Bullying can make children's lives a misery and cause lifelong health problems – but scientists are discovering powerful ways to fight it

There are a lot of preventative measures taken: awareness of staff, reduction of unsupervised environments, positive pro-social culture-building, and direct instruction of bullying and conflict-related vocabulary to students (so that students who experience bullying are more likely to be able to put a name to it, even at a very young age). Responsive measures typically involve progressive consequences for the bully, where each additional behavioral infraction beyond the initial flagged incident/concern results in a stronger punishment.

This sounds cut-and-dry, but the reality is much grayer. Bullies aren't usually one-dimensional caricatures of evil and often their bullying behaviors are representative of underlying issues in their own lives. As such, a lot of anti-bullying measures are simply better awareness of and support for kids' mental health and safety. Bullying doesn't happen if bullies never become bullies in the first place.

The same goes for broader awareness and social uplift, particularly of marginalized minorities and respect for difference. At its root bullying relies on power imbalance, and bullies will use widespread prejudices in their favor. This is what made the anti-gay stuff hit so hard when I was a kid, because it wasn't ever just someone expressing their individual opinion about me -- they were instead using the weight of the wider homophobic society we lived in to try to crush the life out of me.

As acceptance increases for everyone, especially those who are significantly different from the norm, bullies have less cultural power to leverage. This, of course, hasn't gone away and varies by location and culture, but I'd say on the whole the difference is night and day from when I was a kid. I marvel everyday in my job at how I have so many students who are allowed and even encouraged to be themselves without fear. They would have been subjected to merciless cruelty if they'd been in school back when I was a student.

Unfortunately, things aren't entirely rosy. Another part of bullying involves attempting to escape accountability. Where can they do that? Social media. Schools work very hard to make sure that students are always within adult supervision throughout the day (e.g. standing in hallways during passing period) because an adult witness being present is one of the strongest preventative measures against bullying, but social media represents a social landscape for most of the kids that is completely adult-free, and this removes probably the most major inhibitor to bullying. Nearly everything our guidance counselors deal with now either happens on social media or starts there and then moves into the real world as an escalation.

It's also worth noting that social media doesn't just create a space for bullying to thrive, but it also can enhance it. It has never been easier to ostracize someone, for example -- simply open up a group chat without them, then snap some pics of it for all to see who's being left out. Have a meetup with your friends -- except that one person who didn't get invited -- then post pics on your feed so that the target individual can watch the fun they're not having in real time. Talking behind others' backs is trivial and it's easy to rally others against someone. Rumors have never been able to spread faster, and it's trivial to impersonate someone or dogpile an individual with dozens of accounts.

When I was growing up and I did something embarrassing at school, the actual act died in that moment and only lived on in the memory of the few who witnessed it and the reach of relatively slow-moving gossip. Nowadays there's often video of the embarrassment that can be shared widely and immediately. It can also live on indefinitely. Likewise, going home was a way of leaving the environment where my embarrassment lived. Home acted as a respite, as I wouldn't have to face my peers until the next day. Now kids don't have a space away from their peers -- everyone has round-the-clock access to everyone through dozens of different communication platforms. That burning, damning sense of shame we've all felt -- the one that makes us hate who we are and that dims the shine of our very souls -- has never been easier to propagate nor harder to get away from.

We as schools don't really have measures against this, as it's outside of our purview. We deal with its effects when it spills over into school, but at that point it's usually reached the point of an outright misbehavior that requires action (e.g. a fight between two students begins because of an ongoing feud they've had online).

Students in general and bullies in particular are good at modulating their behavior based on their setting. Every year I have students who I believe to be friendly, kind, polite individuals who turn out to have done some monstrous things to others online. My perception of them is a limited one, because I'm only seeing a specific set of behaviors -- the ones they conduct when they know an adult is watching.

That said, I don't believe adults should be in kids self-selected social spaces and believe normalizing that would be incredibly harmful, so the solution isn't the types of adult presence/surveillance we do in the hallways.

In fact, I don't really know that we have a solution at present. I think the issues kids are facing on social media is simply a subset of the larger issue of toxicity in social media in general. We can't even figure out how to get adults to behave well online, so why would we expect anything different for kids?