Bullying in School: It's More Common and Dangerous Than We Think

Fabianna Pergolizzi
The Community School of Naples
Naples, Florida

Jeffrey Johnston, a Florida middle school student, killed himself in 2005 after years of being cyberbullied.

The 23-year-old gunman responsible for the April 16, 2007 shooting deaths of 32 Virginia Tech students had been bullied while in middle and high school.

The two male students responsible for Colorado's Columbine High School killings in 1999 had been victims of bullying.

These devastating acts prompted me to enlist the help of other students and several medical researchers in different parts of the country to raise awareness of bullying. In 2006, I led the team in administering a bullying survey to 587 students at four schools in Naples and Miami, Florida, Palo Alto, California, and Baltimore, Maryland.

The survey results revealed more apathy toward bullying than I am ready to accept. Half the student respondents reported doing nothing the last time they saw someone being bullied; only 7% told an adult and only 7% got friends to help when they saw bullying. The most surprising finding to me was that girls were just as likely as boys to bully.

I, along with one of the other students on the project team, presented these findings at the American Psychiatric Association (APA) conference in San Diego on May 21, 2007–the only presentation on the subject of bullying. Our poster presentation was selected by a blind review from a pool of 1,100 proposals, about a quarter of which were rejected. The most exciting part was that the two of us were the youngest persons in history to present at APA!

While analyzing the findings from our survey, "The Jeffrey Johnston Stand Up For All Students Act" (known as the "Anti-bullying Bill") passed in the Florida House on April 24, 2007. This bill provides a model policy for all school districts and states.

Since the poster presentation and new Bill, a drama professor at Georgetown University has asked me to help write a script for a play that addresses bullying, medical groups have offered potential funding, and I have been invited to lecture on this topic in schools.

I am now in the process of expanding the study by administering the survey in the same schools represented in 2006, as well as in additional schools located in Durham, North Carolina, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Japan, and Canada.

Kids, schools, and parents could do more to sensitize our society to the problems of bullying. We need to take a stand and safely intervene. I truly believe that efforts such as the ones that I am taking part in will lead to high-level policy changes as is evidenced by the passing of Florida's Anti-bullying Bill.