• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

NetFamilyNews.org

Kid tech intel for everybody

Show Search
Hide Search
  • Home
  • Youth
  • Parenting
  • Literacy
  • Safety
  • Policy
  • Research
  • About NetFamilyNews.org
    • Supporters
    • Anne Collier’s Bio
    • Copyright
    • Privacy

Why anti-bullying laws don’t work: School psychologist’s view

May 17, 2010 By Anne 4 Comments

With the passage of Massachusetts’s new anti-bullying law, 42 states now have laws against bullying, Education Week reports, citing “the most recent data available from the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration” of the Department of Health and Human Services. But anti-bullying laws don’t work, says Izzy Kalman in a blog at Psychology Today. They don’t work because they require a punitive approach to dealing with bullying, which the research shows doesn’t work, Kalman writes, and – even so – hold schools responsible if the approach doesn’t work. “Law enforcement agencies are responsible for protecting the public from crime, but they don’t get sued for failing to prevent a crime from occurring,” he argues. So schools shouldn’t be sued for failing to detect and prevent bullying – especially cyberbullying, which is even harder to detect. “Both the American Psychological Association and the National Association of School Psychologists have issued research-based opinion papers recommending that schools shun punitive approaches … because they cause more harm than good,” Kalman writes. Here’s how “well” punitive works: “Let’s say you and I are kids in school and you are mean to me,” Kalman blogs. “Then I tell the teacher, who sends you to the principal, who in turn punishes you for bullying me. Is that going to make you want to be nice to me? You will hate me and want to beat me up after school! You will enlist all your friends against me! You will make me look like scum on Facebook and MySpace! You will look for an opportunity to tell on me and get me in trouble with the school! So subsequent incidents – and probably worse ones – are unwittingly set into motion by the school.” [See also “Students leery of school cyberbullying actions” and “Parenting & the digital drama overload,” and “Clicks, cliques & cyberbullying.”]

Share Button

Filed Under: bullying, cyberbullying, Law & Policy, Risk & Safety, School & Tech, school policy Tagged With: bullying, cyberbullying, Izzy Kalman, school policy, state laws

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Joseph Witkowski says

    October 19, 2013 at 8:49 pm

    Very good article

    Reply
  2. Ila says

    September 4, 2012 at 10:32 pm

    The problems I have encountered are yes the schools & law enforcement set further problems in motion AND many times it is hard for outside people to prove who the bullied vs. the bullies are. Many adults suscribe to the many must be right/ truthful and this one must be “crazy, lying, a bully themselves” etc.

    Reply
  3. Corinne Gregory says

    May 17, 2010 at 4:25 pm

    If laws were all that we needed to prevent crime, we’d have no crime because certainly we have plenty of laws.

    The problem with anti-bullying laws is that a law only works for those who are already lawful. I’m sure Wayne Treacy was worried about laws and consequences when he rode his bike 3 miles across town to beat up Josie Lou Ratley.

    We have to stop taking these outside-in approaches to minimizing and managing the bullying epidemic and start dealing with the problem at its root cause. We need to stop thinking “anti-bullying” and start working on “pro-social” skills that prevent the problem for happening in the first place.

    If you’d like to join our on-going discussions, visit http://socialsmarts.wordpress.com/ or http://www.socialsmarts.com.

    Our kids, teachers, staff and families deserve to be safe — without that, does anything else we try to teach them matter?

    Reply
    • blogadmin says

      May 17, 2010 at 4:46 pm

      So agree, Corinne, that we need to be a lot more pro-social! And maybe stop making such a distinction between online and offline behavior and stop letting “disinhibition” or anonymity be an excuse for or barrier to respectful behavior online. Does that make any sense?
      Anne

      Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Primary Sidebar

NFN in your in-box:

Anne Collier


Bio and my...
2016 TEDx Talk on
the heart of digital citizenship

Connect with me on LinkedIn
Follow me on MASTODON
Friend me on Facebook
See me on YouTube

IMPORTANT RESOURCES

Our (DIGITAL) PARENTING BASICS: Safety + Social
NAMLE, the National Association for Media Literacy Education
CASEL.org & the 5 core social-emotional competencies of SEL
Center for Democracy & Technology
Center for Innovative Public Health Research
Childnet International
Committee for Children
Congressional Internet Caucus Academy
ConnectSafely.org
Control Shift: a pivotal book for Internet safety
Crimes Against Children Research Center
Crisis Textline
Cyber Civil Rights Initiative's Revenge Porn Crisis Line
Cyberwise.org
danah boyd's blog and book about networked youth
Disconnected, Carrie James's book on digital ethics
FOSI.org's Good Digital Parenting
The research of Global Kids Online
The Good Project at Harvard's School of Education
If you watch nothing else: "Parenting in a Digital Age" TED Talk by Prof. Sonia Livingstone
The International Bullying Prevention Association
Let Grow Foundation
Making Caring Common
Raising Digital Natives, author Devorah Heitner's site
Renee Hobbs at the Media Education Lab
MediaSmarts.ca
The New Media Literacies
Report of the Aspen Task Force on Learning & the Internet and our guide to Creating Trusted Learning Environments
The Ruler Approach to social-emotional learning (Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence)
Sources of Strength
"Young & Online: Perspectives on life in a digital age" from young people in 26 countries (via UNICEF)
"Youth Safety on a Living Internet": 2010 report of the Online Safety & Technology Working Group (and my post about it)

Categories

Recent Posts

  • Safety by co-design: How we can take youth online safety to the next level
  • Much-less-social media on Facebook’s 20th birthday
  • What child online safety really needs, senators
  • Welcome to 2024!
  • Supporting the youngest witnesses of this humanitarian crisis
  • Should our kids learn how to use generative AI? Well…
  • The missing piece in US child online safety law
  • Generative AI: July 2023 freeze frame

Footer

Welcome to NetFamilyNews!

Founded as a nonprofit public service in 1999, NetFamilyNews quickly became the “community newspaper” of a vital interest community of subscribers in more than 50 countries. Site and newsletter became a blog in the early 2000s. Nowadays, you can subscribe in the box to the right to receive articles in your in-box as they're posted – or look for toots on Mastodon or posts on our Facebook page, LinkedIn and Medium.com. She welcomes your comments, follows and shares!

Categories

  • Home
  • Youth
  • Parenting
  • Literacy
  • Safety
  • Policy
  • Research

ABOUT

  • About NFN
  • Supporters
  • Anne Collier’s Bio
  • Copyright
  • Privacy

Search

Subscribe



THANKS TO NETFAMILYNEWS.ORG's SUPPORTER HOMESCHOOL CURRICULUM.
Copyright © 2025 ANNE COLLIER. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.