No one ever forgets being bullied. The pain lingers — to varying degrees, of course — but bullying leaves an indelible mark on its victims. But recent research confirms what many would instinctively suspect: Bullying also harms children who witness it.
A longitudinal study by researchers at Université de Montréal with colleagues in Belgium and France examined data from nearly 4,000 Quebec high school students. The researchers looked for a relationship between witnessing different forms of school violence in eighth grade and later antisocial behavior (such as drug use and delinquency), emotional distress (social anxiety and depressive symptoms) and academic achievement in 10th grade. They also compared witnessing school violence with experiencing violence directly.
[See: 10 Concerns Parents Have About Their Kids’ Health.]
Researchers found that witnessing acts of major violence, like physical assaults and carrying weapons, and forms of hidden or veiled violence, such as theft and vandalism, were associated with later drug use and delinquency. Even witnessing minor violence, such as threats and insults, was linked to increases in drug use, social anxiety, depressive symptoms and decreases in engagement and participation at school.
There were several take-home messages from the study, which was published in the December issue of the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, said co-author Linda Pagani, a professor at the Universite de Montreal School of Psycho-Education. “First, witnessing school violence in grade eight predicted later impairment at grade 10. Second, bystander effects were very similar to being victimized by violence directly.”
The Physical and Emotional Toll
“The study makes sense to me,” says Dr. Eli Lebowitz, assistant professor in the Child Study Center and director of the Anxiety and Mood Disorders Program at the Yale School of Medicine. Witnessing bulling contributes to “a general sense of unsafety,” he says.
Lebowitz recently produced a study, to be published in February in the Journal of Affective Disorders, that looked at the impact of “negative peer interactions,” which includes bullying but also acts of shunning or taunting. “We found it had a significant impact on suicidal ideation,” he says, which is having suicidal thoughts. The higher the rates of negative interactions, the higher the rates for ideation. Lebowitz thinks that bearing witness to such acts is like being in a classroom with cigarette smokers. “If someone told you to ignore it and pay attention to the teacher, that would be hard to do because your brain is taken over by worry,” he says.
[Read: 6 Strategies for Helping a Teen Who’s Being Bullied About His or Her Weight.]
That worry and stress can take its toll both physically and emotionally. The child may report not feeling well or not want to go to school, he says. When at school, the stress may also impair the child’s ability to pay attention. It can even impact cognition. “If you’re in class thinking about something you witnessed, you might find it hard to learn,” he says.
Along with these immediate responses, witnessing bullying can have an effect on the long-term emotional growth of children. “Adolescence is a time of moral development, when children are probably going through internal questions about should they defend a person being bullied, should they speak up or could this happen to me,” says Dr. Gabrielle Shapiro, professor of psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City. The hope is that adolescents are developing empathy and a sense of caring for others.
“If they are feeling empathy for a victim but don’t speak up, they can feel sad and anxious and bad themselves. They are struggling with moral issues of right and wrong. ‘Do I stand up for others or preserve myself first?’ If you stand up, you may be a victim too. If you don’t, you feel like you are not a good friend, not strong person,” adds Shapiro, who is also chair of the American Psychiatric Association’s Council on Children, Adolescents, and Their Families.
Awareness and Support
Another important aspect of the recent study, Lebowitz finds, is how unaware teachers are of the amount of bulling happening right under their noses. “Teachers grossly overestimate their awareness. They say they are aware of 80 to 85 percent of bullying, but when you ask students, they think teachers see only 10 to 20 percent of bullying,” he says. “This drives home the importance of raising awareness. For children witnessing bullying, this lack of awareness by adults compounds their sense of unsafety, that there is not always somebody there to intervene or notice or stop it.”
According to the website StopBullying.gov, managed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, more than a quarter of U.S. students in grades six to 12 say they have been bullied at school, and nearly 71 percent of young people say they have witnessed bullying at school.
“Don’t assume that if don’t know about it, it isn’t happening,” Lebowitz advises. Also, a lot of bullying today happens outside of school, on social media. “Children live their life online to a great extent,” he says. “They see posting mean comments, pictures without permission, shunning and rejecting, all of which have a significant impact as well. This is a central part of what their social life is, and it is not trivial.”
[Read: How Parents Can Help Prevent Bullying.]
It’s up to adults — both parents and school personnel — to get involved, Shapiro says. “The stance of schools and parents on these issues needs to be, we will not tolerate this kind of behavior,” she says. “You set the tone before it happens. You have to create an environment of respect for others in the school setting and empower witnesses to speak to an adult or a peer counselor.”
And there’s even an app for that, she says. It’s called KnowBullying, a product of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, which is part of HHS. The app offers parents and other caregivers information about bullying and cyberbullying, and it suggests ways to talk about the subject with children. “I’ve used it with parents and schools,” Shapiro says. “It is important to give students a modality to speak up when they see things and to share feelings with an adult, so they don’t feel powerless. They can process it and do something about it.”
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Why Bullying Harms More Than Just the Victim originally appeared on usnews.com
