In 2024, National Bullying Prevention Month recognizes its 25th year raising awareness about bullying among school age youth. Launched in 1999, the non-profit group Love Our Children USA, a non-profit group committed to advocating for child protection, children’s rights, and ending all types of child neglect, abuse, and mistreatment.
Several years after starting National Bullying Prevention Month, the founder created STOMP Out Bullying, an advocacy group laser-focused on preventing bullying among youth and in schools. Currently, STOMP Out Bullying, StopBullying.gov, and other groups such as WeAreTeachers and Pacer’s National Bullying Prevention Center host events, provide resources, and organize in-person and virtual events to meet the primary goals of National Bullying Prevention Month.
Those goals are:
- Preventing bullying in all forms: physical, verbal, social, both in person and online
- Prevent the spread all forms of discrimination, including racism and homophobia
- Reduce, prevent, and end violence in schools, deter violent online rhetoric
- Increase compassion and empathy for others
The theme for Bullying Prevention Month 2024 is fitting:
Unapologetically Kind.
The organizers encourage everyone to understand what that means.
Unapologetically means in a manner that does not acknowledge or express regret, while kind means the quality of being friendly, generous, and considerate.
We think we can all agree the world can only benefit from unapologetic kindness in any context we name. Kindness matters at school, at work, at home, and out in the world as we go through our daily lives. We can also likely agree that the people who deserve unapologetic kindness the most are kids. From toddlers to teens, they’re our future. They can benefit from living in a world where not only their parents and teachers support them, but their peers do, too.
We’ll share ways we can all join the bullying prevention movement during Bullying Prevention Month, in a moment. First, we’ll share the official definition of bullying, as well as the various types of bullying we should all be aware of – so we can work to end them.
What is Bullying?
Ten years ago, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) published a set of facts, recommendations, and guidelines about bullying in the report “Bullying Surveillance Among Youths: Uniform Definitions for Public Health and Recommended Data Elements.” The publication addressed three pressing needs in schools in the U.S.:
- The need to create a working definition of bullying.
- The need for a central location for teachers and stakeholders to access key statistics on both bullying prevalence
- A resource for proven facts about consequences of bullying.
Let’s start with the CDC definition of bullying:
“Bullying is any unwanted aggressive behavior(s) by another youth or group of youths who are not siblings or current dating partners that involves an observed or perceived power imbalance and is repeated multiple times or is highly likely to be repeated. Bullying may inflict harm or distress on the targeted youth including physical, psychological, social, or educational harm.”
Nest, let’s look at the two primary modes of bullying the CDC experts identified:
Direct bullying:
Aggression in the presence of the targeted individual. Direct bullying includes things like pushing, hitting, or shoving, as well as spoken or written words meant to cause harm.
Indirect bullying:
Aggression directed toward someone that doesn’t happen in person. Indirect bullying involves things like spreading false information to friends/peers through electronic devices or media, including texts, IMs/DMs, or social media platforms.
The CDC report also defines four forms of bullying behavior:
- The use of physical force to cause harm.
- The use of spoken or written words to cause harm.
- Bullying intended to harm friend networks and social capital.
- Stealing, altering, damaging, or destroying personal property to cause emotional/psychological harm.
These definitions give us framework for understanding all types of bullying, vocabulary to label the various forms of bullying, and formalized language bullying victims, teachers, school administrators, and parents can use to document and report bullying behavior.
Bullying in the U.S.: Facts and Figures
We retrieved the latest data on bullying from “Student Reports of Bullying: Results From the 2022 School Crime Supplement to the National Crime Victimization Survey, A Publication of the National Center for Education Statistics at the Institute of Education Sciences,” published in February 2024.
2021-2022 School Year: Bullying Prevalence Among Middle and High School Students in the U.S.
Total:
- 19.2% of students reported being bullied
Gender:
- Females: 21.8%
- Males: 16.7%
Grade:
- 6th: 26.9%
- 7th: 26.3%
- 8th: 25.1%
- 9th: 17.7%
- 10th: 15.8%
- 11th: 10.4%
- 12th: 14.8%
Specific type of bullying:
- Name calling: 11.9%
- Rumors: 13.0%
- Private information shared: 2.5%
- Threats of violence: 3.3%
- Pushed, shoved, tripped, spat on: 4.9%
- Made to do things: 2.5%
- Social exclusion: 3.7%
- Personal property damaged/destroyed: 1.4%
44.2% of bullied students notified an adult
Students who reported bullying had a negative impact in the following areas:
- Schoolwork: 19.7%
- Family and peer relationships: 18.5%
- Self-esteem: 27.8%
- Physical health: 13.4%
41.3% of bullied students think it will happen again
At school, bullying can happen almost anywhere
- Hall/stairs: 37.5%
- During class: 39%
- During lunch/cafeteria: 25.1%
- Outside: 24.4%
- Restroom/locker room: 11.9%
- Gym/weight room: 10.8%
- Bus: 9.8%
Frequency of bullying:
- Once a day: 20.8%
- More than once a day: 6.0%
- Two days (during school year): 17.6%
- Three to 10 days: 31.5%
- 10+ days: 18.5%
Online bullying:
- 21.6%
Online bullying includes:
- Derogatory posts/comments on posts
- Violent threats
- Rumors, lies, innuendo
- Sharing private information
- Posting confidential pictures
Students said the most common things they were bullied for included:
- Physical appearance: 32.7%
- Race/ethnicity: 13.0% total
- Asian: 45.2%
- Black: 26.4%
- Hispanic or Latino: 15.3%
- White 6.3%
- Two or more races 26.5%
- Gender: 9.2%
- Disability: 9.7%
- Religion: 5.8%
- Sexual orientation: 8.9%
To understand this data in human terms rather than percentages, data from the 2021 Census shows there are roughly 29.5 million students in middle school and high school in the U.S. That means that each year, over 5 million students experience bullying in some form – and those are the instances of bullying we know about through surveys.
The Consequences of Bullying
Millions of kids report bullying every year. We know it’s not a good thing. It’s a terrible experience in the moment, and causes short-term problems at school, with friends, in extracurricular activities, and at home.
But what is the long-term impact of bullying?
Stop Bullying.Gov identifies two types of consequences: psychological and physical:
Psychological consequences include increased risk of:
- Depression
- Anxiety
- Self-harm
- Suicidal ideation
- Aggression
- Involvement in violent crime
- Decreased academic performance
- Dropping out of high school
- Low self-esteem
- Alcohol and drug use
Physical consequences – in addition to any injury as a direct result of physical bullying – include:
- Headaches
- Stomachaches
- Insomnia
- Chronic pain
- Heart palpitations
- Bedwetting
In addition, ongoing bullying can result in chronically elevated levels of cortisol, which can have a negative effect on immune function and overall hormone balance.
We’ve outlined the types of bullying, shared the latest facts and figures on the prevalence of bullying in the U.S., and identified the negative consequence common to people who experience bullying. Now let’s take a look at how we can all do our part to help during Bullying Prevention Month.
Join Bullying Prevention Month: How to Raise Awareness, How to Respond to Bullying
Let’s talk about advocacy.
Here are simple ways to promote the concepts that drive Bullying Prevention Month:
- Start at home. Educate your children about what bullying is, the consequences of bullying, and how to respond when/if they experience or witness bullying. Please refer to these helpful videos, for kids of all ages, compiled by We Are Teachers. Remind your kids of the theme for the month: Unapologetically Kind.
- Wear blue on Monday, October 7th for World Day of Bullying Prevention. Share the hashtags #BeKind, #BlueUp, and #STOMPOutBullying on any social media posts during the month of October.
- Contact your kids’ school and ensure they’re participating in Bullying Prevention Month and World Bullying Prevention Day. If they’re not, then you can improve the lives of your kids’ peers by initiating bullying prevention activities this October.
Those are the basics that you can take care of yourself. Now let’s switch gears to what teens can do about bullying. We’ll introduce something Stomp OUT Bullying emphasizes: the idea of changing bystanders to upstanders.
What Teens Can Do: Become Upstanders
Bystanders watch bullying occur without taking action, and in some cases, video the bullying and post it online – which exacerbates the problem. We get it: an innocent bystander doesn’t want to get involved, doesn’t want to draw attention to themselves, and may fear being bullied, themselves.
However, doing and saying nothing perpetuates the problem. For teens who don’t want to get involved at all, we totally understand. You don’t have to. We do encourage you to tell an adult if you see bullying occur. Speak to a teacher or an administrator and tell them you wish to remain anonymous: they’ll take it from there.
If you want to become an upstander, here’s how you can start:
- Never laugh at someone being bullied
- Avoid egging the bully on
- Avoid participating in bullying
- Always tell an adult
Here’s how you can take action when bullying is occurring:
- Tell the bully to stop
- Get others to stand up to the bully with you
- Help the victim in the moment
- Try to divert the attention of the bully from their target to something else
- Find an adult immediately
It’s important to remember that in most schools around the country, there are far more kind, compassionate kids than there are bullies. Since bullies are intimidating, teens can band together, find strength in numbers, and work to change the culture of their school. But perhaps the most powerful method of bullying prevention comes not from parents, not from teachers, not from assistant principals, but from a specific group:
Friends and peers of people who bully.
We encourage parents to teach their teens or school age kids to call out their friends when and if they bully, because one reason bullies bully is to raise their social capital. If they see their behavior turns off their friends, they may stop bullying. Parents can teach kids to:
- Say something as simple as two words, loud and in public: “That’s bullying!”
- Tell their friends how their bullying behavior makes them feel when they witness it.
- Be ready for friends to be mad, because no one likes being called out for negative behavior.
Finally, parents can help teens take the next step by sharing the following resources on anti-bullying advocacy and youth leadership:
