have had a positive effect amongst girls, a number of boys did not think that it was beneficial.  The report suggested reasons for this:

• the boys may have valued the programme less because all the peer counsellors were girls and because they were uncomfortable in the small group discussion format used;
• the initial anti-bullying attitudes held by many of the girls may have pre-disposed them to want to do something about it and to believe that they could do so.  This may have prompted them to responded more positively than the boys to the campaign; and
• bystanders might not have been able to influence the most active bullies.

The study acknowledged the difficulties involved in making generalisations about boys because of the small number of boys who reported being bullied. It also pointed out that there was no control group.

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What data were collected?

Pre-intervention information was gathered three days before the campaign and post-intervention data were gathered five weeks later by the use of questionnaires. The students were first given advice about what constituted bullying and the various forms that bullying could take. They were then asked to:

• identify anyone (including themselves) who they considered was being bullied;
• evaluate the extent to which they had witnessed different types of bullying, such as "physical bullying" or "verbal bullying";
• explain their own attitudes to bullying; and, post-intervention,
• evaluate the campaign.

There were twelve participating classes involving 196 children. To increase the reliability of the results only data from the 144 students who were present at both times of data collection were included.

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Implications

Whilst writing the digest the writers began to ask the following questions about implications for practitioners:

• the study noted that some anti-bullying interventions actually make matters worse - when tackling bullying, do you:
• follow up all claims of bullying?
• keep an open mind and listen carefully to all accounts?
• adopt a problem-solving approach?
• follow-up repeatedly, checking firstly that bullying has stopped, then again within about two weeks and the following half term to ensure bullying has not restarted?
• the study found that among boys, attacks on property was the dominant form of bullying, while for girls, indirect bullying such as social exclusion was most common.  Does this resonate with your own experience?  How would you find out if this is true at your school?
• the study suggests (and there is evidence elsewhere from peer mediation – see NSPCC report in ‘Where might I find more information?’) that the students who are most actively involved in peer  counselling gain most benefit from it - to what extent might this persuade you to consider including students more likely to bully in peer counsellor activities and training?

Whilst writing the digest the writers began to ask the following questions about implications for school leaders:

• in this study, only female students were chosen by their peers to be counsellors, but this seemed to reduce the effect of the campaign on boys - what mechanisms could you use to ensure that all students have a voice and are equally represented within active groups?  Might you need to actively recruit boys who could offer positive role models?
• when reviewing your whole-school anti-bullying policy, have you consulted fully with all interested parties, for example, by conducting surveys of students, staff and parents to find out the extent of bullying in school, asking respondents about their perceptions of what action has been taken and by whom and where bullying takes place? (You might find the link to the event mapper in ‘Where might I find more information?’ useful.)
• the study found that, though girls responded positively to discussion of anti-bullying issues, some students, especially boys, were more resilient to change - has your school developed a range of anti-bullying strategies that you can use to address both simpler and more intractable problems?
• the study attempted to evaluate the success of its intervention by using a questionnaire – how does your school monitor the short-term and long term effectiveness of its anti-bullying strategy? Do you record complaints of bullying, note actions taken, monitor the level of these complaints and/or use surveys?
  

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Where might I find more information?

The DfES anti-bullying website at  http://www.dfes.gov.uk/bullying offers a variety of resources for parents, teachers, pupils and governors on tackling bullying, including revised guidelines for schools and an updated Don’t Suffer in Silence anti-bullying pack full of ideas and practical techniques.

Bullying Online: 
http://www.bullying.co.uk/

The NSPCC has recently published a review that clarifies the nature of peer mediation and highlights issues arising from studies of its use in the UK: Baginsky, W. (2004) Peer mediation in the UK: a guide for schools London:NSPCC.  Available at: http://www.nspcc.org.uk/inform/Downloads/PeerMediationInTheUK.pdf

Website on peer mediation:
www.mediation-eu.net

Teachernet web site:
http://www.dfes.gov.uk/a-z/BULLYING_ba.html

The Mannerheim League for Child Welfare:
(click to http://www.mll.fi/in_english/ ). 

The Scottish Centre for Research in Education website:
http://www.scre.ac.uk/bully/

The Curriculum Evaluation and Management Centre at Durham University has released a monitoring system for schools to help tackle bullying. The 'Event Mapper' allows pupils to indicate on a map of their school where they feel at risk. This enables a school to better allocate resources and to determine if their bullying policy is effective. There's a demonstration at http://intu.cem.dur.ac.uk/datamap .

Cowie, H. and Sharp, S. (1994), Tackling bullying through the curriculum. In: Smith, P. and Sharp, S. (eds) School bullying: insights and perspectives.  London: Routledge, pp.84-107.

O’Connell, P., Pepler, D. and Craig, W. (1999), Peer involvement in bullying: insights and challenges for intervention, Journal of Adolescence, vol. 22, pp 437-452.

Salmivalli, C. (1999) Participant role approach to school bullying: implications for interventions, Journal of Adolescence, vol. 22, pp.453-9.

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