ISSN: 2151-0806
psychologists or counselors could assist parents in promoting healthier choices. And, as the explanation continued, their school really didn’t have problems with extreme violence. The worst case scenarios involving violence were dealing with social isolation, face book issues, texting…”things of that nature.” Occasional fights resulted in detentions, Friday schools, or elimination from school functions such as field trips and sporting events. Olweus Bullying Prevention Program fails to address the needs of poverty schools and their surrounding neighborhoods, while focusing primarily on middle-class suburban type schools. Because Olweus focuses primarily on student, classroom, and school- with additional parental supports, Olweus fails to consider struggles of the poor and under classes. Single-parent households often lack supervision. Parenting styles differ drastically from those of white suburban parents. Harsh discipline is likely to promote aggression in children, still, parents are more likely to employ this type in lower SES than higher SES. Conclusions and Future Research Based on the findings of this study, it is essential that bullying behaviors are targeted at a very early age, preferably pre-kindergarten thru second grade. The need to establish bullying as “not cool” with these youngsters will prevent bystanders from acting as bullies by omission. Bystanders, who are often overlooked, are the most powerful weapons in targeting bullying in the school setting. When a negative affect about bullying is established as a social norm among the school population, students acting as bystanders are likely to report and not tolerate bullying behaviors by a peer. Early intervention is crucial, since it is evident that bullying behaviors peak during the middle school years. Once bullying has been established as a pervasive problem among the student body, the majority of efforts to stop behaviors are punitive, like “putting a band-aid on a gunshot wound.” Therefore, students who have been trained from early childhood to regard bullying behaviors whether blatant or covert, as unacceptable are the best method for stopping bullying. The behaviors specific to each school environment must be clearly defined and made age-appropriate so as to ensure children are capable of recognizing these undesirable actions. Children must also be instructed in the area of reporting peer misbehaviors. Students need to be aware of what to look for, how to report incidents, and to whom they should report. Most importantly, children should be positively reinforced for their personal initiative. Ultimately, other students will learn vicariously through the actions of other individuals. The historical dominance of public education by the bureaucratic model Katz 1975…promotes uniform, “one size fits all” solutions to problems, which have as their primary objective, protection from liability. In the case of bullying, this is promoted by the seminal work of Olweus who, along with Stan Davis, views bullying as a global problem occurring at similar rates, duration, and frequency around the world. In contrast, the major contribution of the present study is to expand the conceptual framework of bullying to recognize variations introduced by recognition of the input of variables including socio-economic status, institutional racism, and gender. Thus anti-bullying policies must be emancipated from a business model dominated by standardized workshops to policymaking grounded in on-going research utilizing a dialectical interpretation of the relationships among class, race, and gender as predictors of the dynamics of Peace Studies Journal, Vol. 6, Issue 3, July 2013
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