Peguero Anthony A. - School Bullying (Springer Series on Child and Family Studies)

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It is 2020, a quarter century after I was introduced to the pioneering scholarship on schoolyard bullying (i.e., whipping boys) of Professor Dan Olweus in Norway. As a graduate student research assistant on a federally funded youth violence prevention project at Indiana University, I remember turning to the PI Kris Bosworth encouraging her to consider developing a scale to measure school bullying. At that time, there were less than ten papers published in US-based journals on the topic of bullying in K-12 settings, and most of them were focused on students with disabilities and their experiences with bullying. We did develop a self-report measure of bullying for middle school youth, and that set us on a course to that would eventually lead to hundreds of articles, grant funding focused on the topic, and major changes to policies and practices to prevent youth bullying. It was not an easy task to convince scholars focused on youth aggression that the dynamic, the context, and very essence of bullying differed from other forms of aggression and warranted its own line of inquiry.

Indeed, I think we were successful in our efforts to encourage a concerted push a research agenda that is multidisciplinary (e.g., psychology, social work, criminology, public health, education, nursing) and specifically focused on bully prevention in our schools. Certainly, there has been a burgeoning of research focused on bullying in schools; a quick search yielded over 4000 published articles from 1995 to present. These studies have uncovered the complexity of bullying as a dynamic set of behaviors, that depends on context, that varies as a function of individual differences, familial characteristics, school-level factors, as well as neighborhood and societal level indicators. Some of these studies have systematically documented that certain populations are at elevated risk for experiencing bullying as a perpetrator, victim, or both. These include, for example, gender and sexual minority youth and students with disabilities, and research on these two populations continues to expand. However, other populations are largely ignored in the extant literature. But this book by Drs. Peguero and Hong fills this gap by highlighting how the social-ecological model can help guide the investigations of bullying among under-represented and under-studied populations and draws upon perspectives and influences beyond the individual student. For example, they open our eyes to the experiences of youth in the court systems, immigrant populations, youth and families who are struggling economically, and go further by addressing the interplay of race and ethnicity along with other marginalized identities. This inequality lens is refreshing given that much of the extant literature has not directly examined how inequities and overt racist practices in our educational systems, our juvenile court systems, our immigration policies, and fiscal policies all play out day after day on our school playgrounds, hallways, school buses, and in our homes. Thank you both for this excellent contribution to the field of bully prevention.

This book reviews sociological, psychological, criminological, and educational research literature pertaining to school bullying and the associated experiences in bullying and school violence among vulnerable and marginalized youth. It also examines how inequities associated with socioeconomic and social status, family cohesion and interactions, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression, race, ethnicity, immigration, and religion, and disabilities and special health needs are significantly associated with youths experiences in bullying and presents how a social-ecological framework can inform the problem and address school bullying. First, this book presents a comprehensive review of school bullying research in the United States that utilized qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research on school bullying in various interpersonal and environmental contexts. A multidisciplinary approach to understanding school bullying and victimization from the perspectives of vulnerable and marginalized youth conveys the importance of expanding our understanding of this phenomenon among various disciplines, which can bridge our gap of knowledge and enhance communications and exchange of ideas among social scientists. Our book bridges this gap in knowledge by addressing not only the individual, intrapersonal, and environmental factors but also distal-level factors and conditions that are specifically relevant to youth, such as culture and law. Second, this book is unique in that we contextualize relevant multilevel factors that foster or inhibit bullying victimization among vulnerable and historically marginalized children and adolescents who are faced with cumulative social inequality.