Reducing peer victimization

I am presenting two articles today, each aimed at reducing bullying, the first focusing on teachers, the second on peers. Cheon, Reeve, Marsh & Jang (2023) published “Cluster Randomized Control Trial to Reduce Peer Victimization: An autonomy-supportive teaching intervention changes the classroom ethos to support defending bystanders” in American Psychologist. Here’s the first abstract with Bold for important findings:

Peer victimization is a harm-inflicting classroom phenomenon, so we investigated how to reduce it. To date, results from school-based interventions to reduce victimization have been collectively judged as “disappointing.” Our investigation was new because we focused on group-level social processes, such as the classroom climate and the mobilization of pro-victim peer bystanders. We invited teachers to participate in an autonomy-supportive teaching workshop so that they could create a highly supportive classroom climate. Once teachers learned how to do this, student bystanders embraced the defender role, and peer victimization declined sharply. We provided teachers with a professional development experience to establish a highly supportive classroom climate that enabled the emergence of pro-victim student bystanders during bullying episodes. In our longitudinal cluster randomized control trial, we randomly assigned 24 teachers (15 men, 9 women; 19 middle school, 5 high school; 32.8 years old, 6.7 years of experience) in 48 classrooms to the autonomy-supportive teaching (AST) workshop (24 classrooms) or the no-intervention control (24 classrooms). Their 1,178 students (age: M = 13.7, SD = 1.5; range = 11–18) reported their perceived teacher autonomy support; perceived classmates’ autonomy support; adoption of the defender role; and peer victimization at the beginning, middle, and end of an 18-week semester. A doubly latent multilevel structural equation model with follow-up mediation tests showed that experimental-group teachers created a substantially more supportive classroom climate, leading student bystanders to embrace the defender role. This classroom-wide (L2) emergence of pro-victim peer bystanders led to sharply reduced victimization (effect size = −.40). Unlike largely unsuccessful past interventions that focused mainly on individual students, our randomized control trial intervention substantially reduced bullying and victimization. Focusing on individual students is likely to be ineffective (even counterproductive) without first changing the normative climate that reinforces bullying. Accordingly, our intervention focused on the classroom teacher. In the classrooms of these teachers, bystanders supported the victims because the classroom climate supported the bystanders. 

In the second study, Malamut, Trach, Garandeau & Salmivalli (2022) published “Does Defending Victimized Peers Put Youth at Risk of Being Victimized?” in Child Development. I have edited the discussion and conclusions here with some information in bold:

Many anti-bullying interventions encourage youth to defend peers who are bullied; however, defending is often discussed as a potentially risky behavior in the research literature. Overall, our findings did not support the assumption that defending would be a risk factor for concurrent or prospective victimization. In fact, the main effect of defending on concurrent levels of victimization was negative for peer-reported victimization and non-significant for self-reported victimization. Therefore, defending itself was not associated with higher levels of victimization. Instead, youth with a reputation for defending were less likely to also have a reputation among their peers as a victim. This supports the idea that defending can signal to classmates that youth are assertive and willing to stand up to bullies, which could protect them from being victimized.

In the current study, popularity was a significant moderator of the association between defending and concurrent levels of peer-reported victimization, but not self-reported victimization. For popular youth, who typically are less likely to be seen as highly victimized by their peers, defending was indeed not related to their concurrent levels of peer-reported victimization. However, for less popular youth, defending actually appears to provide some level of protection against concurrent victimization, as those with a stronger reputation for defending were lower in peer-reported victimization compared to lower status youth who defended less. Contrary to our expectations, defending did not appear to put low-status youth at risk of being victimized, but actually mitigated their likelihood of being bullied (according to peers). 

In classrooms with high levels of bullying, defending others likely signals to peers that an individual is assertive and capable of standing up for themselves, and therefore defenders are unlikely to also have a reputation as a victim. Only bullying norms (not defending norms) moderated the association between defending and self-reported victimization. Defending was associated with higher levels of concurrent self-reported victimization in classrooms where bullying was rewarded with popularity (high bullying popularity norms) compared to classrooms where bullying was not rewarded with popularity. Youth who defend were more likely to report being victimized in contexts where bullying behavior was valued. In such contexts, defenders may realize that they are going against the values of the classroom, and thus report feeling more targeted or isolated. 

Whereas defending may protect youth from having a reputation for being bullied, it also appears to put youth at risk for feeling targeted in classrooms where bullying is supported by the peer group (particularly in classes where youth who bully are also popular).  Defending was not a significant predictor of prospective peer- or self- reported victimization. Even when considering several possible moderators, we did not find any evidence of defending being positively associated with future victimization. 

The current findings provide preliminary good news for anti-bullying programs that encourage youth to defend: in most contexts, defending was not positively associated with victimization concurrently or over time. Even though defending did not predict being victimized over time, it is still important to keep in mind that youth who are both highly victimized and who frequently defend others are more at risk for developing internalizing problems. Furthermore, it is important for school professionals to pay attention to the popularity norms of their classrooms, because youth who defend in classrooms where popular students bully others were more likely to self-report being (concurrently) victimized. This is crucial, as many intervention efforts aim to increase youth's perceived self-efficacy on defending (i.e., belief that they can successfully defend others). If youth who defend also feel more victimized in some situations, then they may be less likely to defend again in the future (perhaps due to decreased defending self-efficacy), regardless of whether or not their peers recognize their victimization. Thus, youth who defend need ongoing peer and adult support if we want them to continue standing up for their bullied peers.

Taken together, these studies illustrate the power of climate in the classroom, both in terms of the role of the teachers and responses by peers.