Hope collection

How can schools effectively prevent and reduce peer victimisation through targeted classroom interventions?

Practical Advice/Tips for Practitioners

• Train teachers in autonomy support:
  Provide professional training for teachers in autonomy-supportive practices, fostering a supportive classroom climate that discourages bullying and encourages collective defence of victims.

• Encourage bystander empowerment:
  Teach students specific strategies for collectively disempowering bullies, transforming passive bystanders into active supporters who help create a safe and inclusive classroom environment.

• Implement multidimensional assessments:
  Regularly assess victimisation through tools measuring physical, verbal, and relational bullying, ensuring nuanced responses tailored to the specific forms of peer aggression occurring.

• Establish antibullying social norms:
  Clearly articulate and reinforce antibullying attitudes and behaviours as classroom norms, fostering a consensus among students that bullying behaviours are unacceptable and socially detrimental.

• Prioritise preventive approaches:
  Introduce proactive interventions early in the school year to establish positive peer relationships, rather than relying solely on reactive strategies after bullying behaviours emerge.

Abstract

Peer victimisation at school is a worldwide problem with profound implications for victims, bullies, and whole-school communities. Yet the 50-year quest to solve the problem has produced mostly disappointing results. A critical examination of current research reveals both pivotal limitations and potential solutions. Solutions include introducing psychometrically sound measures to assess the parallel components of bullying and victimisation, analysing cross-national data sets, and embracing a social-ecological perspective emphasising the motivation of bullies, importance of bystanders, pro-defending and antibullying attitudes, classroom climate, and a multilevel perspective. These solutions have been integrated into a series of recent interventions. Teachers can be professionally trained to create a highly supportive climate that allows student-bystanders to overcome their otherwise normative tendency to reinforce bullies. Once established, this intervention-enabled classroom climate impedes bully-victim episodes. The take-home message is to work with teachers on how to develop an interpersonally supportive classroom climate at the beginning of the school year to catalyse student-bystanders’ volitional internalisation of pro-defending and antibullying attitudes and social norms. Recommendations for future research include studying bullying and victimisation simultaneously, testing multilevel models, targeting classroom climate and bystander roles as critical intervention outcomes, and integrating school-wide and individual student interventions only after improving social norms and the school climate.

Full paper access

Marsh, Herbert Warren, Reeve, Johnmarshall, Guo, Jiesi, Pekrun, Reinhard Herrmann, Parada, Roberto, Parker, Philip David, Basarkod, Geetanjali, Craven, Rhonda Gai, Jang, Hye-Ryen, Dicke, Theresa, Ciarrochi, Joseph, Sahdra, Baljinder Kaur, Devine, Emma and Cheon, Sung Hyeon. (2023). Overcoming limitations in peer-victimization research that impede successful intervention : challenges and new directions. Perspectives on Psychological Science. 18(4), pp. 812-828.

Contact the researcher

Professor Herb Marsh
Herb.marsh@acu.edu.au

Learn more about Professor Herb Marsh’s research