Bullying Prevention Program

The Bullying Prevention Program is a universal intervention developed to promote the reduction and prevention of bullying behavior and victimization problems. The program is based on an ecological model, intervening with a child's environment on many levels: the individual children who are bullying and being bullied, the families, the teachers and students within the classroom, the school as a whole, and the community. The main arena for the program is the school, and school staff have the primary responsibility for introducing and implementing the program. Schools are provided ongoing support by project staff.

Adult behavior is crucial to the success of the Bullying Prevention Program, and to achieve the program's goals two conditions must be met. First, the adults at school and, to some degree, at home must become aware of the extent of bully-victim problems in the given school. Second, the adults must engage themselves, with some degree of seriousness, in changing the situation. Without adults' acknowledgment of schools' existing bully-victim problems and a clear commitment by a majority of the school staff to participate actively in the antibullying efforts, the program is likely to have limited success. These principles have been translated into numerous specific measures, or interventions, that are used at the school, class, and individual levels.

The goal of this program is to reduce bullying in schools.

The Bullying Prevention Program has been implemented in a variety of cultures and school contexts. The U.S. evaluation was conducted in South Carolina, using a quasi-experimental design with fourth through eighth grade students in six school districts. The evaluation of the program has produced somewhat modest but still positive findings. For example, the U.S. study of middle school students revealed significant decreases in students' self-reports of bullying in the intervention schools, when compared with control schools. Moreover, the program appeared to slow the natural rate of increase in students' engagement in several other antisocial behaviors. There were, however, no effects on victimization, bullying of teachers, group delinquency, theft, substance abuse, or attitudes toward bullying. And no program effects were found by year 2.