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one benefit of pandemic schooling was bullying decrease: study
a survey conducted among 6,578 students at a large urban school board in southern ontario in september, october and november 2020 found striking changes.
jul 8 2021
3 minute read
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by: jacquie miller
a university of ottawa professor has discovered one of the few benefits of the pandemic schooling that had ontario children physically distanced, closely supervised and restricted from mixing much with other kids.
bullying at schools declined dramatically last fall, a study by professor tracy vaillancourt suggests.
she has been investigating the intractable problem of bullying among children for a decade and says the rates of students who are either victims or perpetrators have remained stable.
but a survey she conducted among 6,578 students at a large urban school board in southern ontario in september, october and november 2020 found striking changes.
the randomized survey, which is published in a journal called aggressive behavior, would be generally applicable to students across the province, said vaillancourt, who is a canada research chair in school-based mental health and violence prevention.
the survey found that 39.5 per cent of students said they were victims of bullying last fall compared to 59.8 per cent who said they had experienced bullying before the pandemic.
“there’s been about a 20-per-cent reduction in victimization, and we’ve never been able to get that, at least in the past decade that i’ve been studying this,” vaillancourt said.
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thirteen per cent of the students in the survey had bullied others last fall, compared to 24.7 per cent whose responses indicated they had bullied others before the pandemic.
“it’s just interesting because we keep hearing all of this bad news about the pandemic,” said vaillancourt, who has also been a leading voice in warning about the harms to children of pandemic schooling that kept them out of in-person classes for part of the year.
“this is a little bit of a silver lining in a really, really stormy backdrop.”
vaillancourt speculated that bullying went down last fall because students had less opportunity to physically, verbally or socially abuse others.
schools were placed under rigid pandemic protocols. mass gatherings were banned and movements were restricted, with markers painted on hallway floors and asphalt outside to signal how students could remain two metres apart from each other.
students were cohorted, which vastly reduced the number of others they had contact with during the day, and in-person extracurricular activities were banned.
students were also closely supervised at school to make sure they followed the new rules.
“we had more supervision because (teachers) were supervising their compliance with public health initiatives,” vaillancourt said. “so before looking at them and saying, ‘did you wash your hands? did you sanitize? put your mask up! make sure you’re separated…’
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“children get bullied in places that are (less) supervised in the school.”
another possibility is that students behaved a bit better because they recognized the gravity of the situation, vaillancourt said. “maybe they were just being better citizens because they recognized that they were all collectively under duress.”
however, vaillancourt said the survey results seemed to indicate primarily the benefits of more supervision at schools.
“it’s more eyes. study after study shows: when we put an eye on children, they behave better.”
for example, in high schools, hallways where students change classes are prime spots for bullying because teachers are not contractually required to supervise those transition times, she said.
a survey vaillancourt co-authored in 2010 at the same southern ontario school board used in her latest study found that secondary students listed hallways as the top location where they felt unsafe at school, followed by washrooms, lunchrooms and the fronts and backs of schools.
but improving supervision is like putting a band-aid on an infected wound, vaillanourt said. it reduces the immediate harm to students, but it doesn’t solve the underlying problem of bullying.
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she says programs can help students develop social skills, empathy and moral engagement, and the teachers and other educators are also important role models.
“this is a really entrenched problem, so it’s pretty impervious to our best efforts to reduce rates of bullying. but the (programs) that do tend to be better are the ones that have a whole-school approach, that are developmentally and culturally sensitive, that involve multiple stakeholders … but it’s also expensive, so a lot of our best efforts are driven by how much things cost.”
jmiller@postmedia.com
twitter.com/jacquieamiller
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