LAUSR

Natalie Hampton was 12 years old when she started at her new school, keen to make friends. But ‘everyone already had friends and they weren’t looking for any more’. At lunchtime, she tried to join other tables but was told to go away. Within a year, she was the social outcast, the ‘untouchable’, with no friends. The other children called her names and threatened her. In a classic example of victim-blaming, the school administration and even the school counsellor were convinced it was Natalie’s fault. She was ‘drawing the fire’. With the school doing nothing to stop them, the bullies moved from taunting to physical violence. Natalie became increasingly anxious and depressed, her sleep was disturbed, she had nightmares and developed somatic symptoms of headaches and stomach aches. Of course this was fault of both the school and the nasty little bullies. The story has a happy ending. Natalie changed school after 2 years. On her first day at her new high school, a student saw she was new and alone and befriended her. Natalie says in a TED talk she has given that ‘It saved my life.’ Natalie became increasingly confident and sure of her own social worth. She had lots of friends and her physical ills disappeared. Most importantly, she learned from her escape from social isolation and was determined to stop it happening to others. Every time she saw a child eating lunch alone, Natalie would invite the child to join her friends at their table. She created a mobile phone app, ‘Sit With Us’. She became famous in the USA, where this happened, and People magazine included her as one of the ‘25 Women Changing the World’. We should not think: ‘Oh well, we know about bullying in the USA. That rarely happens in my country’. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) recently published data from 2015 on 15-year-old students from 53 OECD countries. Regarding bullying, New Zealand was ranked the second worst of 53, behind only Latvia. Australia came 5th, the UK 6th, Canada 7th and the USA 19th. Korea was 53rd and best. The ranking is based on a score derived from asking students how often in the past year other students had excluded them on purpose, mocked them, threatened them, taken or damaged their possessions, hit them or spread nasty rumours about them. In the OECD data, 4% of students reported physical bullying and 11% were made fun of several times a month. Girls were less likely to suffer physical abuse, but more likely to suffer from the spreading of nasty rumours. New immigrants were more likely to be the victims of all types of bullying. Students who were bullied were more likely to play truant. They performed worse academically, although whether this was a cause of bullying or a result of it is unclear. Bullied students reported less satisfaction with life than other students. In Australia and New Zealand, about a quarter of all the 15-year-old students reported experiencing bullying in the previous year. The OECD report discusses cyber-bullying: nasty text messages, chats or comments, and either spreading rumours on-line or excluding victims from on-line conversation. Cyber-bullying follows the victim home, so there may be no escape at the end of the school day. Girls are more likely than boys to be victims and perpetrators of cyber-bullying. An effective way to reduce cyberbullying is for schools to require children to put their phones in a locked box until the end of the day. The way schools try to prevent bullying and the way they react to it when it does occur is critically important. Bullying is the thermometer of society’s ills. It reflects: • The ingrained belief that punishment produces better people • The deep fear of difference that makes us worship the strong and persecute the weak • The cost of not addressing the casualties of parental mental illness, substance abuse and domestic violence • The way politicians and the media bully and insult opponents and distort real and meaningful communication • The culture of managerialism that makes bullying systemic in our work-a-day lives and filters down to our children. There are several reasons it is important to prevent school bullying. Being bullied can seriously harm children’s mental health. Victims of school bullying are at increased risk of suicidal ideation and bullying is likely to be a factor in some teenage suicides, although this is difficult to prove. It is likely that school bullies become bullies in the workplace. Furthermore, preventing school bullying might conceivably reduce domestic violence. It is all very well shaking our heads and tut-tutting about bullying, but what can we do to prevent it? A range of research initiatives and policy changes have arguably done little or nothing to reduce the levels of bullying in schools. The inspirational Natalie Hampton has shown what can be done at an individual level by students. She may have found the key to effecting community changes in behaviour, which is to engage students. In a cluster randomised study in 56 middle schools in New Jersey (24 191 doi:10.1111/jpc.13878