October is National Bullying Prevention Month and finally, some good news from the pandemic. Bullying and cyberbullying dropped 30-35 percent as schools shifted to online learning in the spring of 2022.
Given that one-fifth of high school students report being bullied each year and 16 percent are cyberbullied, this is a substantial decrease, amounting to about 1 million high schoolers. The negative effects of bullying are depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, and behaviors. These harmful effects result in physical, mental, and economic challenges in adulthood for both the bullied and the bully.
These new findings come from a recent study by researchers at Boston University. (https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/aeri.20210456) They analyzed google trends search data and found that bullying searches follow the school calendar, being highest when school is in session and falling during the summer months.
They also found that pre-pandemic searches for bullying were strongly correlated with self-reported bullying rates. They argue that this strong pre-pandemic correlation and falling searches for bullying while students were learning remotely are indicative of lower actual bullying rates during the pandemic.
What is interesting is that both searches for bullying, school bullying, and cyberbullying all declined. While it was expected that bullying would decline in the absence of peer interaction, the decline in cyberbullying is a bit of a surprise, especially since remote learning increased the use of technology that is essential for cyberbullying (and online learning). The authors suggest the reason is that cyberbullying rarely exists independent of in-person bullying.
Unfortunately, as schools have returned to face-to-face instruction, bullying and cyberbullying trends have increased, though they have not reached pre-pandemic levels.
Much attention has been devoted to the harmful educational effects of remote learning in the early part of the pandemic. Recent data from the National Center for Educational Statistics reported the largest decrease in reading scores of third graders, and math scores had their first decrease in the history of testing.
This research reminds us all of the trade-offs involved in economic choices.
