Using SNA as a part of a school’s Bullying prevention program

Background

Bullying in schools is a big and seemingly never-ending problem. According to a study mentioned on the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program’s (OBPP) website, 17% of all students reported having been bullied “sometimes or more often” [i]. The situation in Sweden is slightly better, ca 8% of the students answering a survey stated they had been bullied sometimes or more often[ii]. Even if 8% is better than 17%, it’s of course still way too high. Action is desperately needed to decrease that number, if possible to 0%. That however, is no easy feat, mainly because of the fact that most bullying is being done without adults knowing about it, on the way home from school, during recess etc. Since a lot of the bullying these days are done online, it’s even harder than it used to be to get to.

All through my career as an elementary school teacher, I have been a part of my different schools’ bullying prevention teams. We would always follow some sort of program, for example the OBPP. These programs would typically follow certain steps, like:

• Meeting with the victim
• Meeting with the bully
• Meeting with the bully and his/her parents (if the bullying continued)

In addition to these meetings, we would also try to be more preventive. These efforts included being active during recess, speaking with the students in the school yard, but the main thing was a big survey that we conducted among the students twice a year. The survey would include questions like “During the past month, have you been harassed or hit?”, “during the past month, have you seen anyone else being harassed or hit?” and “Is there a specific place where you feel unsafe or afraid? If so, please specify”. Following the survey the bullying prevention team would analyze the questions, to get a picture of the situation at the school. The team would then present its findings to the rest of the faculty. The work surrounding the survey was always time consuming and sometimes we wondered what the use really was of conducting it in the first place, seeing all the potential sources of error. Among them were

• misunderstandings (our students were 6-12 years old, many of them from another country)
• students answering the wrong thing on purpose
• incorrectly formulated questions, asking for the wrong thing

However, now with huge advances in technology and an ever growing number of social media users, there might be new ways to work against bullying:

SNA

There are some different ways that SNA might be helpful in a school’s bullying prevention program. The first thing is teachers and parents being active on Facebook and other similar social media platforms. That way they can get knowledge on how and with whom the children speak. They can also follow discussions, and see if anyone is being treated badly. Of course, this method could end up being more or less useless, because most cyber bullies would probably be smart enough not to write something mean if they knew a parent or teacher was present. They would find other places to bully someone quite fast. But at least they wouldn’t bully anyone until they had found the new place.  

So, is there a way to still be online with the children, to learn about their habits and to find bullies? Maybe... I know of teachers that have created fake identities online, posing as children. They then talked to their students and saw a lot of bad things going on. The moral aspects of this method is something we have to leave up to the individual teacher, I think.

Speaking of more specific SNA tools that we have used in the course, I think some of them can also be used to find bullies and victims. The aforementioned survey, for example, could be analyzed using UCINET and NetDraw. Provided we ask the right questions, we could find out who is the most connected in the students’ networks and also the ones that are the least connected, or even isolates. The isolates would probably be the ones most likely to be victims of bullying. Robert Faris and Diane Felmlee has studied network centrality as a source of power and aggression, which leads to bullying[iii]. Different from common belief, Faris and Felmlee don’t see upbringing or negative personality traits as factors to becoming a bully, instead they say that as a person’s connections increase in number (high betweenness) and with them his/her power, the capacity for aggression also increases. The need to keep the position in the group motivates aggression, according to Faris and Felmlee. This should mean that if we analyze the networks for betweenness, we could find students who are well connected and therefore, following Faris and Felmlee’s research, could be potential bullies. We could also find possible victims, following the same logic.  

Now, I’m of course not saying that all the most connected students are or will be bullies. That is taking it all too far. We need to view the analysis as a strictly preventive measure. It’s valuable to find out who has the potential to become a bully or a victim, because then we as adults can make sure that we keep an extra eye on them. If the common belief is true, that a bully is someone that really feels bad themselves because of bad treatment or bad environment etc, then we might prevent someone from ever becoming a bully, just by talking to them and making sure they feel seen and noticed.

Conclusion

As mentioned, what makes bullying so hard to deal with, is the secretive nature of the activities, not many bullies treat someone bad in the open, they generally hide it very well.

Bullying and how to prevent it, is one of the most difficult things that teachers face. It starts very early, my experience is that at as young as 6 years old, many children face bullying and bad treatment. I’m often amazed at how elaborate the bullying can be. It’s talking behind people’s backs, excluding someone, looks etc. At six years old… No child should be forced to endure that. However, given time and some clever analysis tools, maybe we can at least make life a little better for some children, whether they are bullies or victims.

Sources

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[i]http://www.violencepreventionworks.org/public/index.page

[ii]http://www.forskning.se/nyheterfakta/teman/mobbning/tiofragorochsvar/hurvanligtarmobbning.5.303f5325112d7337692800015850.html

[iii] http://www.asanet.org/images/journals/docs/pdf/Faris_FelmleeASRFeb11.pdf