Beating The Bullies

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Bullies are increasingly resorting to technology, too, such as sending offensive text messages or recording incidents on video. Between September 2003 and February 2004, 11 students at a school in Hildesheim in northern Germany regularly beat and humiliated a classmate, forcing him to kiss their shoes, eat chalk and masturbate. They filmed some of the incidents and circulated the footage via e-mail. "It's an increase in the level of perfidy," says Klaus Hurrelmann, professor of sociology at Bielefeld University. "The victims can no longer save face through silence."

As the number and seriousness of incidents increases, many parents worry that the problem is spiraling out of control. They are demanding that schools and policymakers do something — and in response, governments and educational authorities are devising new ways to tackle the problem: giving children strategies to avoid being picked on, and giving teachers more training to deal with the perpetrators.

To make a difference, though, authorities must first understand why bullying is burgeoning now. That's not easy, since its worst forms happen during the early teen years, just when most youths stop talking to their elders. "Young people can be very secretive," says Gerard McAleavy, an education professor at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland. "It's part of their struggle to construct their own identity." Peter Niebling, headmaster of a high school in Hanover, suggests the trend toward smaller families may play a role. "Many children have no siblings and thus don't know how to interact and coexist with their peers in school," he says.

In Spain, about 7% of kids between 9 and 16 are victims of bullying; in France, 13% of students say they've been bullied

The adolescent need for identity sometimes expresses itself in persecution of those who stand out. Consider the case of Kathi Hürter, 14, a top student at Bonn's Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-Gymnasium. About two years ago, Hürter says, many of her schoolmates started looking askance at her short hairstyle and nondescript outfits. But last winter, the situation escalated. Two girls in her class began to ridicule and bad-mouth her, saying she looked like a boy and calling her a nerd. They tripped her up, took her pens, and eventually resorted to hiding and damaging her backpack. "I guess it's because I don't wear fashionable clothes," says Hürter, who gained several kilos while the bullying was going on. "It got so bad I didn't want to go to school anymore. It really affected my self-confidence."

It took a lot for Hürter to summon the courage to tell her mom what was going on. "It's very hard to talk about these things," she says quietly, "even to your own mother." Together, they decided it was time for Hürter to speak to her teachers. The school's reaction was swift. Hürter's head teacher first gave the class a dressing-down, and then told them he would resign if the problem didn't stop. That brought the more severe bullying to a halt, but most of Hürter's classmates still don't interact with her.

Not every student can count on such decisive action. Meredith's son Adam, 14 (both mother's and son's names have been changed), attends a private boarding school in the English countryside. Classmates repeatedly pick on Adam for being small for his age and a vegetarian; they deliberately bump into him and vandalize his property. Meredith says Adam's school simply pretends there's no problem. "I've made dozens of phone calls but no one ever gets back to me," she says. "It's as if he doesn't exist." School officials did not respond to requests for comment.

Even when there are official policies to tackle bullying, many teachers feel unprepared to deal with the problem. In France, Germany and Britain, students can be expelled for bullying, although that tends only to move the problem to another school. Teachers need help — because they don't always know the best strategies. In a 2001 survey of 66 Czech grade schools, 85% of teachers demonstrated that they had little idea how to resolve a bullying problem: the best solution, they said, was to bring together perpetrator and victim. Bad move, says Michal Kolar, chairman of the Prague-based Society Against Bullying, who describes that technique as like "trying to confront a cobra with a mouse." Instead, he says, teachers should isolate the victim from the oppressor.