School nurse logs might be a way to detect bullying that flies under the radar of teachers and parents. by jestevens

Fact No. 1 -- Bullying is bad for everybody: the victim, the bully, the bystanders.

Fact No. 2 -- It’s difficult to know exactly how much bullying goes on in a school. Fear and threats tend to induce kids to clam up.

Eric Vernberg, professor of clinical child psychology and director of the Child and Family Services Clinic at the University of Kansas, may have found a way to get around Fact. No. 2. His research shows that frequent school nurse visits may be telltale signs of bullying.

“In this study, there is a connection between how often kids self-report being the target or victims of aggression and how often they visit the school nurse over the course of the year,” Vernberg was quoted in a KU media release. (Try though I have, he hasn’t talked to me yet.)

What’s useful about this research is that Vernberg may have uncovered a new way to detect the bullying that flies under the radar of teachers and parents.

Bullying is a big problem in schools. The 2010 National Center for Education Statistics Indicators of School Crime and Safety report says that in 2007, the last year for which they have data, about 32 percent of students 12 to 18 years old reported having been bullied at school during the school year. That’s an increase since 2005, when 28 percent of students said they’d been bullied. In 2007, 4 percent said they’d been cyber-bullied.

The sad fact is that the survey revealed that more bullying goes on in grade school than in junior high and high school. Other research corroborates that. Last year, Dan Olweus (pronounced Ol-VEY-us), who developed a bullying prevention program used by thousands of U.S. schools (including some in Lawrence), released research that found that 17 percent of boys and girls in grades 3 through 12 in the United States had been bullied two to three times a month. This study found that bullying occurred most often in the third grade, when a quarter of boys and girls reported being bullied. The data came from an anonymous survey of more than half a million students, and is published on the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program site.

In his research, Vernberg looked for the three signs of bullying:

• a child intentionally harming another
• an imbalance of power between the bully and her/his victim (it’s about the same among boys and girls)
• an ongoing relationship between the victim and the bully.

To see if school nurses’ logs correlated with bullying, Vernberg and his coauthors compared the logs with questionnaires completed by 590 children in grades 3 through 5 in six elementary schools in a large unidentified Midwestern city. Students were asked to “nominate” classmates who displayed hostile behavior toward others. The students all were participants in a larger study of school violence.

KU professor Eric Vernberg's research shows that bullies and their victims visit school nurses more often. He's shown receiving the Kemper award from Provost David Shulenburger in 2003. by jestevens

The KU researcher found that it is not only victims of bullying who make more visits to the nurse — the bullies did, too. Both visited the school nurse for three reasons:

• Because both bully and victim are under a great deal of stress, they complain of headaches, muscles and joint pain and chronic fatigue. Stress on the victim is obvious. Research has shown that bullies may be witnessing domestic violence or experiencing trauma of some type from their caregivers.
• Their immune systems are weakened, so they come down with illnesses such as the flu more often.
• They come for treatment of injuries that may or may not be associated with the bullying itself.

Vernberg's research appears in the journal Pediatrics.

Besides affecting a child’s ability to function well in school, self-esteem and sense of safety, bullying has dangerous and long-term effects.

The number of suicides reported around the U.S. because children and teens couldn't put up with bullying any longer is dismaying. The CDC reported that gay, lesbian and bisexual teens were at a much higher risk for suicide, and have high rates of absenteeism to avoid bullying at school.

Researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston found that men who were bullies as children are much more likely to be violent towards their intimate partners. They noted that intimate partner violence is rampant -- 25 percent of women have experienced violence from their significant others, and 40 percent of men have been violent to their partners.

In 2008, the state of Kansas enacted laws that required local school buards to “adopt and implement” plans to prevent bullying.

Lawrence Public Schools had instituted bullying prevention programs in the schools long before the state required them. I’m putting together a separate post about the effects those program have had. If you’d like to share what you know, please contact me at jstevens@ljworld.com.