ABSTRACT
Attention to bullying problems among children and youth has increased dramatically in recent years among American educators, the press, and the general public. Whereas bullying had been the focus of wide public concern in Scandinavia since the early 1980s (Olweus, 1993), and although school-based interventions were being tested in England in the early 1990s, bullying was not on the radar screens of most Americans until several years later. In the mid-1990s, stories of bullying experiences began to appear in the national news media (ABC News, 1995) and school-based bullying prevention programs first emerged in American schools (e.g., Garrity, Jens, Porter, Sager, & Short-Camilli, 1994; South Carolina Educational Television, 1995; Sjostrom & Stein, 1996). Today, a conservative count yields more than one dozen different school-based programs (including both curricula and comprehensive approaches) that focus
significantly on bullying and that are in use in elementary, middle, and high schools in the U.S.1
